Simply explained: How does GPT work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#201

Post by cgh » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

barrysteve wrote: post #157

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #130

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who takes the Chinese Room scenario seriously, or at least can see how it applies to any of this. I cannot see that it matters if a computer understands something. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, and your only need is for it to quack and walk like a duck, then it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a duck or not for all intents and purposes. It only matters if you…

I have tried multiple times to use Chatgpt to generate Unreal c++ code. It does not do. It spits out class names for slate objects, that inherit from other slate objects. Chatgpt doesn't understand inheritance. It just guesses what might fit inside a parameter grouping, and never suggests something with the right class type. For my use case, it has never quacked like a duck, so to speak. It never performed , the word…

Yeah, I asked it to write some relatively simple Zig and it produced a weird mix of Zig and C. It just made stuff up, fake it until you make it style.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#202

Post by robwwilliams » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #84

myrmidon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's highly reductive of our capacities. I'm not saying that GPT4 is as capable as a human-- it can not be, by design, because its architecture lacks memory/feedback paths that we have. What I'm saying is that HOW it thinks might already be quite close in essence to how WE think. > We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference mode…

> What I'm saying is that HOW it thinks might already be quite close in essence to how WE think. How would one be able to prove this? Nobody knows how we think, yet. All one can say is that what GPT-4 outputs could plausible fool another human into believing another human wrote it. But that's exactly what it's designed to do, so what's interesting about that? > If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", It could…

I think you would love to read Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf. He asks these questions and like all if us struggles with answers.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8651250

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#203

Post by brazzy » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

tines wrote: post #148

danenania wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about emergent complexity. While you can reduce it to "just" statistical auto-completion of the next word, we are seeing evidence of abstraction and reasoning produced as a higher-order effect of these simple completions. It's a bit like the Sagan quote: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". Sometimes for GPT to "just" complete the next word in a way that humans…

> Sometimes for GPT to "just" complete the next word in a way that humans find plausible, it must, along the way, develop a model of the world, theory of mind, abstract reasoning. etc. I did an experiment recently where I asked ChatGPT to "tell me an idea [you] have never heard before". ChatGPT replied with what sounded like an idea for a startup, which was delivering farm-fresh vegetables to customers' doors. This i…

Almost all people almost never have truly original ideas. When asked to "tell me an idea [you] have never heard before", they will remix stuff they have heard to get something that "feels" like it's new. In some cases they'll actually be wrong and reproduce something they heard and forgot about hearing, but remember the concept. Most of the time, the remix will be fairly superficial.

And remixing stuff it has heard before is exactly what ChatGPT is doing. What it sucks at is the "feels like it's new" part, but fundamentally it would be quite easily capable of creating output that combines concepts with maximally negative correlation, the only thing that's truly missing is the ability to interpret the prompt as an instruction to do that.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#204

Post by ben7799 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

I asked it which was better, Lisp or Almonds.

It said that was an impossible comparison like Apples and Oranges.

Then I asked it which were more similar, Apples & Oranges or Lisp & Almonds.

It said it is impossible to classify either of those two pairs as more similar because they too fundamentally different. It couldn't come up with anything like Lisp is not edible. Or that Apples and Oranges are both sweet and Lisp and Almonds don't share any common traits.

It seems like it has far more trouble with weird questions like this that even a small child will instantly figure out than it does with anything that seems like a lookup of information.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#205

Post by ExtremisAndy » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:49 PM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #138

justrealist wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hallucinates up a method call that doesn't exist I actually think it helps to reframe this. It hallucinates up a method call that predictively should exist. If you're working with boto3, maybe that's not actually practical. But if it's a method within your codebase, it's actually a helpful suggestion! And if you prompt it with the declaration and signature of the new method, very often it will write the new helper…

If you have a long iterative session by the end it will have forgotten the helpful hallucinations at the beginning, so then phantom methods evolve in their name and details. I wonder if it is better at some languages than others. I have been using it for Go for a week or two and it’s ok but not awesome. I am also learning how to work with it, so probably will keep at it, but it is clearly a generative model not a thi…

No idea about Go, but I was curious how GPT-4 would handle a request to generate C code, so I asked it to help me write a header-only C string processing library with convenience functions like starts_with(), ends_with(), contains(), etc.) I told it every function must only work with String structs defined as:

struct String { char * text; long size; }

...or pointers to them. I then asked it to write tests for the functions it created. Everything... the functions and the tests... worked beautifully. I am not a professional programmer so I mainly use these LLMs for things other than code generation, but the little I've done has left me quite impressed! (Of course, not being a professional programmer no doubt makes me far easier to impress.)

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#206

Post by masswerk » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

ttpphd wrote: post #196

thanatropism wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to form some sort of guild of engineers who think Deleuze, Latour, Lacan et caterva should be read within our disciplines.

In this moment it would be better if people would read some Wittgenstein and Roy Harris, IMHO.

Why not both? Things like philosophy or metapsychology tend to be prismatic, each framework comes with advantages and disadvantages and boundaries of its own.

(A turn towards the dogmatic is something I'm pretty much expecting from the current launch of AI anyway, simply, because the productions systematically favor the semantic center. So it may be worth putting some generality against this, rather than being overly selective.)

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#207

Post by brotchie » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:53 PM UTC

kmod wrote: post #200

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #130

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who takes the Chinese Room scenario seriously, or at least can see how it applies to any of this. I cannot see that it matters if a computer understands something. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, and your only need is for it to quack and walk like a duck, then it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a duck or not for all intents and purposes. It only matters if you…

Here's an example that I think garners more agreement that properties of a limit ("really understanding") don't necessarily mean that any path towards that limit has the properties of the limit. I think there's a lot of room for disagreement about whether this is a factually-accurate analogy and I'm not trying to argue either way on that, just trying to answer your question about how one might make these sorts of arg…

re: Calculator examples, I kinda see them both as information systems that achieve a result but there's a phase difference in where the information is stored.

Similar to how space is 4D such that with relativity going faster in a spatial dimension kind of "borrows" from the time dimension (in a hand wavy way).

By analogy, you can have something that's purely a lookup table, or on the other hand, completely based on an algorithm, and the full lookup table is kind of "borrowing" from the algorithmic dimension of the information system space and vice-verse the fully algorithmic version is borrowing from the hardcoded dimension of the information system space.

Under the condition that you're adding integers below N, then if you consider BOTH the (hardcoded, algorithmic) as a singular space (as with 4D space time) then they are equivalent.

Need to work on this theory further to make it more understandable, but I think this way about intelligence.

Intelligence sits as a pattern in the information system space that can range anywhere from hardcoded to algorithmic (if we choose to orthogonalize the space this way). But what actually matters is the system's future impact on it's local laws of physics, and for that purpose both implementations are equivalent.

Edit: Conversation with GPT-4 about this https://sharegpt.com/c/Sbs4XgI

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#208

Post by danesparza » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:54 PM UTC

At least part of this article is contradicted by Chat GPT itself. From the article:

"...Ongoing learning: The brain keeps learning, including during a conversation, whereas GPT has finished its training long before the start of the conversation."

From ChatGPT 4.x:

"As an AI language model, I don't have a fixed training schedule. Instead, I'm constantly learning and updating myself based on the text data that I'm exposed to. My training data is sourced from the internet, books, and other written material, and my creators at OpenAI periodically update and fine-tune my algorithms to improve my performance. So, in short, I am always in the process of learning and refining my abilities based on the data available to me."

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#209

Post by danenania » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:57 PM UTC

tines wrote: post #195

danenania wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything wrong with it either. It's an important debate. I just think the arguments usually become very circular and repetitive. If there's nothing an AI could ever do to convince you that it's thinking or reasoning, then really you should be explicit and say "I don't believe an AI can produce human thought or human reasoning" or "an AI is not a human" and nobody will disagree with you on those…

> and nobody will disagree with you on those points But that's the point, they do. Even on HN there are many comments saying that humans are just fancy autocomplete, i.e. there's no fundamental difference between humans and LLMs.

"there's no fundamental difference between humans and LLMs."

I think that's a straw man. No one disagrees that humans and LLMs produce cognition differently. One uses a wet, squishy brain. The other uses silicon chips. There's no disagreement here.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#210

Post by krickkrack » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #54

myrmidon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans? Why should the emulation of human though, a result of unguided evolution, require anything more than properly wired silicon?

That's highly reductive of our capacities. We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference model. That's it. It's not going to wake up one day, decide it prefers eggs benny and has had enough of your idle chatter because of that sarcastic remark you made last week. Could we simulate a plausibly realistic human brain on silicon someday? I…

I read this and can't help but chuckle... To say that we are nowhere being able to have AGI is quite a bold statement. It was after all only a few months ago where many people also believed we were a long way away from ChatGPT-4.

The confidence with which you think we are not weighted transformers or statistical inference models is also puzzling. How could you possibly know that? How do you know that that's not precisely what we are, or something immediately tangent to that?

Perhaps if you keep going you do get something that begins to have feeling, religion and understand that it's a self and perhaps that's precisely what happened to humans.