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GPT makes learning fun again

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Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#191

Post by karmakaze »

therein wrote: post #107
LASR wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm honestly baffled that people lack the ability to use LLMs in a productive and optimal manner. Huge +1. I’ve got it to do a large part of my work for me by chaining some simple API calls. The fundamental conceptual gap I see - people often ask it to do some “thinking”. Then are annoyed by the inaccurate output. A simple example is doing word count and it getting the wrong answer very confidently. Of course it su…

I agree. I often use it as if it is a code generator with a decent grasp of human language. Here is what I asked it to do the other day, and it just did it right away and got it entirely right. > Write async tokio Rust code that takes in a Vec , writes it to a temporary file, calls /usr/bin/svc infer pathToTemporaryFile, reads and deletes temporaryFile+".out" and returns Result > containing the contents of temporaryF…

If this is a good example of using ChatGPT for writing Rust, I suspect that the problem may be with Rust async.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#192

Post by hammyhavoc »

dmd wrote: post #189
hammyhavoc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your qualifications and background are what? Why is this on a free WordPress instead of in a scientific paper if it's something to take seriously? Counterpoint: https://the-decoder.com/why-large-ai-language-models-dont-le...

Do you think I wrote that? And what do qualifications have to do with anything?

I assumed you did, as it's a very strange post to link to on a very strange blog, and doesn't lend credibility to the idea that a human being is an LLM simply by existing, and if it was such a compelling idea then it wouldn't be languishing on a free WordPress.

Qualifications are a great way of figuring out who's worth listening to, but that's not always the case as AI/ML folks prove with regularity, but it's nice to know if someone isn't just an armchair commentator and isn't peddling baseless information.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#193

Post by dmd »

dmd wrote: post #189
hammyhavoc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your qualifications and background are what? Why is this on a free WordPress instead of in a scientific paper if it's something to take seriously? Counterpoint: https://the-decoder.com/why-large-ai-language-models-dont-le...

Do you think I wrote that? And what do qualifications have to do with anything?

> a human being is an LLM simply by existing,

That's not what it's claiming at all. It's taking umbrage with the word "just" in "just predicting the next word".

A gun "just moves some metal from one place to another".

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#194

Post by hammyhavoc »

dmd wrote: post #193
dmd wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think I wrote that? And what do qualifications have to do with anything?

> a human being is an LLM simply by existing, That's not what it's claiming at all. It's taking umbrage with the word "just" in "just predicting the next word". A gun "just moves some metal from one place to another".

"by existing" = because the blog post exists does not prove something is true.

I'd sooner listen to people who are leaders in their field when it comes to LLMs than someone rambling on their free WordPress blog.

It is just an LLM. That's an objective fact. IBM's Watson is a pipeline of different algorithms. Neither are like a human brain, but multiple processes are going to be more brain-like in concept than just an LLM.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#195

Post by Aachen »

noduerme wrote: post #120
Aachen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was not clear to me either

Sorry. I'm glad I clarified. Almost everything I write should come with a red label above it that says: Gallows Humor. I get taken seriously way more often than I expect to, or should be, around here. Although it's a little weird that we're on a board where someone could seriously mean what I said and people wouldn't think it was a joke. e.g. the "You let your kids use calculators, don't you?" crowd.

Just now I heard someone unironically say that it's about time the USA government stops the supply of porn to minors via the Internet (presumably that's any nudity to anyone under 21 or maybe 18, another thing I never know when reading USA-originating comments). You just can't tell what kind of wacky opinions are out there and what's a joke. The comment read as though posted by someone who enjoys watching others waste time disagreeing with them, until they said something about social media in the end that's much less far out there and makes me conclude the comment is likely actually genuine.

It's also kinda rude to assume someone is joking when they were actually serious, so yeah one tends to get taken seriously when in doubt...

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#196

Post by mlboss »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #65
LASR wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to use this comment to state one thing, not directly addressed to you. Stop using GPT as a database! GPT is far more useful a reasoning engine that can accumulate fuzzy data and then provide various views or transformation of that data. So asking GPT to parse a Wikipedia page and then asking it to teach you from it - this is a much more successful usage than what the author in the original article is doing. It…

Is it? I couldn't even get it to figure out an NGINX config, despite feeding it the documentation and URL rewrites it would need, and the prior Apache .htaccess file. Spent days on it. Consulted with people who know more than me about prompt engineering. Nope. Reasoning is not its strong point, IMO. It's a next-word prediction model, why would it be? It's doing what an LLM does. Frequently, nonsensically.

Are you using GPT 4 ? It is far superior when compared to GPT 3.5

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#197

Post by sebastiennight »

input_sh wrote: post #109
rolisz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not DevOps, why bother learning whatever framework is used today, but which will be replaced by something else next year? I just want to get my stuff deployed and that's it.

Saying that DevOps tooling changes every year is absolute nonsense. The tooling is fairly standardised nowadays (Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Prometheus, CI/CD tool of your choice) and every part of it is over half a decade old. ChatGPT will only help you with the simplest of tasks, and even then you're gonna fail if you don't know to correct it. If you go beyond the most basic of the tasks you can learn h…

Well, you say

> Saying that DevOps tooling changes every year is absolute nonsense.

And then you list 5 technologies with an alleged lifespan of half a decade, which sort of hints at the idea that someone would need to learn/update a new tooling skillset once a year.

In that light, GP's comment doesn't sound so wild.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#198

Post by mlboss »

somethoughts wrote: post #96
devjab wrote: post #7

I'm in two minds about it. On one hand the internet (in general) has become so hard to find information on, and I agree with the author that GPT is a breath of fresh air. On the other hand I've seen GPT fail so miserably at topics that I'm knowledge about that I have a very hard time trusting anything it tells me. I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT. I wish we could go back to having sea…

As a follow on to those thoughts, I feel like ChatGPT is in the phase similar to that fleeting moment when search engines were maximally useable - before SEO was a thing and before Google "needed" to turn on the profitability spigot. Its unclear to me how long we'll have before LLM Engine Optimization is a thing and OpenAI/MSFT "need" to turn on their LLM profitability spigot; and what ChatGPT will look like then. Th…

I hope that open source LLM catches up. Then you can have your personal LLM running on desktop that can look at your personal files and can search internet.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#199

Post by simonw »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #140
LASR wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm honestly baffled that people lack the ability to use LLMs in a productive and optimal manner. Huge +1. I’ve got it to do a large part of my work for me by chaining some simple API calls. The fundamental conceptual gap I see - people often ask it to do some “thinking”. Then are annoyed by the inaccurate output. A simple example is doing word count and it getting the wrong answer very confidently. Of course it su…

If "chaining some simple API calls" is "a large part of your work", I can see it being incredibly useful. I already used it in this way a few times and it saved me some time indeed. However, as a software developer I feel like it's actually a tiny minority of my work; most of it is "doing some thinking" and slowly unfolding the inner parts of systems in order to understand how they work and how to fix them or make th…

It's a pretty amazing rubber duck. I used it to brainstorm approaches to tracking changes to a database table using SQLite and ended up building an entirely new library:

- Article: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/15/sqlite-history/

- ChatGPT transcript: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1aa4050f3f7d92b048ae414a40cdd...

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#200

Post by abdou4a »

dmbche wrote: post #52
thsbrown wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity what would say is the optimal way to learn from an encyclopedia, research paper or Wikipedia?

Sticking to what you want to understand - for example, when reading a paper, you don't necessarily need to read the methodology, especially if it's out of your field. Read the abstract and the conclusion, identify any part of it that you are suprised by and would like further explanation, and go see that part of the paper. A lot of the paper is talking to peer and people wanting to verify the validity of the paper -…

>> you can mostly assume that the paper is valid

you should check this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging or P-hacking

and many more...

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