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ChatGPT: A Mental Model

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21–30 of 99 posts

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#21
Lots of lead up to it, but the punchline is:

"My current mental model of ChatGPT is that it’s akin to a “Maximum Likelihood Estimator for the Entirety of Human Knowledge”. There are two very different ways to interpret that: (1) Meh, it’s just a silly stats trick and (2) Holy F**ing Shit!!"

This is almost right... It's a fair way to think of GPT3/4 (sort of), but given RLHF ChatGPT is a pretty different beast.

Anyway, a pretty hand wavy kind of analysis, I was not a fan.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#22
post #21

Lots of lead up to it, but the punchline is: "My current mental model of ChatGPT is that it’s akin to a “Maximum Likelihood Estimator for the Entirety of Human Knowledge”. There are two very different ways to interpret that: (1) Meh, it’s just a silly stats trick and (2) Holy F**ing Shit!!" This is almost right... It's a fair way to think of GPT3/4 (sort of), but given RLHF ChatGPT is a pretty different beast. Anyway…

It's a simulator. It simulates appropriate outputs to a given input. RL of any kind is just tweaking the definition of appropriate.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#23

Jiggawatts’ second rule: “Unless an opinion on LLM technology includes the specific phrase ‘GPT 4’, it can be dismissed.” The author tried older, thoroughly outdated models, and has decided to publicly state an opinion without bothering to check if it’s still valid or not. Ironically confirming that humans are just as susceptible to writing false statements as Chat AIs. Remember boys and girls: self driving cars don’…

//Remember boys and girls: self driving cars don’t need to be perfect, just better than humans. Fudamentally disagree. Self driving cars need to be effectively perfect (almost impossible) for me to consider them. I would rather be in a situation where the circumstances mean that there is a greater probability of me crashing, but under my control, rather than a "random" coding error or AI hallucination taking me and m…

So you want to deliberately put your family in more danger just so that it'll be your fault if they get hurt?

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal opinion? Yes. I’m happy to argue the finer points of the philosophy of the mind and consciousness, but: I’ve talked to people that have a weaker mental model of the world than GPT 4. Many people compare these AIs against an idealised human, a type of Übermensch, something like a Very Smart Person that doesn’t lie and doesn’t make mistakes. Random humans aren’t remotely like that, and are a more realist…

I was able to get gpt4 to do a lot of useful work. But for some reason it completely falls apart for this scenario. May be because it has to think in second order to achieve the task. Perhaps you could take a crack at this: Prerequisite (for you the human)> You have a file at src/SampleReactComponent.jsx that has below simple react component: const SampleReactComponent = (props) => { const [var1, setVar1] = React.use…

Give it space to think. It's like talking to someone and taking their train of thought as the only output, the worst kind of whiteboard programming interview.

You can get them to talk through the problem, build parts, test things, etc.

Also, this is a horrible problem to solve with awkward tools. Why is your code file to large to cat???

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#25
post #21

Lots of lead up to it, but the punchline is: "My current mental model of ChatGPT is that it’s akin to a “Maximum Likelihood Estimator for the Entirety of Human Knowledge”. There are two very different ways to interpret that: (1) Meh, it’s just a silly stats trick and (2) Holy F**ing Shit!!" This is almost right... It's a fair way to think of GPT3/4 (sort of), but given RLHF ChatGPT is a pretty different beast. Anyway…

It's a simulator. It simulates appropriate outputs to a given input. RL of any kind is just tweaking the definition of appropriate.

This is my sentiment too; I'm curious about if the OP agrees with this or not because there's a lot of variation in opinion here.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to get gpt4 to do a lot of useful work. But for some reason it completely falls apart for this scenario. May be because it has to think in second order to achieve the task. Perhaps you could take a crack at this: Prerequisite (for you the human)> You have a file at src/SampleReactComponent.jsx that has below simple react component: const SampleReactComponent = (props) => { const [var1, setVar1] = React.use…

Dude. Dude . I’m an IT professional and I have no idea how to begin answering that request! Pose that question verbatim to a dozen random people[1] and I guarantee you that you’ll get zero answers. Also, I find it hilarious that sed and awk are so counterintuitive that not even the AIs can do useful things with them. The same AIs that speak Latin, and can explain quantum mechanics. [1] I mean specifically not random…

That would mean nothing because GPT4 isn't most people. I had it solve more complex problems than this particular one and using the same tools :)

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to get gpt4 to do a lot of useful work. But for some reason it completely falls apart for this scenario. May be because it has to think in second order to achieve the task. Perhaps you could take a crack at this: Prerequisite (for you the human)> You have a file at src/SampleReactComponent.jsx that has below simple react component: const SampleReactComponent = (props) => { const [var1, setVar1] = React.use…

Give it space to think. It's like talking to someone and taking their train of thought as the only output, the worst kind of whiteboard programming interview. You can get them to talk through the problem, build parts, test things, etc. Also, this is a horrible problem to solve with awkward tools. Why is your code file to large to cat???

Most code files are usually too large to 'cat' because of the context size limitations. Even if they fit within the context window, it's waste of API credits to provide it the information that it doesn't need.

Anyways posting this here isn't to get this particular problem solved. It is to see if there is a prompt that can solve it. And this is the only problem I found it not able to solve. It's not like it doesn't know about sed/awk/grep or other Linux tools, it is an expert on most of the common options involving them. My guess is there is something going on with this prompt that just breaks it's 'though patterns' for the lack of a better word :)

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#28
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does, in your personal opinion, GPT-4 has an underlying model of the world?

It has a model, but it is not a rational model. This difference is something that often throws engineers off track when thinking about generative AI. LLMs models work more like intuitions. They are able to make statements about a problem in context, but they are generated from ideas that "instinctively" make sense given the prior statements and learned corpus (similar to Daniel Kahneman's fast mode of thinking), not…

Yeah agreed, all thinking is "fast" as it were, although with self prompting plus tool use one gets closer to slow thinking that results in more rational reasoning (e.g. get the data from wolfram alpha, plug it into a calculator api, return results). No guarantee that it'll be rational though, much like in humans.

If it had absolutely no model of the world it would be unable to dynamically reason about it at all which it very much does [citation needed I guess], so there's definitely something there.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#29
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's Jiggawatts' first rule?

“Always start numbering rules higher than one to make it seem like there are more rules than actually are.”

Doesn't that rule break itself unless it's at least a #3 on the list?

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#30
post #15

Jiggawatts’ second rule: “Unless an opinion on LLM technology includes the specific phrase ‘GPT 4’, it can be dismissed.” The author tried older, thoroughly outdated models, and has decided to publicly state an opinion without bothering to check if it’s still valid or not. Ironically confirming that humans are just as susceptible to writing false statements as Chat AIs. Remember boys and girls: self driving cars don’…

GPT4 still isn't freely available, is it? So it's not that surprising people aren't using it as much as the older ones.

I suspect that's why OpenAI recently added the share conversation thing, people are just looking at 3.5 and scoffing at it as it fails at things 4 would do just fine, and then assume it applies to all models. They've got a marketing problem that can't really be solved without making 4 public or showing people volumes of examples of what it can do. I was pretty convinced by the launch demo, seeing it not make the same mistakes I've seen 3.5 do when using it, but basically nobody's seen that one.
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