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ChatGPT: A Mental Model

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Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#41

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…

It's meaningless to compare a LLM to a human, anymore than it is to compare a wheelbarrow to a human. To do so betrays both a fantasy projected onto LLMs and a lack of understanding of humans.

We are discussing a system that is very interesting precisely and only because it produces human language that at least superficially looks as though it was produced by a reasonably smart and educated human. For one thing, I don't know how one would disabuse someone of their fantasy projected onto LLMs and a lack of understanding of humans without making comparisons (while, of course, being wary of anthropomorphizing the former.)

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#42
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 The author tried older, thoroughly outdated models, and has decided to publicly state an opinion without bothering to check if it’s still valid or not.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.

Bing chat is GPT-4. People in general might not keep track of that but we're talking about people who think they have something worth saying about LLMs. Btw if you hop onto Bing to try GPT-4 just be aware you'll have to talk it out of web searching, or you'll get a response that's crippled by having to 'ground' itself in the web's current sludge of fake chum pages

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Interesting! I, for one, would be most appreciative if we could see some of the similar and more difficult tasks that it succeeds on.

I have cleared my chat history recently so don't have all the prompts but here is a recent use case I used it for: Prompt: "Generate a react mui component that fetches a Seller's shipping credits and shows his current credit balance in the top portion. There should be a recharge button next to the credit balance. The bottom portion should show recent transactions. Use below api for fetching credit balance: . Use below api for fetching the transactions: Recharge should be done with the below api:

Make the component beautiful with good spacing, elevation etc. Use Grid/Card components."

Final result: https://res.cloudinary.com/dksmi6x98/image/upload/v168527409...

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

> Most code files are usually too large to 'cat' because of the context size limitations These are command line tools though, not piping it into the llm. My point though was more about giving it space to reason. It's very important for good results on more complex tasks.

Aah, in case it wasn't clear the use case I'm trying to solve is exactly that: piping shell commands to and fro so that LLM has a bit of autonomy. I know that things like LangChain, AutoGPT exist but frankly they are really poorly thought out and seem to have become kitchen sinks too fast without solving anything properly.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! I, for one, would be most appreciative if we could see some of the similar and more difficult tasks that it succeeds on.

I have cleared my chat history recently so don't have all the prompts but here is a recent use case I used it for: Prompt: "Generate a react mui component that fetches a Seller's shipping credits and shows his current credit balance in the top portion. There should be a recharge button next to the credit balance. The bottom portion should show recent transactions. Use below api for fetching credit balance: . Use belo…

Thank you for your reply. The impression I'm getting is that it is producing concrete solutions to specific problems, but not generic solutions to abstract problems - does that sound about right?

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have cleared my chat history recently so don't have all the prompts but here is a recent use case I used it for: Prompt: "Generate a react mui component that fetches a Seller's shipping credits and shows his current credit balance in the top portion. There should be a recharge button next to the credit balance. The bottom portion should show recent transactions. Use below api for fetching credit balance: . Use belo…

Thank you for your reply. The impression I'm getting is that it is producing concrete solutions to specific problems, but not generic solutions to abstract problems - does that sound about right?

Kind of I guess. If it is a single step: That is modify or generate text (could be code or anything) in a specific way, it works great even on obscure things.

However if the problem is stated in a way that it has to think through derivative of it's solution: that is generate some code that generates some other code which behaves in a certain way, it fails miserably. I'm not sure why. The problem I stated in current thread which it failed on I have tried multiple prompts to make it understand the problem but unfortunately nothing worked. It's as if it can do first level but but not second level abstraction.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#48
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

The irony is I think GPT4 gives the best answer. It even gets the idea that language is inextricably tied up with our experiences of reality that most humans seem to simply not understand.

GPT4

"The statement that language models have a "model of reality" can be both true and false, depending on how you interpret "model of reality."

Language models like ChatGPT do have a kind of "model" in a broad sense. They have been trained on large amounts of text data from the internet and have learned statistical patterns from these data. This allows them to generate text that can seem sensible and knowledgeable about various aspects of reality.

However, this "model" is more akin to a very sophisticated pattern recognition system. It doesn't possess a deep or holistic understanding of reality as humans do. It doesn't form beliefs, doesn't have a consciousness, and doesn't experience the world in any sense. It can't learn from the environment or update its understanding over time. Its "knowledge" is fixed at the time it was last trained (for GPT-4, this is as of September 2021), and it can't incorporate new information or discoveries unless it's trained on new data.

Therefore, while language models like GPT-4 can simulate a kind of "knowledge" or "understanding" based on patterns in the data they were trained on, they don't have a model of reality in the sense of an evolving, interactive understanding based on sensory experience and reflection.

So, language models have a "model of reality" only in the sense that they mimic certain aspects of human language use, which is inextricably tied up with our experiences of reality. But this is quite different from possessing a human-like understanding or model of the world."

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#49
> it doesn’t have any underlying model of the world

Then how is it getting better at the ToM tests? For next word prediction to work well, as per Ilya Sutskever, requires a good understanding of the world. If you ask GPT-4 to predict what a human would do in a novel scenario, it will probably imagine the best human it can think of and then predict from there. That requires a world model.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#50
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

//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?

Perhaps a more generous interpretation is that just because a self-driving performs better than humans overall doesn't mean it performs better the specific situations you drive in. Though even then I think it might be dubious.
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