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ChatGPT: A Mental Model

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Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#51

Post by bigyikes »

laratied wrote: post #48
jiggawatts wrote: post #4

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…

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 be…

Haha this scenario is perfect and tells you everything you need to know about the state of AI.

We’re sitting here wondering if the language model also models reality, when we can just ask the thing itself!

We are living in an Asimov novel

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#52

Post by bigyikes »

moffkalast wrote: post #29
jiggawatts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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?

Rule #3: rules must be zero-indexed

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#53

Post by williamcotton »

allisdust wrote: post #44
IanCal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://github.com/williamcotton/autorails-alpha/pull/38

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#54

Post by pixl97 »

mft_ wrote: post #34
jiggawatts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the GPTs won't change this. I suspect but cannot prove that the opposite will be the case. We can make bipedal robots now, but we can’t give them instructions , not like we can instruct human labourers. “Bob, go to where George ate his lunch an hour ago and bring me the tools for fixing a pipe” was an impossible instruction for a robot to execute. Suddenly this is a trivial sentence for an AI that knows what ty…

That's not quite the issue I'm raising. It's not about being able to communicate better with existing robots - it's where (as yet) there are no robots suitable to do the job. There are plenty of tasks which are simple, tedious and repetitive - and yet are resistant (currently) to automation. An example is sorting mixed plastic waste into categories according to the type of plastic. This is comparatively trivial for a…

Let's imagine a world where most jobs that cannot be automated are low end, low skill, low pay jobs... what does this world look like economically? In my eyes this is a world where corporations and the extremely wealthy suck up all the economic benefits and we're left with massive wealth disparity. Assets keep going up in price, but there is no means of monetary velocity to the bottom earners.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#55

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

IanCal wrote: post #23
LightBug1 wrote: post #13

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?

I think part of the problem is that random failure modes that auto driving does is extremely terrifying, even if you know statistically it is safer. The nature of the failures are unpredictable and alien to a human understanding of driving, and therefore appears something akin to “a small portion of the time, your car will randomly, catastrophically explode, but it happens less often than when you would statistically have an accident”. People would 150% not drive that thing!

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#56

Post by [deleted] »

sorokod wrote: post #3
jiggawatts wrote: post #2

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’…

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

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#57

Post by pixl97 »

allisdust wrote: post #47
mannykannot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'm assuming something like tree of thought needs used on problems like this. GPT 'mostly' thinks in a single step.

Also, in general we attempt to make these models as economically efficient as possible at this point because of the extreme lack of excess computing power to run these things. You can't have it spending the next 30 minutes thinking in loops about the problem at hand.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#58

Post by bigyikes »

sorokod wrote: post #3
jiggawatts wrote: post #2

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’…

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

Yes.

There is nothing special about modeling the world. There isn’t some threshold where the ability to model the world suddenly emerges.

The AI will model the world if modeling the world is the simplest way to predict the next word.

For basic prompts, no model of the world is necessary: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy…” you know what’s next, and you don’t need to know about the real world to answer.

For complex prompts, the only way to answer correctly is to model the world. There is no simpler way to arrive at the correct answer.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#59

Post by skyechurch »

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

Citation needed.

ChatGPT doesn't have an explicit underlying model of the world separate from its language model, but it is unclear that this is necessary. It would not be an original philosophical position to say that language, properly understood, is definitionally a model of the world - otherwise it would be incapable of expressing anything true or false about the world. Words are concepts, they are defined in part by a web of relations to other words, this structure mirrors reality with some finite but significant fidelity. By this reckoning, GPT4 has dozens of models of the world.

Now, it's true that a) this is hardly a universally accepted opinion, b) humans certainly have extra-linguistic mental models of the world as well, and c) actually existing linguistic models of the world are all riddled with flaws and ambiguities (see for example everything that has ever happened). But it's also not a bonkers opinion that GPT4 is actually doing something similar to what it appears for all the world to be doing. Newton's 3rd Law of Discourse states that every hype cycle must be followed by an equal and opposite deflationary hot take, so here we are, but is any of this true? LLMs are just overgrown auto complete, ok, and humans are just bunch es of molecules. There are serious limits to the utility of reductionism as well.

Re: ChatGPT: A Mental Model

#60

Post by qup »

moffkalast wrote: post #29
jiggawatts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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?

The rule didn't have to be followed before it existed.
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