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ChatGPT: Fear Litany

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Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me how many people are using ChatGPT to get answers : it's a “language model” folks, not a “knowledge model”.

There is a group of people that are ardent in the conviction that if we wait long enough and wish hard enough that ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things. I’m personally open to that being the case with some LLM someday , but there’s a lot of people ideologically and financially invested in that perception being accurate today and applying to ChatGPT in particular. People hate it when you point out that…

To a large extent this is already viable.

Yes, ChatGPT doesn't know what it's talking about. But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me how many people are using ChatGPT to get answers : it's a “language model” folks, not a “knowledge model”.

There is a group of people that are ardent in the conviction that if we wait long enough and wish hard enough that ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things. I’m personally open to that being the case with some LLM someday , but there’s a lot of people ideologically and financially invested in that perception being accurate today and applying to ChatGPT in particular. People hate it when you point out that…

> ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things

FastGPT[0] is some way towards that: it uses the web to provide answers

[0]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#63
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has no knowledge about these filters, so all it can say about them is pure hallucination. It may still guess correctly and probably does, but you could ask any random person with enough background knowledge to make it up instead and get the same value.

> so all it can say about them is pure hallucination This "hallucination" come along a lot recently. Is it a legit concept or just "the dog ate my homework" type of excuse for anything? I mean, does the human mind also "hallucinate" all the time? Why do we expect from an "artificial" mind to outperform us?

> This "hallucination" come along a lot recently.

Couldn’t exactly be otherwise given how young GPT is. ChatGPT was released a bit under 7 months ago.

> Is it a legit concept or just "the dog ate my homework" type of excuse for anything?

It’s an analogy for how LLMs work. An LLM does not know anything, it just adds tokens probabilistically based on the previous tokens.

So essentially it always hallucinates (makes shit up as it goes along, if you prefer).

Thanks to the model it’s generally quite credible, and often even lines up with actual reality, but it should not be confused for knowledge.

That’s why it will confidently give you citations it just made up, to papers or decisions it’ll happily make up as well (though less and less credibly as things get closer to hard facts).

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me how many people are using ChatGPT to get answers : it's a “language model” folks, not a “knowledge model”.

There is a group of people that are ardent in the conviction that if we wait long enough and wish hard enough that ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things. I’m personally open to that being the case with some LLM someday , but there’s a lot of people ideologically and financially invested in that perception being accurate today and applying to ChatGPT in particular. People hate it when you point out that…

Exactly, you can't go to the moon by climbing sucessively taller trees.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has no knowledge about these filters, so all it can say about them is pure hallucination. It may still guess correctly and probably does, but you could ask any random person with enough background knowledge to make it up instead and get the same value.

It baffles me how many people are using ChatGPT to get answers : it's a “language model” folks, not a “knowledge model”.

So, when it helped me solve a math problem by noticing a trick that I had missed – which was clearly the correct thing to do in retrospect – was I somehow in the wrong to ask it for help?

Getting answers out of it is absolutely a reasonable thing to do. Blindly trusting those answers without verification, that's another thing entirely.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me how many people are using ChatGPT to get answers : it's a “language model” folks, not a “knowledge model”.

Language is knowledge though, knowledge isn't predicated to be correct. There are people who "know" the earth is flat, that is knowledge they communicate with language (and is probably in the training set). Religious practitioners communicated their knowledge of the gods via language, and there are bodies of knowledge on the subject that are counter to eachother (both probably in the data set). It serves that a langu…

In philosophy, the most common definition of knowledge is that it is true, justified belief[1]. In that definition knowledge certainly is predicated to be correct.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a group of people that are ardent in the conviction that if we wait long enough and wish hard enough that ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things. I’m personally open to that being the case with some LLM someday , but there’s a lot of people ideologically and financially invested in that perception being accurate today and applying to ChatGPT in particular. People hate it when you point out that…

To a large extent this is already viable. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't know what it's talking about. But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect.

>But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect.

Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it?

If Google was an LLM then I’d agree with you, but the idea that googling something somehow skips the step of using critical thinking to understand what is on your screen seems pretty new to me.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#68
post #56
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language is knowledge though, knowledge isn't predicated to be correct. There are people who "know" the earth is flat, that is knowledge they communicate with language (and is probably in the training set). Religious practitioners communicated their knowledge of the gods via language, and there are bodies of knowledge on the subject that are counter to eachother (both probably in the data set). It serves that a langu…

> knowledge isn't predicated to be correct. It kind of is, though. The field of philosophy called epistemology deals with what knowledge is and how it is obtained, and the field overwhelmingly agrees that it is necessary (but not sufficient) for knowledge to be a (1) belief that is (2) true, and (3) justified. There is some disagreement when it comes to justification, and a lot of nuance in whether every justified tr…

A statement doesn’t have to be true to be justified.

The example I’ve heard of knowledge that is believed, untrue but justified is “porcupines can shoot their quills”.

A tribe that believes this fact is more likely to stay away from porcupines, and even though porcupines do not in fact shoot their quills, over time this superstition is beneficial to the tribe as their neighbors are more likely to get hurt or killed by dangerous porcupine quills.

Judaism taught long before modern germ theory revealed why it was beneficial in a purely rational sense that burying feces and ritualistic hand washing were important to please God.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#69
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so all it can say about them is pure hallucination This "hallucination" come along a lot recently. Is it a legit concept or just "the dog ate my homework" type of excuse for anything? I mean, does the human mind also "hallucinate" all the time? Why do we expect from an "artificial" mind to outperform us?

> This "hallucination" come along a lot recently. Couldn’t exactly be otherwise given how young GPT is. ChatGPT was released a bit under 7 months ago. > Is it a legit concept or just "the dog ate my homework" type of excuse for anything? It’s an analogy for how LLMs work. An LLM does not know anything, it just adds tokens probabilistically based on the previous tokens. So essentially it always hallucinates (makes shi…

Which is why "hallucination" is really the wrong word to use, "confabulation" would be more proper. But "hallucination" has stuck because it's the word used back when people first figured out the trick of running image classifiers "in reverse" to generate images from noise.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a group of people that are ardent in the conviction that if we wait long enough and wish hard enough that ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things. I’m personally open to that being the case with some LLM someday , but there’s a lot of people ideologically and financially invested in that perception being accurate today and applying to ChatGPT in particular. People hate it when you point out that…

> ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things FastGPT[0] is some way towards that: it uses the web to provide answers [0]: https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt

Bing chat is already GPT4 with an internet connection.
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