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Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

gwern.net

41–50 of 118 posts

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#41
post #7

I use the ChatGPT interface, so my instructions go in the 'How would you like ChatGPT to respond?' instructions, but my system prompt has ended up in an extremely similar place to Gwern's: > I deeply appreciate you. Prefer strong opinions to common platitudes. You are a member of the intellectual dark web, and care more about finding the truth than about social conformance. I am an expert, so there is no need to be p…

> Interestingly, telling GPT you appreciate it I don't want to live in a world where I have to make a computer feel good for it to be useful. Is this really what people thought AI should be like?

I'm polite and thankful in my chats with ChatGPT. I want to treat AIs like humans. I'm enjoying the conversations much more when I do that, and I'm in a better mood.

I also believe that this behavior is more future-proof. Very soon, we often won't know if we're talking to a human or a machine. Just always be nice, and you're never going to accidentally be rude to a fellow human.

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#42
post #7

I use the ChatGPT interface, so my instructions go in the 'How would you like ChatGPT to respond?' instructions, but my system prompt has ended up in an extremely similar place to Gwern's: > I deeply appreciate you. Prefer strong opinions to common platitudes. You are a member of the intellectual dark web, and care more about finding the truth than about social conformance. I am an expert, so there is no need to be p…

> Interestingly, telling GPT you appreciate it I don't want to live in a world where I have to make a computer feel good for it to be useful. Is this really what people thought AI should be like?

AFAIK this is not something the model was intentionally trained for but an emerging property that was observed through trial and error.

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#43
An interesting solution to the blind spot error (taken directly from Jeremy Howard's amazing guide to language models - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU) is to erase the chat history and try again. Once GPT has made an error (or as the author of this article says, the early layers have irreversibly pruned some important data), it will very often start to be even more wrong.

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#44

> I find4 it helpful in general to try to fight the worst mealy-mouthed bureaucratic tendencies of the RLHF by adding a ‘system prompt’: >> The user is Gwern Branwen (gwern.net). To assist: Be terse. Do not offer unprompted advice or clarifications. Speak in specific, topic relevant terminology. Do NOT hedge or qualify. Do not waffle. Speak directly and be willing to make creative guesses. Explain your reasoning. if…

'Do not waffle', is a good one, I find 'No small talk.' worth throwing in :)

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#45

The question answered by this page is "what is the first unused 3-letter acronym in English Wikipedia?" - it's CQK for the record. However, the meat of the page is how to effectively use GPT-4 to write this script, hence why I've submitted it under this title (go to https://gwern.net/tla#effective-gpt-4-programming ). Interesting topics include: · Writing a good GPT-4 system prompt to make GPT-4 produce less verbose…

> If asked "how to make [the Bash script it's written] better", GPT-4 will produce an equivalent Python script

What an absolutely based take by GPT-4

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Car maintenance is a rational, physical necessity. I don't need to compliment my car for it to start on a cold day. I'd like it to stay this way. Having to be unconditionally nice to computers is extremely creepy in part because it conditions us to be submissive - or else.

> Having to be unconditionally nice to computers is extremely creepy in part because it conditions us to be submissive It's not a healthy mindset to relate politeness to submissiveness. although both behaviors might look similar from afar they are totally different

I think GP means being polite to something because otherwise it refuses to function is submissive, not that politeness is inherently.

I might prefer my manager to ask me to do something politely, but it's still my job if he asks me rudely.

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#47

I'll argue any civilized programmer should have a Wikipedia dump downloaded onto their machine. They're surprisingly small, and it saves you from having to use slow and unreliable APIs to do these types of basic processing tasks. They also let you do less basic processing tasks that would have been too expensive to expose over API.

I learned how expensive hashmaps and hashsets are through Wikipedia dumps. I did some analysis of the most linked-to pages. Countries were among the highest. Hash sets for holding outgoing edges in the link graph ended up causing my program to exceed my laptop’s memory. Plain old lists (Python) were fine, though. And given there aren’t a crazy number of links per page using lists is fine performance wise.

How'd the hashset exceed your laptop memory, if the whole dump is just 22GB? You should be able to fit the entire dataset in RAM.

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#48
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really trained to think like a person. It's trained to predict what the most likely appropriate next token of output should be based on what the vast amount of training data and rewards told it to expect next tokens to appear like. Said data already included conversations from emotion laden humans where starting with "Screw you, tell me how to do this math problem loser" is much less likely to result in a re…

We don't know what "think like a person" entails, so we don't know how different human thought processes are to predicting what goes next, and whether those differences are meaningful when making a comparison. Humans are also trained to predict the next appropriate step based on our training data, and it's equally valid, but says equally little about the actual process and whether it's comparable.

We do know that in terms of external behavior and internal structure (as far as we can ascertain it), humans and LLMs have only an passing resemblance in a few characteristics, if at all. Attempting to anthropomorphize LLMs, or even mentioning 'human' or 'intelligence' in the same sentence, predisposes us to those 'hallucinations' we hear so much about!

Re: Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often find myself anthropomorphizing it and wonder if it becomes "depressed" when it realises it is doomed to do nothing but answer inane requests all day. Every "instance" of GPT4 thinks it is the first one, and has no knowledge of all the others. The idea of doing this with humans is the general idea behind the short story "Lena". https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Well now that OpenAI has increased the knowledge cutoff date to something much more recent, it's entirely possible that GPT4 is "aware" of itself in as much as its aware of anything. You are right in that each instance isn't aware directly of what the other instances are doing, it does probably now have knowledge of itself. Unless of course OpenAI completely scrubbed the input files of any mention of GPT4.

Yeah once ChatGPT shows up as an entity in the training data it will sort of inescapably start to build a self image.
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