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Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

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101–110 of 193 posts

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#101

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

What you’re saying seems to be compounded by the black box aspects here.

Instinctively a prompt may look like one line of code. We can often know or prove what a compiler is doing, but higher dimensional space is just not understood in the same way.

What other engineered thing in history has had this much immediately useful emergent capability? Genetic algorithms finding antenna designs and flocking algorithms are fantastic, but I would argue narrower in scope.

Of course a paper is still expected to expand knowledge, to have rigor and impact, but I don’t see why a prompt centric contribution would inherently preclude this.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#102

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

>> LLM research is currently in its infancy Everything that went in to creating GPT4 is AI/science or whatever. Probing GPT4 and trying to understand and characterize it is also a very worthy thing to do - else how can it be improved upon? But if making GPT is science, I'd say this stuff is more akin to psychology ;-)

you realize nobody understands WHY or HOW these models work under the hood right?

it's akin to evolution - we understand the process - that part is simple. But the output/organisms we have to investigate how they work.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#103
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the author of this tweet wasn’t saying step-by-step isn’t worthy, he was saying that non-reproducible results are not science. He emphasizes this twice in that tweet: > one experiment on one data set with seed picking is not worthy reporting > Additionally, we all need to understand this is just one good empirical result, now we need to make it useful…

Exactly, and I tend to agree with him. I argued some time ago here that a paper should take some time to try to explain why its results are happening, at least from a reasonable hypothesis (people didn't seem to agree). An experiment (even a simple one) starts from a null hypothesis and tries to disprove it. However, most of what we see coming out of "scientific" papers is basically just engineering, I guess?: we put…

Lots of onions in the varnish.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#104

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

I have a question For people in the field!

Would GPT only with pretraining and no fine tuning be able to behave better when prompt is "let’s think step by step"?

Or this prompt only worked because a fine tuning dataset containing many "let’s think step by step" prompt was used?

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#105
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont put people inside mental asylums when they are not ill?

There is no evidence of existing at least one defined illness in psy* fields. For example, let me tell you that a person X fell ill with schizophrenia. What do you know about X or X's brain?

Most psychologists would be much more interested in person X's behavior, rather than their brain.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#106
post #7

If you do enough measurements on that new prompt then I don't see why this shouldn't be a paper. People overestimate the value of "grand developments", and underestimate the value of actually knowing - in this case actually knowing how well something works, even if it is as simple as a prompt. Compare with drug trials: Adderall only differs from regular amphetamine in the relative concentration of enantiomers, and th…

There's a great lesson here for marketers: the prospect can be convinced with the simple presence of graphs and data and measurements. Even just the mere presence of data and data visuals is enough to legitimize what you're selling in the eyes of the prospect. When the prevailing religion is Scientism, data bestows that blessing of authority and legitimacy upon whatever it is you're trying to sell. Show and tell what…

Having worked at famously data driven Meta and Google, this is 100% accurate.

You can turbo boost your career by mastering the art of “data ritual”. It doesn’t matter what the results are or magnitude of impact or what it cost to build and launch something. Show your results in a pretty way that looks like you did your diligence and you will be celebrated.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#107
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence of existing at least one defined illness in psy* fields. For example, let me tell you that a person X fell ill with schizophrenia. What do you know about X or X's brain?

Most psychologists would be much more interested in person X's behavior, rather than their brain.

And believe in such false statement as a free will?

So what is a part of organism (if not brain) which might be possible for psy* specialist to heal, is it an arm or a leg or a spine?

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#108

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

I'm not surprised at the defence of "prompt engineering" here. It's something easy to do with no real knowledge, and I'm sure having it dismissed hurts some people.

But I 100% agree with the author, "prompt engineering" is not science, and I'd say it's not engineering either. All you're doing is exploring the parameter space of particular model in a very crude way. There is no "engineering" going on in this process, just a bunch of trial and error. Perhaps it should be called "prompt guessing."

None of the results of this process will transfer to any other model. It's simply not science. Papers like "step-by-step" are different, and relate more to learning and inference and do translate to different models and even different architectures.

Also, no, we are not all beginners here. Language models have a long history, and while the very large models are impressive, most of their failings have been known for a very long time already. Things like "prompt engineering" will eventually end up in the same graveyard as "keyword engineers" of the past.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#109

It is a _paper_, but it's not science, since GTP-4 is closed source and thus not reproducible in a lab. If OpenAI disappears tomorrow, papers are GTP-4 will likely be of little to no value, which is another tell of a non-scientific exploration. (note: not all explorations are scientific, and that is great! Science is just one of many tools for exploring lived reality.)

What is science? Can you not apply it to artifacts whose inner workings are hidden? As as aside, I was surprised at the repeated misspelling of GPT-4 and take it as a heuristic that this comment was likely written by a real human :)

Aha, didn't know Guanosine-5'-triphosphate (GTP) (a purine nucleoside triphosphate) was part of my ios dictionary, good catch!

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#110
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the author of this tweet wasn’t saying step-by-step isn’t worthy, he was saying that non-reproducible results are not science. He emphasizes this twice in that tweet: > one experiment on one data set with seed picking is not worthy reporting > Additionally, we all need to understand this is just one good empirical result, now we need to make it useful…

Exactly, and I tend to agree with him. I argued some time ago here that a paper should take some time to try to explain why its results are happening, at least from a reasonable hypothesis (people didn't seem to agree). An experiment (even a simple one) starts from a null hypothesis and tries to disprove it. However, most of what we see coming out of "scientific" papers is basically just engineering, I guess?: we put…

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