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

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

#131

Post by eimrine »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #126
eimrine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychology is a religious-like pseudoscience, they can not even define what "psy" is without using some conceptions from religions such as a soul. upd these statements from me are so controversial, the number of "points" just dances lambada. The psy* areas are clearly polarized: some guys upvote all my messages in this topic and some other ones downvote all my messages in this topic. This is a sign of something inter…

> This is a sign of something interesting but I am not ready to elaborate on this statement in this comment which is going to become [flagged] eventually. Yet you're being a reply guy all over this thread, might as well just elaborate you clearly have the time and interest

Psy* pseudoscience is among a few hills I am gladly die for. Also free/libre software, Lisp and cryptocurrency with no premine.

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

#132

Post by alphazard »

rileymat2 wrote: post #125
alphazard wrote: post #120

Developing prompts for these models isn't a science yet. It does seem to meet most of the criteria for an art though. We recognize some outputs as high quality, and others as low quality, but often can't articulate the exact reason why. It seems that some people are able to reliably produce high quality results, indicating there is some kind of skill involved. More precisely, the quality of an individual artist's las…

Why isn’t it science? Surely people can use the scientific method in investigating?

For starters we don't have a way to measure quality objectively, and this is the case for art in general. If you were to develop an objective measure of beauty for example, visual art as a discipline would quickly turn into a science. At some level we know that's possible, we're all just brains in jars. But AFAIK we aren't doing science there yet.

The science and engineering parts all have a measure of quality, sometimes that's a human rating, sometimes it's cross-entropy loss. There's nothing stopping someone from using the scientific method to investigate these things, but descriptively I haven't seen anyone, calling themselves a "prompt engineer/scientist", doing that yet.

"I used these words, and I got this output which is nice" sounds like, "I tried using these brushes and I made this painting which is nice". I can agree with the painting being nice, but not that science was used to engineer a nice painting.

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

#133

Post by blueboo »

gwervc wrote: post #129
adastra22 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I wonder what your definition of “science” or “engineering” is…

If you remove the AI glasses, "prompt engineering" is just typing words and seeing if results match the expectations... which is exactly what any search engine pays their testers for. Those testers are making an important job to keep improving the quality of the product but they aren't engineers and even less so researchers. Similarly a kid playing with the dose of water needed to build a sandcastle isn't a civil eng…

I’m not sure the scientific method itself can withstand this sort of scrutiny. After all, it’s just making guesses about what will happen and then seeing what happens!

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

#134

Post by shwouchk »

kergonath wrote: post #117
jejeyyy77 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you realize nobody understands WHY or HOW these models work under the hood right? Of course we understand how they work, we built them! There is no mystery in their mechanisms, we know the number of neurons, their connectivity, everything from the weights to the activation functions. This is not a mystery, this is several decades of technical developments. > it's akin to evolution - we understand the process - that…

Why stop at chemistry? Chemistry is fundamentally quantum electrodynamics applied to huge ensembles of particles. QED is very well understood and gives the best predictions we have to date of any scientific theory.

How come we don’t entirely understand biology then?

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

#135

Post by lmeyerov »

To bring some data to a sour grapes fight: https://paperswithcode.com/sota/code-generation-on-humaneval

For code generation, GPT4 is getting beat by the small prompt library LATS wrapped around GPT3.5. Given the recent release of MagicCoder / Instruct-OSS, that means a small prompt library + a small 7B model you can self-host beats the much fancier GPT4.

Similar to when simple NNs destroyed a decade of Bayesian modeling theses & research programs, it's frustrating for folks going other paths. But it doesn't make the work 'wrong'.

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

#136

Post by thesz »

azinman2 wrote: post #52
thesz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lower-order ML constructs do not demonstrate emergent capabilities like step by step, stream of consciousness thinking, and so on. As a matter of fact, I did a project on the normalization of the text, e.g., translate "crossing of 6 a. and 12 s." into "crossing of sixth avenue and 12-th street" with a simple LM (order 3) and beam search on the lattice paths, lattice formed with hypotheses' variants. I got two fold…

Is there something you can link to? I’d like to learn more.

Here it is: https://huggingface.co/blog/how-to-generate

Beam search at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_search

Beam search in Sqlite: https://www.sqlite.org/queryplanner-ng.html#_a_difficult_cas...

Beam search is more interesting than its' application within AI field.

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

#137

Post by aeternum »

0xfae wrote: post #121
adastra22 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I wonder what your definition of “science” or “engineering” is…

Right? I'm having a hard time imagining a definition that includes "trying new things and seeing what happens" but that doesn't include... "trying new things and seeing what happens"

"Science" has been twisted recently into a kind of witchcraft that can only be practiced by those anointed through the rigors of academia.

"Trust the science"

In reality, that is about the furthest from what you should do. As Feynman once said: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". Electricity was also once considered a toy and good for nothing but parlor tricks.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #22

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…

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by selfhoster11 »

jebarker wrote: post #76
selfhoster11 wrote: post #22

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…

> emergent capabilities like step by step, stream of consciousness thinking What makes these things "emergent capabilities"? They seem like pretty straightforward consequences of autoregressive generation. If you feed output back as input then you'll get more output conditioned on that new input and stream of conscious generation is just stochastic parroting isn't it?

They are emergent in the sense that there is nothing in the pre-training dataset that would show the LLM by example how to, for example, compare and contrast any given pairing of fruit, technologies, or fictional settings, while thinking with the mindset of a doctor that hates both options, and on top of that make sure that this ends up formatted as a stream-of-consciousness. It can learn all these aspects from the source data individually in isolation, but there's no way there are examples that show how to combine it all (awareness of world information + knowledge of how to use it) into a single answer. That's probably a very clumsy example - others online have supplied more rigorous ones that I recommend checking out.

Strictly speaking, it might be "stochastic parroting". But really, if you want to be a great and supremely effective stochastic parrot, you have to learn an internal representation of certain things so that you can predict them. And there are hints that this is exactly what a sufficiently-large large language model is doing.

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

#140

Post by j2kun »

blueboo wrote: post #133
gwervc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove the AI glasses, "prompt engineering" is just typing words and seeing if results match the expectations... which is exactly what any search engine pays their testers for. Those testers are making an important job to keep improving the quality of the product but they aren't engineers and even less so researchers. Similarly a kid playing with the dose of water needed to build a sandcastle isn't a civil eng…

I’m not sure the scientific method itself can withstand this sort of scrutiny. After all, it’s just making guesses about what will happen and then seeing what happens!

Except there's also, you know, building coherent theories and using those theories to predict the system behavior.
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