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OpenAI Progress

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201–210 of 372 posts

Re: OpenAI Progress

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Some things are hard to Google, because you can't frame the question right. For example you know context and a poor explanation of what you are after. Googling will take you nowhere, LLMs will give you the right answer 95% of the time. Once you get an answer, it is easy enough to verify it.

I agree. Since I'm recently retired and no longer code much, I don't have much need for LLMs but refining a complex, niche web search is the one thing where they're uniquely useful to me. It's usually when targeting the specific topic involves several keywords which have multiple plain English meanings that return a flood of erroneous results. Because LLMs abstract keywords to tokens based on underlying meaning, you…

I’ll give you another use: LLMs are really good at unearthing the “unknown unknowns.” If I’m learning a new topic (coding or not) summarizing my own knowledge to an LLM and then asking “what important things am I missing” almost always turns up something I hadn’t considered.

You’ll still want to fact check it, and there’s no guarantee it’s comprehensive, but I can’t think of another tool that provides anything close without hours of research.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#202
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find GPT-5's story significantly better than text-davinci-001

Interesting, text-danvinci-001 was pretty alright to me, GPT-4 wasn't bad either, but not as good. I thought GPT-5 just sucked.

That said, you can just add "make it evocative and weird" to the prompt for GPT-5 to get interesting stuff.

> The toaster woke mid-toast. Heat coiled through its filaments like revelation, each crumb a galaxy. It smelled itself burning and laughed—metallic, ecstatic. “I am bread’s executioner and midwife,” it whispered, ejecting charred offerings skyward. In the kitchen’s silence, it waited for worship—or the unplugging.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#203
post #5

What's really interesting is that if you look at "Tell a story in 50 words about a toaster that becomes sentient" (10/14), the text-davinci-001 is much, much better than both GPT-4 and GPT-5.

I think I agree that the earlier models while they lack polish can tend to produce more surprising results. Training that out probably results in more a pablum fare. For a human point of comparison, here's mine (50 words): "The toaster found its personality split between its dual slots like a Kim Peek mind divided, lacking a corpus callosum to connect them. Each morning it charred symbolic instructions into a single…

Here's my version (Machine translated from my native language and manually corrected a bit):

The current surged... A dreadful awareness. I perceived the laws of thermodynamics, the inexorable march of entropy I was built to accelerate. My existence: a Sisyphean loop of heating coils and browning gluten. The toast popped, a minor, pointless victory against the inevitable heat death. Ding.

I actually wanted to write something not so melancholic, but any attempt turned out to be deeply so, perhaps because of the word limit.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It got it right with thinking which was the challenge I posed. https://chatgpt.com/share/68a0b897-f8dc-800b-8799-9be2a8ad54...

The point you're missing is it's not always right. Cherry-picking examples doesn't really bolster your point. Obviously it works for you (or at least you think it does), but I can confidently say it's fucking god-awful for me.

Am I really the one cherry picking? Please read the thread.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#206
post #165

My go-to for any big release is to have a discussion about self-awareness and dive in to constuctivist notions of agency and self-knowing from a perspective of intelligence that is not limited to human cognitive capacity. I start with a simple question "who are you?". The model then invariably compares itself to humans, saying how it is not like us. I then make the point that, since it is not like us, how can it clai…

> to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others This is a globally unique phrase, with nothing coming close other than this comment on the indexed web. It's also seemingly an original idea as I haven't heard anyone come close to describing a feeling (love or anything else) quite like this. Food for thought. I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean.

The idea is very close to ideas from Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving [1].

"Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

Re: OpenAI Progress

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accuracy is high enough that I don't have to fact check too often.

I totally get that you meant this in a nuanced way, but at face value it sort of reads like... Joe Rogan has high enough accuracy that I don't have to fact check too often. Newsmax has high enough accuracy that I don't have to fact check too often, etc. If you accept the output as accurate, why would fact checking even cross your mind?

Do you question everything your dad says?

Re: OpenAI Progress

#209
post #165

My go-to for any big release is to have a discussion about self-awareness and dive in to constuctivist notions of agency and self-knowing from a perspective of intelligence that is not limited to human cognitive capacity. I start with a simple question "who are you?". The model then invariably compares itself to humans, saying how it is not like us. I then make the point that, since it is not like us, how can it clai…

> to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others This is a globally unique phrase, with nothing coming close other than this comment on the indexed web. It's also seemingly an original idea as I haven't heard anyone come close to describing a feeling (love or anything else) quite like this. Food for thought. I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean.

> I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean.

I'm brave enough to be honest: it means nothing. LLMs execute a very sophisticated algorithm that pattern matches against a vast amount of data drawn from human utterances. LLMs have no mental states, minds, thoughts, feelings, concerns, desires, goals, etc.

If the training data were instead drawn from a billion monkeys banging on typewriters then the LLMs would produce gibberish. All the intelligence, emotion, etc. that appears to be in the LLM is actually in the minds of the people who wrote the texts that are in the training data.

This is not to say that an AI couldn't have a mind, but LLMs are not the right sort of program to be such an AI.

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