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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

spectrum.ieee.org

11–20 of 412 posts

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#11
It's funny how it's possible to simultaneously overestimate and underestimate GPT4 at the same time, vastly.

I think that we just don't fully understand everything it gives us yet.

The complaints of "well it explained this wrong" are over-emphasized. The same thing happens with google and with any sort of research. Besides, if you're actually being productive with GPT4, you're going to be asking it stuff that relates to something you do know, and will be able to verify it readily enough. (Especially when it comes to programming and compilers.)

And just a reminder, those of you opining based off your experience with GPT3.5... GPT4 is a huge, huge improvement. Almost to the point of it not really being an incremental improvement. It's so much better it's like a different thing.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#12
Jaron Lanier's 2010 book "You are not a gadget" basically foreshadows the hype around chat-gpt and how we (technologists) want to make people obsolete so that computers seem more advanced. He argues that we adjust ourselves and reduce our expectations in the Turing test.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#13
I get why AI people are at pains to say that GPT-* isn’t AI, and that agi is still a long, difficult way off, I do understand that the distinction is important. But ChatGPT has become such a useful tool to help explain a concept or to filter thoughts through I don’t really care if it’s proper AI or just playing pretend.

Google search gives me pretty useless results these days, forums are slow and inconsistent to respond. ChatGPT is fast, easy to use, and sometimes incredibly wrong. I can live with that, I’m not using it to drive my car.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#14

Annoyed at all these N=1 articles from prominent thinkers about this stuff. Especially from scientists - can these sorts of folks please more carefully quantify, how often it’s “wrong” and then from that decide whether or not to “calm down”. Right now I suspect we hear from the outliers on both ends of the spectrum here. People who either see AGI happening tomorrow and the more dismissive crowd. But aside from what w…

Anytime I ask these things something (bard, gpt etc), 33% of the answer is genius, 33% misleading garbage, 33% filler stuff that’s neither here or there The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to? I don’t know who finds these things use…

> The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to?

Because it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it?

More so when the correctness check can itself be automated to some extent.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#15
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when the Internet was new and no-one believed anything on it? Then, learning what to believe became a marketable skill for many people? Then society fundamentally changed because not everyone learned that skill? This is just that again. Gen Z will joke about their millennial/Gen X bosses believing anything the AI tells them and it will probably lead to some sort of mainstream conspiracy that Jackie O herself…

> Remember when the Internet was new and no-one believed anything on it? Is this true?

I remember my parents and teachers indicating this, and me and my friends thinking “then why do they trust TV, books, etc.?”

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#16

It is a disruption. It now has more wood behind the arrow. You can’t ignore it just because it lies today for some inputs.

Maybe, but the rest of the arrow is not more chat gpt but other AI things to come. The problem I currently see is the hype, we’re acting as if we’re already there, we’ve nearly achieved AGI with LLMs, we just need to ramp up production more and miraculously AGI will pop into existence

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#17

It's funny how it's possible to simultaneously overestimate and underestimate GPT4 at the same time, vastly. I think that we just don't fully understand everything it gives us yet. The complaints of "well it explained this wrong" are over-emphasized. The same thing happens with google and with any sort of research. Besides, if you're actually being productive with GPT4, you're going to be asking it stuff that relates…

This captures it well. We're at the "startups are throwing GPT at every possible wall to see what sticks" stage of this.

We're going to see both improvements in application, and parallel improvements in the underlying model.

Who cares if it's AGI if someone figures out how to turn it into a competent tax accountant?

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#18
I already calmed down because it’s quite obvious that OpenAI is engaging in textbook, bait-and-switch startup tactics. GPT-4 performance has noticeably taken a nosedive since its initial release and most recently degraded further in advance of the iOS app release.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#19
post #2

> I’ll give you that. And I think what they say, interestingly, is how much of our language is very much rote, R-O-T-E, rather than generated directly, because it can be collapsed down to this set of parameters. But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence. On this, I think he might be wrong. I think the hallucination ability shows th…

Hallucination right now is just the exponential divergence that LeCun talks about if you are interested in reading more about it.

LLMs probably need generative diffusion but still lack the fundamentals to reason, plan and evaluate.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#20
post #2

> I’ll give you that. And I think what they say, interestingly, is how much of our language is very much rote, R-O-T-E, rather than generated directly, because it can be collapsed down to this set of parameters. But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence. On this, I think he might be wrong. I think the hallucination ability shows th…

Logic is inconsistent and/or incomplete.

Truth is both consistent and complete.

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