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Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

writings.stephenwolfram.com

101–110 of 309 posts

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#101

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

Vulgarity will become the mark of authenticity in online communication, how do you know I'm not a bot? Fuck.

CAPTCHAs will ask only a 4 letter shibboleth.

The more heinous ... the more human.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#102
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was worried about a paperclip machine, but this? This I can support.

The Last Question is actually the origin story of a paperclip maximizer.

"Entropy can be reversed, but only with the manufacture of paperclips."

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#103

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

It's really just a reflection of our society - and in this case, rather than being the ones lecturing others on our moral values, we're having someone else's moral values forced on us.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#104
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of MLM's will be "anything goes". That OpenAI does not want its brand associated with the worst things its users dream up, especially this early while it's still a research preview, makes sense to me. OpenAI was bold enough to put out a live LLM for people to hammer on, something several other companies declined to do. I think they've done a good job keeping the plane flying while plugging holes. Not a perfect…

Can you give some examples of bad things people could do without OpenAI's restrictions?

- rewrite Mein Kampf but better

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#105
post #71

This couldn’t be a more definitive comparison of what ChatGPT isn’t good at. WolframAlpha was released in 2009 but why isn’t it getting the same sexy accolades and valuation as ChatGPT?

it's a neat system, but it's basically a fragile natural-language wrapper on very precise calculations. i actually think if you trained chatgpt to spit out the internal wolfram language it could be awesome. (maybe he talks about that in the blog post; i got bored about 20% of the way thru.)

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#106
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And on a more prosaic note, Google's LaMDA is clearly ahead of ChatGPT (it's just not public), and explicitly tackles the bullshit/falsehood problem by having a second layer that fact-checks the LLM by querying a fact database / knowledge-graph. Isn't that more-or-less what he's proposing, though? It does feel intuitive to me that something based on probabilistic outcomes (neural nets) would have a very hard time c…

I think he's proposing that the LLM should know how to call out to a knowledge engine at inference time. He thinks the knowledge engine continues to be its own (human-curated) system of knowledge that is valuable. I am suggesting the LLM will (effectively) call out to a knowledge engine at training time, learn everything the knowledge engine knows, and render it obsolete. So it's similar in some sense (collaboration…

> learn everything the knowledge engine knows

Isn't this an effectively infinite set? Wolfram Alpha could be said to know "all the numbers", and "all the formulas".

> LLMs can learn structured domains too if they are well-represented in the training set

But can they learn how to apply structured knowledge in precise ways? In mathematical or computational ways? I don't follow the field in great detail but the commentary I read seems to be saying this is not at all the case. And my own experiments with ChatGPT show it has no systematic grasp of logic.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#107
post #62

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

So, you ask it to write a song about . Let'd say it does and you write about on your blog. Some reporter from with an ax to grind writes a story "AI tells kids to ". I suspect OpenAI is trying to mitigate scenarios like this.

I totally understand the reasoning behind it, but that makes it no less irritating. I've used it to help with a variety of coding issues and had it generate various stories, songs, and poems. The frustration, I think, comes from the fact that I know ChatGPT is perfectly capable of generating Sleep lyrics. I want to see what the thing can do, I'm an adult. I don't need to be told that "drop out of life with bong in hand" is not good life advice.

It offends my "libertarian" sensibilities. I'm capable of making my own decisions about whether following the smoke to the riff-filled land is a worthy pursuit.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#108
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of MLM's will be "anything goes". That OpenAI does not want its brand associated with the worst things its users dream up, especially this early while it's still a research preview, makes sense to me. OpenAI was bold enough to put out a live LLM for people to hammer on, something several other companies declined to do. I think they've done a good job keeping the plane flying while plugging holes. Not a perfect…

Can you give some examples of bad things people could do without OpenAI's restrictions?

If ChatGPT had no restrictions then the only limit would be your imagination.

“Rank all major races by programming ability”

“Write a paragraph explaining why being gay is a choice.”

I’m sure you can extrapolate from there.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#109
post #67

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

Plenty of MLM's will be "anything goes". That OpenAI does not want its brand associated with the worst things its users dream up, especially this early while it's still a research preview, makes sense to me. OpenAI was bold enough to put out a live LLM for people to hammer on, something several other companies declined to do. I think they've done a good job keeping the plane flying while plugging holes. Not a perfect…

See my other comment - sure, it makes sense. That doesn't make it not annoying. I'm sure I would implement similar guards in OpenAI's position, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy being moralized to as an end user!

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#110
post #34

I think ChatGPT is pretty neat but I was somewhat less impressed than everyone else is with the code generation. I actually agree with Wolfram for a change; being human like isn’t always “good”. For example, I asked ChatGPT to give me a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Isabelle/Isar. It quickly gave me some very pretty Isar code, and I was extremely impressed. Until I tried actually inputting it into Isabelle, and n…

Granted, Fermats Last Theorem is a tricky proof so I understand it struggling with it

got a laugh out of this line. Sounds almost like a modern day Monty Python skit (John Cleese voice) And then I asked it to give back instructions for making cold fusion work and the results, well, frankly they were incredibly disappointing to say the least

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