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OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

maraoz.com

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Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#111

I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box. Having read to the bottom, the quality of text generation there absolutely blew me away. GPT-2 texts have a somewhat disconnected quality - "it only makes sense if you're not really paying attenti…

> Even on re-reading more closely, it doesn't feel like the world's best writing, but I don't notice major loss of coherence until the last couple of paragraphs. I guessed it was fake before getting to the end, not from the content, but from the fact that all the sentences are roughly the same length and follow the same basic grammatical patterns. Real people purposely mix up their sentence structure in order to keep…

I did not guess that it was fake but skipped to the bottom because the article did not seem to be worth reading. It felt like the author was not moving anywhere with their words. I laughed out loud at the reveal that it was written programmatically.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#112

I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box. Having read to the bottom, the quality of text generation there absolutely blew me away. GPT-2 texts have a somewhat disconnected quality - "it only makes sense if you're not really paying attenti…

I'm not a very good test case. I briefly skimmed (not expecting very much from a Bitcoin-themed article), read the end, and only then read more carefully. So my first read was brief and biased, and my second was very biased.

That said, the content of the computer-generated parts doesn't make much sense even for a Bitcoin-influenced article (what would be the point of paraphrasing your previous post in a forum on a regular basis, and how does this not get one very quickly banned?), but the grammar is far far better than previous attempts - it reads like Simple English wiki.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#113

I dunno. There's a bot on /r/buttcoin that posts dumb bitcoiner quotes, and bitcoiners would keep showing up and arguing with it. So I think the Turing test bar's a little low in this domain.

How do you know that they're bitcoiners and not someone training their own bot? :)

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#114
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even on re-reading more closely, it doesn't feel like the world's best writing, but I don't notice major loss of coherence until the last couple of paragraphs. I guessed it was fake before getting to the end, not from the content, but from the fact that all the sentences are roughly the same length and follow the same basic grammatical patterns. Real people purposely mix up their sentence structure in order to keep…

If that’s the only thing that separates this from human writing; I’m sure it can be influenced easily.

> I'm sure it can be influenced easily.

Maybe. Right now this reads like a glorified shopping list. It's coherent, but actually sounding human also requires a theory of mind.

E.g. I explain here why it's possible for written statements to be objectively insightful, informative, interesting, or funny, but objectively in a way that's relational to other information or beliefs. The implication being that statements are only going to seem subjectively funny or insightful (or whatever) to others who have that knowledge or those beliefs, which means that you can't reliably create those subjective experiences in a reader without having some sort of theory of mind for them.

I guess you can create content that's funny or insightful relative to that content itself, but that's not especially useful. It's entertaining at the time, but the experience is more like seeing a movie that you laugh a lot during but then leave and are kind of like what was the point? It's an empty experience because it wasn't transformative.

I definitely don't think it's impossible, but I also don't think it's a matter of just adding a couple more if-else statements.

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writin...

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#115
It reads diffusive, unfocused and meandering, like a really bad writer who knows how to spell well and form proper sentences.

All these AI generated systems have the same smell so far - from the ones that create art, music, literature - a convincing imitation of a lousy practitioner.

This is fine for the background ... suspenseful music for a television show for instance or some descriptive balls-and-strikes style journalism (traffic, weather, stock market, sports scores) but these things are still a giant distance away from anyone saying "wow, that's brilliant writing".

15 years ago I think you'd have something like:

"Shares of XX rose 15% today in heavy trading"

while these days it would be:

"Following the news of the acquisition of YY, analysts revised the EPS estimates for Q4 for XX, which led to heavy trading leading to a 15% rise in the stock."

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#116

I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box. Having read to the bottom, the quality of text generation there absolutely blew me away. GPT-2 texts have a somewhat disconnected quality - "it only makes sense if you're not really paying attenti…

This is so true. I had a high regard for HN comments till quite recently.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#117
Its impressive that it can pass as your usual post where the author just seems to want to mention a topic without explaining anything that would warrant the need for such a post.

I'm afraid we're in for a lot more of this everywhere. Its already a struggle trying to understand people when they are actually trying to communicate an idea across, now add these bots into the mix everywhere.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#118

I dunno. There's a bot on /r/buttcoin that posts dumb bitcoiner quotes, and bitcoiners would keep showing up and arguing with it. So I think the Turing test bar's a little low in this domain.

> I dunno. There's a bot on /r/buttcoin that posts dumb bitcoiner quotes, and bitcoiners would keep showing up and arguing with it. So I think the Turing test bar's a little low in this domain.

If you're saying that because you understood that the article was claiming that GPT3 was impressive because it fooled people on bitcointalk.org, then I think you just demonstrated that GPT3 passed the Turing test with respect to cryptocurrency-critics. :)

[The posting to bitcointalk.org was a fiction written by GPT3.]

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#119

I published a response today to the sudden hype urging people to temper their expectations for GPT-3 a bit: https://minimaxir.com/2020/07/gpt3-expectations/ GPT-3 is objectively a step forward in the field of AI text-generation, but the current hype on VC Twitter misrepresents the model's current capabilities. GPT-3 isn't magic.

GPT-3 isn't magic. That's the most important thing. I got so amused with the hagiographical tweets that I coded myself a non GPT-3 demo :)

https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1284446411438710784

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#120
post #78
post #2

> I further predict that this will spark a creative gold rush among talented amateurs to train similar models and adapt them to a variety of purposes, including: mock news, “researched journalism”, advertising, politics, and propaganda. The first mention of 'Elon Musk' (who left the board) and this sentence alone gave me the tip-off that GPT-3 had generated that (and the whole blog) and it's following prediction make…

Uh-huh. Except anyone can verify the results themselves, sans specific ones like code generation - through (paid version) of AI Dungeon. Amount of people confidently posting bullshit on Hacker News is astounding. Reacting like everything we know about GPT is just a bunch of tech demos. Supposedly everyone who has access to the API is just a shill. Eh.

I just spent an hour or so playing around with the paid version of AI Dungeon, and was super unimpressed. It's pretty fun for a moment, sure, and I assume some really heroic work went into building it. I'm not saying the creators did a poor job so much as the task is really hard and the final result is...lacking.

The "Dragon" (GPT-3) engine responds reasonably to any particular input, but clearly lacks a coherent state of the world. Objects appear and disappear; plot cues are given and then can never be summoned again if not immediately grabbed, environments change dramatically without explanation, etc.

Do you feel otherwise?

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