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The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

win-vector.com

111–120 of 148 posts

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#111
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trivial and unique Python programs would output if they were run, despite GPT-4 not having access to a Python interpreter itself Trivially explained as "even a broken clock is right twice a day." I skimmed the paper, as it was linked here on HN iirc. First, it was published by Microsoft, a company that absolutely has a horse in this race (what were they supposed to say? "The AI bot our search engine uses is dumb?")…

You're one of the people that will be yelling to everyone else in a potential future "We're only seemingly oppressed! It's just a parlor trick that they've turned most of humanity into paperclips, sci-fi authors wrote about this already!" I don't think GPT-4 is magic, but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to…

Do you think the card catalog down at the local library is sentient? Maybe that's not enough data, though! Is the card catalog for NY Public Library sentient? Maybe that's still too local. Is Google sentient? Everyone with a clue would admit these are all examples of "knowledge" It's the same parlor trick, with fancier algos. It's not intelligence. It won't produce a human-level AI. Period.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#112
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Microsoft Research "Sparks of AGI" paper spends 154 pages describing behaviors of GPT-4 that are inconsistent with the understanding of it being a "fancy Markov chain": https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 I expect that the reason people are constantly arguing with you is that your analysis does not explain some easily testable experiences, such as why GPT-4 has the ability to explain what some non-trivial and unique…

> trivial and unique Python programs would output if they were run, despite GPT-4 not having access to a Python interpreter itself Trivially explained as "even a broken clock is right twice a day." I skimmed the paper, as it was linked here on HN iirc. First, it was published by Microsoft, a company that absolutely has a horse in this race (what were they supposed to say? "The AI bot our search engine uses is dumb?")…

> Trivially explained as "even a broken clock is right twice a day."

Trivial, vacuous, and wrong. It is not plausible to correctly predict the output of a serious Python program by coincidence. See the detailed examples in the paper -- one of which was pseudocode, not Python -- to see how silly this claim sounds.

> First, it was published by Microsoft, a company that absolutely has a horse in this race

Firstly, this is evidence that you are neither very familiar with Microsoft, nor with academic or industrial research labs. Microsoft Research (the affiliation of the authors) is practically a different company, and run more like a university lab. It is somewhat deeply insulting to their (often still primarily academic) researchers to suggest that they would publish a misleading puff piece to benefit the commercial arm.

Secondly, while the paper describes itself as qualitative, you can reproduce the major claims yourself (and I have).

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Significantly economically impactful in some cases- obvious examples of call centers and first-line customer support. Is it that obvious? Yesterday I had a trivial but uncommon issue with my pharmacy. I reached out to them online - their chatbot was the only channel available. I tried, over the course of 20 minutes and 3 restarted sessions, to communicate an issue that a human would have been able to respond to in…

Do you have any reason to believe that the Chatbot was GPT3.5 or GPT4 based?

Seems unlikely they would be trusting a system that so willingly makes up stuff to provide a customer with life-critical advice about medications

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#114
post #79

In my opinion it's a weak take that only got so upvoted and commented on hacker news because it has the existential and universal logical quantifier symbols in the title and also because it uses the chiasmus rhetoric device both in the title and at the end of the article. The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that…

Yeah it's a super weak take, unless somehow the chatgpt folks tweaked as many hyper parameters as there is dimensionality in language.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#115
I'll try to explain this better.

Sometimes you hope to get a system that works without constant tweaking. Once you've adjusted it properly, it should work without adjusting the settings. So there's one setting that works for all the inputs you care about.

But instead you have a system that you have to adjust all the time. For every input, you can get it to work. But you're never done tweaking.

This is actually fine if you're expecting the user to do some work. Consider doing a Google search, seeing what you get, and then modifying your query when you didn't get what you want.

It sucks if you're hoping to go into fully-automatic mode. You didn't get that, you got an interactive application. (Or maybe the tweaks aren't reasonable for the user to make themselves, so you got nothing?)

So the scam, if there is one, is selling something as fully-automated when it's not. It's a tool that requires a person to work with a machine, and you're never going to be able to take the human out of the loop. (Let's say you're hoping for a driverless car but you never quite get there.)

Often, it's not the end of the world. An interactive tool can be very valuable! But you need to set your expectations appropriately.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the inverse?

Informally, "this thing can solve all your problems" vs "for each of your problems there is a thing that can solve it". I suppose the argument is that LLMs are not a solution to any problem, they are a complex tool which might be used to find a solution, with non-zero effort. As an example of non-zero effort: I spent a fair amount of time the other day trying to get chatGPT to advise how to effectively deal with a gr…

Right, but this seems like strawmanning to me. The vast majority of useful technology ever developed has been "a complex tool which might be used to find a solution, with non-zero effort".

The complaint here seems to be about the existence of marketing.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#117
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trivial and unique Python programs would output if they were run, despite GPT-4 not having access to a Python interpreter itself Trivially explained as "even a broken clock is right twice a day." I skimmed the paper, as it was linked here on HN iirc. First, it was published by Microsoft, a company that absolutely has a horse in this race (what were they supposed to say? "The AI bot our search engine uses is dumb?")…

> Trivially explained as "even a broken clock is right twice a day." Trivial, vacuous, and wrong. It is not plausible to correctly predict the output of a serious Python program by coincidence. See the detailed examples in the paper -- one of which was pseudocode, not Python -- to see how silly this claim sounds. > First, it was published by Microsoft, a company that absolutely has a horse in this race Firstly, this…

> familiar with Microsoft, nor with academic or industrial research labs

The idea that Microsoft Research would publish anything remotely damaging to Microsoft is beyond naïve. I mean, one of their core tenets is "Ensure that Microsoft products have a future," but okay.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#118
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trivial and unique Python programs would output if they were run, despite GPT-4 not having access to a Python interpreter itself Trivially explained as "even a broken clock is right twice a day." I skimmed the paper, as it was linked here on HN iirc. First, it was published by Microsoft, a company that absolutely has a horse in this race (what were they supposed to say? "The AI bot our search engine uses is dumb?")…

You're one of the people that will be yelling to everyone else in a potential future "We're only seemingly oppressed! It's just a parlor trick that they've turned most of humanity into paperclips, sci-fi authors wrote about this already!" I don't think GPT-4 is magic, but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to…

> but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to deny that

Speaking of weird, that's a very weird definition of knowledge. Because in that case, then almost any data transformation operation implies knowledge. MS Word thesaurus? Knowledge. Search and replace? Knowledge. Markov chain[1]? Knowledge.

[1] http://www2.hawaii.edu/~chin/661/Projects/AdvAI_Project_Repo...

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#119
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna respond to you, because i think you like GPT4 and i do too (even if the only use i trust for now is "Resume me this **lot of text/research article** in less than 200 words", which is already great for a knowledge hoarder like me) You can think against yourself, a LLM have troubles doing so. Also, they fail spectacularly when asked to do real-life operation: "I have to buy two bagettes at one euros, then fiv…

I don't understand, GPT-4 answers this very easily: > To calculate the total cost, first find the cost for each item: > Two baguettes at 1 euro each: 2 * 1 = 2 euros > Five chocolatines at 1.40 euros each: 5 * 1.40 = 7 euros > Five croissants at 1.20 euros each: 5 * 1.20 = 6 euros > Five raisin breads at 1.60 euros each: 5 * 1.60 = 8 euros > Now, add up the cost of each item: > 2 euros (baguettes) + 7 euros (chocolat…

Ah ! I was using GPT 3.5. Impressive improvements.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#120
post #79

In my opinion it's a weak take that only got so upvoted and commented on hacker news because it has the existential and universal logical quantifier symbols in the title and also because it uses the chiasmus rhetoric device both in the title and at the end of the article. The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that…

Upvotes don't necessarily mean "I agree", they might mean "I want more of this"
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