Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 141 posts

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#111

Post by GenerocUsername »

qup wrote: post #53
bacon_waffle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only bad thing is that it's hallucinating an answer instead of admitting it doesn't know. Isn't this a fundamental issue?

Only if it can't be corrected. How do you rate the likelihood of this problem being unsolvable?

Well it's a language model.

Technically its just a really good auto complete, whose factual database is a side-effect of stringing together contextually correct tokens. It by itself is entirely incapable of knowing when it is wrong, despite possibly generating sentences apologizing for being wrong when told it was wrong

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#112

Post by copperx »

keithalewis wrote: post #109
ilaksh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't that interested and probably didn't know there were two versions. Eventually someone did give him the GPT-4 version I think.

Outdated? Two versions? We're talking on the order of months and dozens of versions. Maybe he has seen similar claims before and is too old and dumb to not realize how world changing this is. My take away is that he views this as another tool we are still figuring out how to use.

Dumb is the last adjective I would use to describe Knuth, even if you believe that becoming old makes you dumb, like you clearly do.

My advice to you is to never dismiss anyone's opinion just for being old. And I hope you lose your ingrained ageism before you become old yourself, otherwise you'll find old age intolerable.

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#113

Post by paulddraper »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #48
paulddraper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true.

I tried, this is what I came up with under significant time pressure: Happy books sound great. It was very difficult to think of a plural verb with 5 letters, and once I realized that was an issue, I was worried that I wouldn't have enough time to come up with a singular noun that would fit any of the singular verbs that I was considering (reads, seems). Interestingly, this is the exact same mistake that ChatGPT made…

Or....."I don't think that is true."

;)

Or "See Spot run."

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#114

Post by manquer »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #73

What I find amazing about the original exchange was the profound lack of curiosity Knuth demonstrated. Because the model wasn’t flawless in performance he pinned it as a curiosity that was good at grammar and vacuous otherwise and wasn’t interested to hear how it improves. This reminds me of an awful lot of the computing field in this drama as it plays out. People that literally know how implausible any of these feat…

What do you expect ? He is one the person in the world who has most the earned the right to take that attitude .

Both Knuth and GPTs are aggregators and presenters of knowledge, Knuth is however the antithesis of a LLM .

He has painstakingly spent years to make sure not a single mistake, not even a typo is there in material he publishes , he has devoted years developing a better typesetting so he can present his material accurately.

His obsession with accuracy is unparalleled and his dedication and mastery over communication to explain complex topics precisely and with an approachability that no one else comes close to .

He has strived for perfection all his life and not been far of the mark .ChatGPT for its all powers will never share that idealogy,

so I am more surprised that he was complimentary at all, and actually appreciated many of its skills

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#115

Post by fnordpiglet »

carapace wrote: post #103
fnordpiglet wrote: post #73

What I find amazing about the original exchange was the profound lack of curiosity Knuth demonstrated. Because the model wasn’t flawless in performance he pinned it as a curiosity that was good at grammar and vacuous otherwise and wasn’t interested to hear how it improves. This reminds me of an awful lot of the computing field in this drama as it plays out. People that literally know how implausible any of these feat…

It sounds like you profoundly misunderstand Knuth, and LLMs. I recommend a dose of Mickens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

I don’t know Knuth. I understand LLMs for precisely what they are, how they’re built, the math behind them, the limits of what they’re doing, and I don’t over estimate the illusion. However while I see people over estimating them I think they’re extrapolating the current state to a state where it’s limits are restricted and augmented with other techniques and models that address their short comings. Lack of agency? We have agent techniques. Lack of consistency with reality? We have information retrieval and semantic inference systems. LLMs bring an unreasonably powerful ability to semantically interpret in a space of ambiguity and approximate enough reasoning and inference to tie together all the pieces we’ve built into an ensemble model that’s so close to AGI that it likely doesn’t matter. People look at LLMs and shake their head failing to realize it’s a single model and single technique that we haven’t even attempted to augment and fail to realize that it’s even possible to augment and constrain LLM with other techniques to address their non trivial failings.

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#116

Post by fnordpiglet »

manquer wrote: post #114
fnordpiglet wrote: post #73

What I find amazing about the original exchange was the profound lack of curiosity Knuth demonstrated. Because the model wasn’t flawless in performance he pinned it as a curiosity that was good at grammar and vacuous otherwise and wasn’t interested to hear how it improves. This reminds me of an awful lot of the computing field in this drama as it plays out. People that literally know how implausible any of these feat…

What do you expect ? He is one the person in the world who has most the earned the right to take that attitude . Both Knuth and GPTs are aggregators and presenters of knowledge, Knuth is however the antithesis of a LLM . He has painstakingly spent years to make sure not a single mistake, not even a typo is there in material he publishes , he has devoted years developing a better typesetting so he can present his mate…

That’s actually not exactly my point - my point is his lack of curiosity … 3.5’s answered poorly but sounded convincing. But his dismissiveness of the potential and future advances bothered me.

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#118

Post by manquer »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #116
manquer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect ? He is one the person in the world who has most the earned the right to take that attitude . Both Knuth and GPTs are aggregators and presenters of knowledge, Knuth is however the antithesis of a LLM . He has painstakingly spent years to make sure not a single mistake, not even a typo is there in material he publishes , he has devoted years developing a better typesetting so he can present his mate…

That’s actually not exactly my point - my point is his lack of curiosity … 3.5’s answered poorly but sounded convincing. But his dismissiveness of the potential and future advances bothered me.

He is 85! I would hope to be that disciplined about what what I can spend time on at that age

He was curious enough to spend some time on it and was worried it would sink more of his time with all the sub problems it is presented and asks specifically Stephan wolfram to disengage on this

He talks about his preference of working with authentic and trustworthy .

Maybe a younger Knuth may have spent more time , but I perhaps think not that likely really .

This is simply not a area of interest for him, he does truly understand the impact and potential - When he talks about novelists not capturing precursors to singularity and how millions of people have access to 0.01 % intelligence for free .

I don’t think he is dismissive of its potential and future , he is not working on everything that can change the world in computing just his areas of interest.

Perhaps you (I am certainly) disappointed that someone of Knuth’s stature is not going to spend time on an emerging field and that’s what really bothers us..

Re: “Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT” but with ChatGPT-4

#119

Post by wahahah »

beanaroo wrote: post #31
hannasm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe radix sort belongs first in this list.

The most elegant is certainly sleepsort. Maybe not the most efficient, but definitely elegant.

rest in peace /prog/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277

[edit] took me a minute to find an archive https://archive.tinychan.net/read/prog/1295544154

Post reply on HN