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What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

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Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#121

Post by layer8 »

rqtwteye wrote: post #120
layer8 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be like auto-generated javadoc all over again, just more wordy and with contrafactual fabulations sprinkled in.

I have thrown a set of our requirements and some helm charts at it and the summary it produced was pretty good. It needs some work but I think it’s just a matter of time until the output is pretty good. The bar for most documentation is pretty low.

The GP was about producing documentation from code. The problem is that useful documentation is exactly about what is not clear from the code.

Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#122

Post by mpalmer »

andai wrote: post #116
mpalmer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to the Googler who thought an LLM was self-aware and made public statements that were damaging to the company's reputation? I guess yeah, be careful you don't do that.

The public statements were just him passing along what LaMDA told him, which was that it had subjective experiences and didn't appreciate being experimented on without its consent.

You don't think passing along that text without further comment makes his intent pretty clear?

Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#123

Post by sowbug »

blackbear_ wrote: post #107
sowbug wrote: post #90

I liked the post's title more than the article's contents. It got me wondering about the difference between language and thought, if there actually is any. Is thought just unspoken language? Do we think if we don't know a language? Is there a subset of any human language that can be described by a formal regular grammar without giving up the expressiveness of human language? Is there a notion of "Turing completeness"…

> Is thought just unspoken language? Do we think if we don't know a language? I find it pretty obvious that there are many ways of thinking that are not language, just consider abstract concepts in math and related fields. When working my way through math and programming problems, a large part of my thinking is not through words but.. Some kind of visualization?

I know what you mean. I wonder whether it's useful to distinguish thinking from that "mind's eye" imaging capability that I believe you're describing. They might be separate things. It's pretty evident that a cat or a dog, or even a fish, has memory. Is memory the ability to conjure things in the mind's eye? If remembering one image reminds us of other images, then language-free thought might be moving through a chain of images. Perhaps humans are good at creating such chains in their heads, while a fly or an ant can't do much more beyond matching a memory to their actual instantaneous sensory input, and reacting accordingly. Substitute "image" with symbolic memories, and that might be the start of abstract reasoning.

In other words, there's probably basic consciousness at one end of a spectrum, and thinking evidenced by language on the other end. Somewhere between those two, one might draw a line between thought and mere conscious awareness.

Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#124

Post by mannykannot »

Shaggy2000 wrote: post #80
_Algernon_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that GPT is training future versions based on the information you provide. It could potentially be returned to a future user. AWS does no such thing.

It's easy to replace terms with something else in order to keep information confidential.

If you replace terms with something else, what sort of value can you find in the responses you get back? On the one hand, the LLM does not know the code you are using; alternatively, if you restrict your code to using well-understood near synonyms, you are not really obfuscating.

Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#125

Post by pmarreck »

asciimov wrote: post #81
pmarreck wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Love your username btw.) I think that this is great and I'll explain why. When the machines manage to supplant all the mechanistic portions of our thinking, what will remain? The creative bits, is my guess. There will be far more room for the creative bits, and then... ???

Where do those creative bits come from? Often the creative bits come out of the struggle to do the work. If you get rid of the struggle, then you also get rid of the motivation for their creation.

Good point. Reminds me of poetry, where it's the constraint that demands creativity. Necessity, mother, invention, etc.

Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#126

Post by pmarreck »

passion__desire wrote: post #86
pmarreck wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Love your username btw.) I think that this is great and I'll explain why. When the machines manage to supplant all the mechanistic portions of our thinking, what will remain? The creative bits, is my guess. There will be far more room for the creative bits, and then... ???

By creative bits, you are supplying an human-based objective function. I like this book "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" which argues for the existence of the "objective paradox", a paradox which states that "soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it". Maybe we shouldn't have any objective as such and let fun and play will be the norm of discovery. Sort of like kno…

Were you referring to this?

https://medium.com/agileinsider/the-objective-paradox-8cabfd...

Re: What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?

#127

Post by mistermann »

DrJasonPhillips wrote: post #67
sandkoan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the basic model already exists. You could throw together something like this yourself: encode your documents with a Transformers model into a series of vectors. Then you're merely a nearest neighbor search away from finding the most semantically relevant documents. Feed those documents to GPT-3 or some such LLM as contextual state, along with the query, et voila! you have Q&A on documentation.

Those are the essential steps, yes. (Spoiler: I worked on this feature @ Slite) But in practice, the effectiveness of your pipeline will depend greatly upon exactly how you implement each piece. Here are some of the things we've had to consider and develop, in order for the Q&A to be production worthy: - at which level is it best to encode documents (sentence, paragraph, whole doc) and how can those tiered embeddings…

Thanks for all this, most of which flew right over my head!!

I wonder, can you recommend a resource where one could get "quickly" up to speed on how this stuff conceptually works, something one could ingest in a weekend or so to get a decent handle on it (but not necessarily be capable of doing anything)?

Like, I think I have a decent understanding of the probabilistic "next word" aspect of LLM text generation, but I'm assuming there's an initial "vector query" that happens prior to this part of it?

Also, could you offer any advice on the notion of how AI/ML is able to extract various meanings from text? For example, let's say I wanted to be able to scrape this thread and then for each comment extract various ideas/topics mentioned in each comment (ideally with influence from a custom ontology), detect emotions, claims of fact, etc etc etc - is that sort of thing possible?

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