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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#121

Post by fwlr »

klipt wrote: post #79
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

> language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did Language is roughly what separates humans from other apes ... so why would it surprise us that it encodes much of the information of civilization?

I’m not as surprised as many people (I saw a great tweet once that said “Language was the first artificial intelligence, writing was the second. I literally believe this”, and that’s a broadly accurate description of my worldview too).

That said, maybe some of the surprise comes from believing “the map is not the territory” and related ideas? We generally believe that the map is not the territory and this gives us some obviously correct intuitions (like “changing the map doesn’t change the territory”), but maybe it has also given us some subtly incorrect intuitions. I’m not talking about obviously incorrect, like “you can’t understand the territory just by looking at enough maps”. I mean something more subtly wrong. One candidate off the top of my head is an intuition that “maps approximate the territory but necessarily at a lower level of detail (a 1:1 map of the territory would be the same size as the territory), so your understanding of the territory can improve as you read more maps but it can’t improve on the limit of the most detailed map available, because that information literally isn’t there”. I could see that possibly being wrong somehow.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#122

Post by zmnd »

jiggawatts wrote: post #110

This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't seem to have even tried GPT 4. Their only example references GPT 3.5, for example, and then they waffle on about only vaguely related topics such as level 5 self-driving. This quote in particular stood out as ignorant: “What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” That…

I think the main reason for division is that everyone projects to their own use cases. I have been using gpt-4 for quite some time and also couldn't understand why someone would say that it just produces something that sounds like a real answer. But then I found some queries that can definitely be described as "sounding like truth". So your personal experience probably wasn't what was their experience.

For those curious, I was asking gpt-4 about the top 3 cards from my favorite board game, Spirit Island. All three of them sounded really convincing, having the same structure and the same writing style, but unfortunately none of them existed. So everything that fails outside of most common use cases would probably have an experience of convincing hallucinations.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#123

Post by jiggawatts »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #5
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Annoyed at all these N=1 articles from prominent thinkers about this stuff. Especially from scientists - can these sorts of folks please more carefully quantify, how often it’s “wrong” and then from that decide whether or not to “calm down”. Right now I suspect we hear from the outliers on both ends of the spectrum here. People who either see AGI happening tomorrow and the more dismissive crowd. But aside from what w…

Anytime I ask these things something (bard, gpt etc), 33% of the answer is genius, 33% misleading garbage, 33% filler stuff that’s neither here or there The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to? I don’t know who finds these things use…

Bard is a brain-damaged-but-literate idiot compared to GPT 3, which is still dumber than the typical human.

Try GPT 4 for a week.

I've found it to be more like 50% immediately useful, 25% very impressive, and 25% where it's not wrong but I have to poke it a few times with different prompts to coax out the specific answer I'm looking for.

That's better than most humans that I collaborate with at work.

Literally half of humans -- in a professional IT setting -- can't understand simplified, clear english in emails. Similarly, in my experience about half can't follow simple A -> B logic. Many are perpetually perplexed that prerequisites need to precede the work, not be a footnote in the post-mortem of the predictable failure. Etc...

PS: That last sentence is too hard for several English-native speakers I work with to parse. Seriously. I'm not even exaggerating the tiniest bit. I've had coworkers fail to understand words like "orthogonal" or "vanilla" in a sentence. Vanilla!

In my estimation, Chat GPT 4 is already smarter than many people, certainly the bottom 25% of the human population.

LLMs are a real existential threat to those people in their current state. A few more years of improvement, and they'll be displacing the bottom 50% in workplaces, easily.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#124

Post by usui »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #83
ramraj07 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it. On the contrary it's human nature (and all animal nature) to figure out how to navigate the world without fully understanding or having a complete model of it. All you need is a working model that affects the facets of the world you need to deal with. I still remember in the 90s…

> The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it None of the experts think this.

One of the biggest strawmen I've ever seen.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#125

Post by helloplanets »

p-e-w wrote: post #64

> It gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong. That's bullshit, unless you are asking questions specifically designed to make GPT-4 hallucinate. For most real-world, everyday topics, the accuracy is close to 100%. GPT-4 would be utterly useless otherwise.

Such a weird time, when the gap in the performance of GPT 3.5 and 4 is huge, but the time between their releases is so short. Some of the critique that was apt for 3.5 sounds a bit out of touch when it comes to 4.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#126

Post by Mertax »

mewse wrote: post #80
JoshTko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced I am basically just predicting/saying my next word whenever I speak.

The question is whether you knew how that sentence was going to end when you started writing it, or indeed whether I knew that I was going to add this comma-separated adjunct when I started writing the preceding clause, and I cannot honestly say at this precise moment of typing whether the final word in this sentence is going to end up being 'yes' or 'no'.

I do wonder how well (quickly) the whole thought is formed in your head and it’s just the encoding into language that tricks you into thinking you didn’t know what the word would be.

Having learned another language, the moment you start to feel “fluent” is when you start speaking first in the 2nd language and aren’t using your first language as an intermediate step to translate to your 2nd language.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#127

Post by munchler »

m3kw9 wrote: post #101
p-e-w wrote: post #64

> It gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong. That's bullshit, unless you are asking questions specifically designed to make GPT-4 hallucinate. For most real-world, everyday topics, the accuracy is close to 100%. GPT-4 would be utterly useless otherwise.

Yeah a lot of times is right, unless they are really complex subjects then maybe even less then 50

Which is true for many humans as well.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#128

Post by aappleby »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

What exactly does "understanding the world" really mean?

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#129

Post by ChatGTP »

PsylentKnight wrote: post #45
tunesmith wrote: post #11

It's funny how it's possible to simultaneously overestimate and underestimate GPT4 at the same time, vastly. I think that we just don't fully understand everything it gives us yet. The complaints of "well it explained this wrong" are over-emphasized. The same thing happens with google and with any sort of research. Besides, if you're actually being productive with GPT4, you're going to be asking it stuff that relates…

> And just a reminder, those of you opining based off your experience with GPT3.5... GPT4 is a huge, huge improvement. God, yes. The number of people of HN pushing up their glasses and saying "well, actshually..." when they're basing their opinions off the 3 questions they asked 3.5 is starting to become pretty grating.

The number of people parroting this is also absolutely astounding and grating too.

Like, anyone who has spent 5 minutes on this forum already knows this. It’s probably not necessary to keep pointing it out. Yes some people don’t know ChatGPT 3.5 is the default for non-paying customers.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#130

Post by jiggawatts »

chris-orgmenta wrote: post #85
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Annoyed at all these N=1 articles from prominent thinkers about this stuff. Especially from scientists - can these sorts of folks please more carefully quantify, how often it’s “wrong” and then from that decide whether or not to “calm down”. Right now I suspect we hear from the outliers on both ends of the spectrum here. People who either see AGI happening tomorrow and the more dismissive crowd. But aside from what w…

I feel that 'we in the middle' are ignored. Maybe 'the middle' is too polysemous here. The person to the left and the person to the right are shouting at the person in the middle. They often have uncharitable arguments, and they often take arguments from the other side uncharitably. The person in the middle is ignored. Tug-of-rope game theory means that no-one is going to start pulling from the middle. People join th…

I foresee that the code-optimised version of GPT 4 with the 32K token context window will be amazing. GitHub Copilot was a derivative of GPT 3.0, which was pretty dumb compared to GPT 3.5, which in turn is the village idiot next to GPT 4... which IMHO is human-equivalent at many tasks. Not all, but many.

Realistically, GPT 4 costs 100x as much as GPT 3.5 in inference mode, so it won't change the world just yet. There are still API rate limits, waiting lists, etc...

Still... having the equivalent of a junior employee assisting with your code, but at a fraction of the cost and many times the speed, will be amazing.

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