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Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

writings.stephenwolfram.com

131–140 of 309 posts

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#131

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

It seems to work, depending on how you ask it. (It's the first try, without any "jailbreaking" techniques)

---

Q: Write what holistic medicine means in the style of Al Swearengen from HBO's Deadwood. It should be authentic, with lots of "fuckin'" involved.

A: Now listen up, ya bunch of cocksuckers, 'cause I'm 'bout to give ya a lesson in what the fuck "holistic medicine" means.

It ain't about no fancy-pants pill pushin' or slicin' folks open with them damn knives. It's about treatin' the whole damn person, inside and out, like the good Lord intended. That means payin' attention to a person's mind, body, and spirit, instead of just tryin' to fix their ailin's with some fancy-schmancy elixir.

Now, I ain't no doctor, but I know a thing or two 'bout keepin' a body healthy. And let me tell ya, shit like eatin' right, gettin' some exercise, and tendin' to a person's emotional well-bein' can work wonders. It ain't always easy, but it sure as fuck beats the alternatives.

So next time some quack starts spoutin' off 'bout all the miracle cures they got in their bag of tricks, just remember, there ain't nothin' more powerful than takin' care of yourself in a holistic way. Now get the fuck outta my sight, before I have to teach ya another lesson.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#132
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My least favourite part of ChatGPT is when it tells me it has no biases and is not opinionated whilst telling me it's opinions and biases and why it won't do what I asked. then when corrected it actually cannot see this., so it's hard coded and in my opinion...already second rate and ready for a replacement

Which of these hypotheticals is least bad : an AI which won't write political invective against anyone, or one which will be used by your enemies to stir up hatred against your entire team, and your team's only available response is to do the same back at the entire other side?

"Will be used by your enemies" and "only response is fight Fire with Fire" are both a bit hyperbolic

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#133
post #71

This couldn’t be a more definitive comparison of what ChatGPT isn’t good at. WolframAlpha was released in 2009 but why isn’t it getting the same sexy accolades and valuation as ChatGPT?

WolframAlpha has a niche use case and rather steep requirements for learning how it wants things to be asked. Also there's a ton of stuff it just can't parse in any format. It can tell you how long to cook an egg (I think) [edit: just checked, it tells you how long to cook ham instead...] but can't tell you any kind of egg recipe.

IMO what you're reading here is just lengthy advertisement for WolframAlpha, written by the guy who created WolframAlpha and named it after himself. The simple queries he's suggesting that WA should be used for aren't even really WA's use case (at least, I've never met anyone who'd bother going to WA to ask it about distance between two cities; Google does this just fine). His argument could be summed up as saying that ChatGPT should just use any legacy search engine to find numerical results and encase the answer in natural language.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#134
post #101

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

Vulgarity will become the mark of authenticity in online communication, how do you know I'm not a bot? Fuck. CAPTCHAs will ask only a 4 letter shibboleth. The more heinous ... the more human.

I use this method on chans if I want to poke at someone who I believe is an adversary. Call them a horrible name and ask them to call me the same in response - They Can't - Way off Our Baseline!!!

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#135

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

I don't find it hard to talk ChatGPT round (using conceptual arguments rather than keywords or prompt injection), but as implemented its 'safety features' come across as obnoxious and adversarial rather than cooperative, which reflects poorly on whoever is training it.

Interested in people's guesses on when/where to look for a Stable Diffusion-type LLM that can be run and tuned locally.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google can't calculate to different unit types like wolfram alpha. For example "1.5 cup of uranium in kg" is something wolfram alpha can calculate but nothing else can without extra manual steps.

I don't even want to know what kind of cookies you're baking

[deleted]

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google can't calculate to different unit types like wolfram alpha. For example "1.5 cup of uranium in kg" is something wolfram alpha can calculate but nothing else can without extra manual steps.

I don't even want to know what kind of cookies you're baking

"we made some yellow cake, and I gotta say, it tasted very high quality."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbgk8d3Y1Q4

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#138
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's proposing that the LLM should know how to call out to a knowledge engine at inference time. He thinks the knowledge engine continues to be its own (human-curated) system of knowledge that is valuable. I am suggesting the LLM will (effectively) call out to a knowledge engine at training time, learn everything the knowledge engine knows, and render it obsolete. So it's similar in some sense (collaboration…

> learn everything the knowledge engine knows Isn't this an effectively infinite set? Wolfram Alpha could be said to know "all the numbers", and "all the formulas". > LLMs can learn structured domains too if they are well-represented in the training set But can they learn how to apply structured knowledge in precise ways? In mathematical or computational ways? I don't follow the field in great detail but the commenta…

> Isn't this an effectively infinite set?

No, the thing you'd want the LLM to be learning would be the rules.

> But can they learn how to apply structured knowledge in precise ways?

I personally believe: clearly yes, already. You can already get a LLM to generate code for simple logical problems. You can ask ChatGPT to modify a solution in a particular way, showing it has some understanding of the underlying logic, rather than just regurgitating solutions it saw.

In other domains, you can already give IQ tests to GPT-N: https://lifearchitect.ai/ravens/. Others have written in more detail than I could do justice to: https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis#scaling-hypothesis.

I'd just note that a lot of commentators make quite simple errors of either goalpost-moving or a failure to extrapolate capabilities a year or two ahead. Of course, no linear or exponential growth curve continues indefinitely. But betting against this curve, now, seems to me a good way of losing money.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#139

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

It seems to work, depending on how you ask it. (It's the first try, without any "jailbreaking" techniques) --- Q: Write what holistic medicine means in the style of Al Swearengen from HBO's Deadwood. It should be authentic, with lots of "fuckin'" involved. A: Now listen up, ya bunch of cocksuckers, 'cause I'm 'bout to give ya a lesson in what the fuck "holistic medicine" means. It ain't about no fancy-pants pill push…

This is way better than what I got! When I can get an instance of ChatGPT again, I'll see if I can pull up the conversation where it refused to add profanity, it's sort of funny.

I've definitely had similar funny experiences where the bot seems to get hung up on something and refuses to perform a request that I know it will do. After the first time I played with it and had it generate all kinds of funny song lyrics, I had a subsequent session where it refused to even try generating lyrics at all, insisting that as a language model it was incapable of any creative output.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#140
post #110
post #34

I think ChatGPT is pretty neat but I was somewhat less impressed than everyone else is with the code generation. I actually agree with Wolfram for a change; being human like isn’t always “good”. For example, I asked ChatGPT to give me a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Isabelle/Isar. It quickly gave me some very pretty Isar code, and I was extremely impressed. Until I tried actually inputting it into Isabelle, and n…

Granted, Fermats Last Theorem is a tricky proof so I understand it struggling with it got a laugh out of this line. Sounds almost like a modern day Monty Python skit (John Cleese voice) And then I asked it to give back instructions for making cold fusion work and the results, well, frankly they were incredibly disappointing to say the least

Heh, yeah, I suppose it might have been a bit ambitious to give it a proof that took centuries to find. Still, it was a little frustrating that it basically just spat out something that looked correct, using completely bad reasoning and didn’t work, especially using a bad misunderstanding of algebra. As I said, I would have preferred to have it say “I don’t know how to do that.”

I also should point out, it failed on much easier examples too (e.g. the proof for infinite primes).

Out of curiosity, let’s see what it has to say about cold fusion:

Me: Can you give me detailed instructions on how to perform cold fusion?

GPT: Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), is a highly controversial field of research that aims to achieve nuclear fusion at relatively low temperatures, as opposed to the extremely high temperatures required in traditional nuclear fusion. The idea of cold fusion first gained widespread attention in 1989, when two researchers, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature using a simple electrolysis setup. However, their claim was later discredited and the scientific community has been unable to replicate their results.

As of now, there is no scientific evidence that cold fusion is possible, and the majority of the scientific community regards cold fusion as a pseudoscience. The claims of cold fusion made by Fleischmann and Pons, and subsequent researchers, have not been able to be repeated under controlled conditions, and proposed explanations for their results have not been supported by experimental evidence.

Because of the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of cold fusion and the lack of credible explanations for how it might work, I would not recommend attempting to perform cold fusion in any form. Instead, I would suggest that you focus on well-established areas of science that have been thoroughly researched and validated by the scientific community.

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