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ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

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Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#131
post #19
post #3

ChatGPT can't access the external internet. The example ChatGPT instruction where they "teach it" just has the user giving it a URL to their docs and ChatGPT is like "oh ok got it" (Figure 3). I'm not sure if the blog post writers are aware it's hallucinating what the JSON implementation is and hasn't actually read the documentation at all.

There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect. ChatGPT is essentially that but on steroids. Its primary ability is being able to sound extremel…

> common on Reddit and other such forums

It's especially common on Hacker News.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are always made unnecessary. The smart ones then find other ways in which they are. Not sure how this is any different.

What we are discussing is something that removes the need for problem solving. What will the supposed smart do if there’s a magical machine that can solve all problems that can be represented as text?

That sounds like a problem, so they ask this magical wonder machine to solve it. It will write pro-UBI statements that instantly convince politicians that maybe those who profited the most from magical wonder machine can now afford to pay more than zero taxes.

After that, it's dolce vita and stargazing until they die.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you need to prompt it with more specific knowledge; if you're generic in your prompts it will be generic in its responses. inject some field-specific terminology and be esoteric in your queries, etc its latent representation is vast, I find you can get much higher quality+interesting responses if the prompts are tuned appropriately

Here’s the thing though, when you keep having to “prompt it”, are you really doing the work yourself by coaxing a good enough bullshit answer that you’ll believe it? It could still be useful, not sure.

A minimum sort of knowledge of the field would be helpful.

But I feel that if one is inquisitive enough, they'd know when exploring a topic to ask broad questions of the sort:

- what are the common types of problems encountered in X field

- what are the main roles and responsibilities of personnel in X field

- list some open questions in the field of X

After these open-ended questions one can dive into each of them with:

- what are some common solutions to X, compare and contrast X vs Y

The risk of seeing hallucinated info is always there, but just for an example when I was exploring the types of space-time metrics and asking chatgpt which tensors are most suited for which scenario (and also which coordinates are best for which scenario, such as moving from Schwarzchild to Eddington Finkelstein coordinates to deal with the event horizons near black holes), their individual wiki pages said generally the same things.

I was able to ask ChatGPT in very naïve "idk please explain like im 5" ways and it was able to very patiently rephrase dense jargon into surprisingly understandable explanations.

I'm sure if an expert in GR were to drill down deeper into the details they will find inaccuracies in ChatGPT's responses, but for the inquisitive information sponge user, a dive through ChatGPT to get a general feel of a topic is insanely useful. After that, one could dive into the appropriate books/papers/primary sources to start the real learning once they find what they're interested in.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#134
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect. ChatGPT is essentially that but on steroids. Its primary ability is being able to sound extremel…

That's almost every reddit thread I've been involved in. Oratory prowess is way more important than accuracy. If you ever want to "lose a debate" on reddit, pick something that's counter-intuitive or widely misunderstood and use nuance and citations in your defense. You'll get cyberbullied every time - sometimes even banned from the sub.

I post on both Reddit and YC News regularly, and it is fascinating to see the differences in biases, counter-arguments, or outright rejections of reality.

YC News people generally seem to prefer to hear the truth, especially from sources that appear knowledgeable. I've had people here comment in reply to me saying I've "changed their mind". That never happens on Reddit.

Reddit has cliques, quasi-religions, and fads. Anything contrary to the group-think is mercilessly voted down. Intelligent, thought-out counter arguments that aren't entertaining are especially likely to garner lots of downvotes. Not only do the readers feel "personally attacked" by contrary opinions, there is also that ever present undercurrent of anti-intellectualism of typical Americans that makes intelligent discourse distasteful to them.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#136
post #3

ChatGPT can't access the external internet. The example ChatGPT instruction where they "teach it" just has the user giving it a URL to their docs and ChatGPT is like "oh ok got it" (Figure 3). I'm not sure if the blog post writers are aware it's hallucinating what the JSON implementation is and hasn't actually read the documentation at all.

Jokes on you. The entire blog post you just read, ChatGPT. There never was a database.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#137
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect. ChatGPT is essentially that but on steroids. Its primary ability is being able to sound extremel…

I think a lot of overly-eager and under-informed people are jumping on the bandwagon and shouting half-baked proclamations from the rooftops to get clicks and views. But underneath all the bullshit is something truly useful, so I wouldn't necessarily say that Confidently Incorrect™ is ChatGPT's primary ability. Coincidentally, over the past few weeks of this ChatGPT craze, I've needed to create a lot of fake data to…

Like said somewhere on the internet, we don't need AI to create art, we need AI to do the dishes and free our time to create art.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#138
post #19
post #3

ChatGPT can't access the external internet. The example ChatGPT instruction where they "teach it" just has the user giving it a URL to their docs and ChatGPT is like "oh ok got it" (Figure 3). I'm not sure if the blog post writers are aware it's hallucinating what the JSON implementation is and hasn't actually read the documentation at all.

There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect. ChatGPT is essentially that but on steroids. Its primary ability is being able to sound extremel…

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect but at scale. I find this all the time when reading the NYT, or Washington Post, or whatever, about something I'm intimately familiar with. ChatGPT just does this as a sort of carnival trick, and people seem to think it's funny for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

>Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been quizzing ChatGPT about it’s knowledge of the oil industry - it has no idea what’s talking about. For example, I ask it to simulate a discussion between a flow engineer and a geologist, and it doesn’t seem to understand they work together regularly. Not like there’a a stack overflow for this sort of thing.

you need to prompt it with more specific knowledge; if you're generic in your prompts it will be generic in its responses. inject some field-specific terminology and be esoteric in your queries, etc its latent representation is vast, I find you can get much higher quality+interesting responses if the prompts are tuned appropriately

This is at best going to slightly improve the output. I asked about something hyper specific and also extremely trivial: transit wayfinding type queries specific to the NYC subway. All the semantics are services and stations. A service is nothing more than a list of stations it stops at and a station is nothing more than a list of services which stop at it. Eg if I tell it "I'm on the F, how do I get to Time Sq", it should cross reference the service/station lists, find the commonality, and tell me "switch to the A at W 4th".

No context about anything in the outside world or even about the physical nature and purpose of commuting is needed to comprehend and answer these questions. There is no external context or sophisticated logic beyond just matching those sorts of lists to each other. Its a wholly closed system of highly standardized tokens.

I ask it what stops the F and A have in common. 125th St is on the list. I know that's wrong. I ask it to list all the services that go to 125th. The F is not on the list (correctly so). I point out the inconsistency between the two outputs. It says sorry and does nothing. I tell it to remake the list of stops the F and A have in common. It is now missing a few stations from before, and has added new incorrect results.

This is just a snippet. I went in circles with it for probably an hour playing wack a mole with its inability to correctly recall more than 10 true details in a row. These were not obtuse, esoteric, or even logically complicated queries. Nor was it ambiguous stuff open to interpretation. Nor was it even something that you'd need a real meatspace body to comprehend, like the feeling of the sun on a summer day. This should have been a language models bread and butter.

Re: ChatGPT is now finding bugs in databases

#140
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect. ChatGPT is essentially that but on steroids. Its primary ability is being able to sound extremel…

I think a lot of overly-eager and under-informed people are jumping on the bandwagon and shouting half-baked proclamations from the rooftops to get clicks and views. But underneath all the bullshit is something truly useful, so I wouldn't necessarily say that Confidently Incorrect™ is ChatGPT's primary ability. Coincidentally, over the past few weeks of this ChatGPT craze, I've needed to create a lot of fake data to…

Just imagine how many little code snippets you used (at least I did) to make my life easier and faster

A script which parses jaon for a specific key or transforming a table from y to z.

Now everyone has this available to them.

It's great already!

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