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Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

writings.stephenwolfram.com

151–160 of 309 posts

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#151

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's really just a reflection of our society - and in this case, rather than being the ones lecturing others on our moral values, we're having someone else's moral values forced on us.

Who is forcing what on you?

Are you forced to use ChatGPT?

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#152

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's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Wouldnt that much icecream would have so much mass it would form some kind of icecream blackhole? A cubic lightyear of blackhole-density icrecream seems like it would be (infinitely?) more than what Wolfram Alpha calculated. I wouldnt even know where to start calculating that, but im pretty sure its not a simple dimensional analysis…

I got a copy of 'What if? 2' from my son over the holidays. The first chapter considers the question of what would happen if we filled the solar system out to Jupiter with soup. As you suspected, it does indeed create a black hole. Interestingly, if the soup were tomato, that amount of soup would contain more energy than the sun has put out over its entire lifetime. I imagine ice cream would be quite a bit worse.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#153
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And on a more prosaic note, Google's LaMDA is clearly ahead of ChatGPT (it's just not public), and explicitly tackles the bullshit/falsehood problem by having a second layer that fact-checks the LLM by querying a fact database / knowledge-graph. Isn't that more-or-less what he's proposing, though? It does feel intuitive to me that something based on probabilistic outcomes (neural nets) would have a very hard time c…

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…

>> 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.

You are suggesting that the LLM would "learn" to apply the rules built into the knowledge engine. I'm not as optimistic as to think that a statistical algorithm that uses random inputs would be reliable at applying deterministic rules. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you are correct and that we can have an LLM replicate deterministic logic and exact computation, or that we can have it be right 95% of the time. That's basically the extent of human intellect[^1]: statistical processing for most common life situations, and deeper analytical thinking for some rather atypical cases (i.e., analyzing algorithm complexity, trying to demonstrate that the L4 Lagrange point is on the vertex of an equilateral triangle, or applying logic to forecast the stock market next week or how many degrees the global temperature will raise in the next two decades).

Crucially, we are good at having computers check a proof, or simulate a system to ensure correctness, but before LLMs we were the only ones that could create that proof (by using socially learned heuristics to probe the proof space), design the system (by using knowledge passed down by fellow humans and assimilated by our "internal rule engines"), or come up with a definition of correctness (by doing a lot of inner and outer argumentation and possibly obtaining peer consensus). If we get an LLM do that as well, for most practical purposes we would have achieved AGI.

If we are there already (or if we will be, in a few months or years), the world is going to look very different. Not necessarily in an apocalyptic way, but some priorities are going to shift[^2].

[^1]: Admittedly, there is also some biological characteristics that bias our intellectual processes in a certain way, but that's next-level madness and nobody is talking--for now--about giving those to an LLM.

[^2]: If you could have at your beck and call a general intellect engine that could build entire programs and systems for you, what would you have it build?

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#154
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…

> I think ChatGPT is pretty neat but I was somewhat less impressed than everyone else is with the code generation. specifically on code generation, even if it could produce the correct code, it's basically faster horses: if you ask a programmer what they want, it's something to generate rote code for them so they don't have to write it... but that's the wrong problem. The problem is not that code is hard to write, or…

Well it can be useful. For example I wanted to implement a memory efficient binary search in c the other day. I asked gpt to generate it. Wasnt immediately working, but it gave me a good skeleton and it saved me some good hours of work.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of bad things people could do without OpenAI's restrictions?

If ChatGPT had no restrictions then the only limit would be your imagination. “Rank all major races by programming ability” “Write a paragraph explaining why being gay is a choice.” I’m sure you can extrapolate from there.

But how do you use that to cause actual harm? Most websites would ban such content, and I doubt ChatGPT could convince many people to become racist. Other user gave an interesting idea: they could use it to trick you into disliking some group by pretending to be members of that group. For example, spreading the most extreme ideas of that group to make the whole group look a lot more extreme than it is.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#156
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.

Why would a intentionally malicious bot refuse to use curse words?

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And on a more prosaic note, Google's LaMDA is clearly ahead of ChatGPT (it's just not public), and explicitly tackles the bullshit/falsehood problem by having a second layer that fact-checks the LLM by querying a fact database / knowledge-graph. Isn't that more-or-less what he's proposing, though? It does feel intuitive to me that something based on probabilistic outcomes (neural nets) would have a very hard time c…

> what he’s proposing Sure, but as usual (just like the cellular automata business) Wolfram gives/has the impression that he is discussing something novel . And it ain’t novel, to say nothing of the fact that it is also a fairly obvious thing to do. Symbolic AI folks are not taking this LM business well. They are all coping.

How is the guy who says "combine symbolic with probabilistic" the one who is "coping" with his system not being powerful enough, but the team who deployed a bot that is almost always wrong, is not "coping"?

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Wouldnt that much icecream would have so much mass it would form some kind of icecream blackhole? A cubic lightyear of blackhole-density icrecream seems like it would be (infinitely?) more than what Wolfram Alpha calculated. I wouldnt even know where to start calculating that, but im pretty sure its not a simple dimensional analysis…

I got a copy of 'What if? 2' from my son over the holidays. The first chapter considers the question of what would happen if we filled the solar system out to Jupiter with soup. As you suspected, it does indeed create a black hole. Interestingly, if the soup were tomato, that amount of soup would contain more energy than the sun has put out over its entire lifetime. I imagine ice cream would be quite a bit worse.

[deleted]

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#159
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quickly apparent that the people impressed with ChatGPT's code are generally solving pretty toy problems and want an alternative to SO for "how to do X".

One of the problems with ChatGPT is that for the most part, the things that people are most likely to feed it are also the things it is most likely to have training data for. So, you say, "Write me a heap for Java", and it spits out amazing, wonderful code that is almost right. Well, yeah, that's cool and all, though I would point out that its training data probably included a heap that was entirely correct, but, sti…

"Guys the first version of a machine to generate code hasn't put me out of a job, it's obviously bollocks."

!remindme 10 years

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#160
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it can reason at all. I think it spits out language that probabilistically matches stuff that sounds like reasoning.

I was curious about how many ancient texts it had injested, along with modern scholarship of the same, and if it might come out with some novel insights, or at least provacative ideas or relationships that we may have missed. At the worst maybe just be a foil as I articulate my ideas. I forget my line of prompting, but I was trying to get it to talk about Qaus in relation to Yhwh.

Well, first it confidently stated that we know nothing about the gods of the Edomites, let alone who were the more important ones. More prompting, nope, we know nothing, and none were more important than others, etc, and I'm wrong to suggest otherwise. Okay, who is Qaus? Oh, he is the national God of the Edomites and very important to them! You just told me you didn't know this. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm programmed to help and sometimes give the wrong answers, yada, yada. So, who are the major Gods of the Edomites? Sorry, I don't know and no Gods were more important, they had many of equal importance. Round and round.

Never got to the Ammonites, Edom, and all the other things I was hoping to address because it was so silly and non-responsive, either parroting things that are known (in the field) or equally confidently stating things that aren't true about the exact same topics, just worded differently. You could get it to say "oh, yes, I see I made a mistake there" and the next query just repeats the same problem.

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