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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#151
post #68

As mentioned, much of our discussion is rote parroting. I can usually go into any hackernews thread and roughly know what the top discussions are going to be. It's not surprising that an AI trained on a large portion of the internet would thus look human like. If you really poke at GPT, you begin to realize it's fairly shallow. Human intelligence is like a deep well or pond, where as GPT is a vast but shallow ocean.…

> Making that ocean deeper is not a trivial problem that we can just throw more compute or data at. You can't possibly know that, given that we don't actually understand how LLMs work on a high level. > We've pretty much tapped out that depth with GPT4 GPT-4 is three months old and you're confident that its working principle cannot be extended further? Where do you get that confidence from?

> You can't possibly know that, given that we don't actually understand how LLMs work on a high level.

It's a fair assumption to make however - basically 80/20 rule.

AI research isn't a new thing and I bet you could go back 40/50 years where they thought they were about to have a massive breakthrough to human level intelligence.

> GPT-4 is three months old and you're confident that its working principle cannot be extended further? Where do you get that confidence from?

I'm guessing from actually using it.

GPT4 is super impressive and helpful in a practical way, but having used it myself for a while now I get this feeling also. It feels a bit like "it's been fed everything we have, with all the techniques we have, now what?"

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Not to be rude, but are you paid by OpenAI to say this? The amount of comments here telling people to “upgrade to ChatGPT 4” is absolutely unprecedented. I know it might be good, but people will find value in it and upgrade if they see the need to do so?

I am in no shape, way, or form affiliated with OpenAI or any other AI company.

What I and many others have noticed about the "Are LLMs really smart?" debate is that everyone on the "Nay" side is using 3.5 and everyone on the "Yay" side is using 4.0.

The naming and the versioning implies that GPT 4 is somehow slightly better than 3.5, like not even a "full +1" better, just "+0.5" better. (This goes to show how trivial it is to trick "mere" humans and their primitive meat brains.)

Similarly, all pre-4 LLMs including not just the older ChatGPT variants, but Bard, Vicuna, etc... are all very clearly and obviously sub-par, making glaring mistakes regularly. Hence, people generalise and assume GPT 4 must be more of the same.

For the last few weeks, across many forums, every time someone has said "AIs can't do X" I have put X into ChatGPT 4 and it could do it, with only a very few exceptions.

The unfortunate thing is that there is no free trial for GPT 4, and the version on Bing doesn't seem to be quite the same. (It's probably too restricted by a very long system prompt.)

So no, people won't form their own opinions, at least not yet, because they can't do so without paying for access.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#153

I get why AI people are at pains to say that GPT-* isn’t AI, and that agi is still a long, difficult way off, I do understand that the distinction is important. But ChatGPT has become such a useful tool to help explain a concept or to filter thoughts through I don’t really care if it’s proper AI or just playing pretend. Google search gives me pretty useless results these days, forums are slow and inconsistent to resp…

AGI is just a poorly defined, moving target. Absent the goals constantly shifting, GPT-3 can be viewed as one, GPT-4 even more so. You can ask it questions about almost anything (at a broad level) and get an answer. That's what makes it general and "intelligent"

You can ask the original ELIZA anything and get an answer but that doesn't make it "intelligent" according to any generally accepted definition of AGI.

Regardless of how you define it exactly, AGI means essentially the ability to converse relatively intelligently on any topic. That means an app that tends to spout gibberish when asked a question most humans should be able to answer is, well, not an AGI.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#154

No world model ? A world model is so obvious papers like these are more confirmation than surprise https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11169 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 There a certain sentiment that AGI however you wish to define it won't infact be a "We'll know it when we see it" situation but rather a "AGI will arrive long before consensus reaches its AGI". LLMs have made me believe this will 100% be the case, either…

To do a great deal of harm, GPT-X just has to have enough of a world model to be useful for automating tasks like deception and impersonation at a scale humanity has never before experienced.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#155
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true; it was a almost a meme before memes existed, as to say "I saw it on the internet so it must be true!", as a way to teasingly highlight how non-credible it was seen at the time.

"Kilroy was here" was a meme before "meme" was coined. I don't think the phrase "before memes existed" has meaning.

Sure. Maybe better if I qualified it with "as they exist as we know them today"

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#157
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…

> One way to resolve this surprise is to find some reason to believe these strange abilities are fundamentally not an understanding of the world.

An easy way to test this is to ask questions and followup-questions that actually require understanding, and compare this to the answers. I recommend to try that.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#158

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.

Is Chomsky an expert? Try reading his infuriatingly tone-deaf NYTimes editorial.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#159
post #38
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…

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

I believe this view of humans is because we work in increasingly deterministic environments (the internet) using predictable methods of communication, text.

We’ve kind of made the world a bit boring and deterministic, places where almost perfect is knowledge is obtainable and so everything feels more and more predictable.

Your day probably consists of using Google, talking on platforms that don’t change much, solving already solved coding problems and communicating with others about office politics problems that we’ve all spoke about over and over again. We literally are just chatbots in this world.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time when people find a maths problem that they can trick the model into getting wrong, it's also possible to get the model to give the correct answer with better prompting. A trick that's worth knowing is just to ask the model to give each step in the solution and explain as it goes. This gives the model "time to think" and leads to better results.

Pretty sure you can't get GPT-4 to do 8 digit multiplication with any prompt. For what it's worth, I'm not even sure if chain of thought provides much value to GPT-4. The RLHF it went through seems to have encouraged more logical thinking already.

Now you have me wondering if you could prompt it to solve it step by step, using the same method an elementary student would do on paper.
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