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ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#21

Post by siraben »

Interestingly, if you ask it to do the counting one by one it does it correctly. Is this still an artifact of how the tokenization works? If so how does it have the ability to separate the characters out?

  Q: how many letters are in the string djsjcnnrjfkalcr

  A: There are 18 letters in the string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr".

  Q: count them one by one

  A: Sure! Here are the letters in the string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr", counted one by one: [...]

     There are a total of 15 letters.

  Q: did your answers agree?

  A: I apologize if my responses were not helpful. In my previous message, I stated that there are 18 letters in the string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr". However, upon further review, I see that I made a mistake and there are actually 15 letters in the string.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#22

Post by maxbond »

swyx wrote: post #18

this nitpicky luddism is so boring. For 100 years we’ve had machines that can do math Then we made a new kind of machine that can do words and now we’re complaining it can’t do math? Sounds a lot like you are judging a fish by its ability to climb trees.

I think people just want to explore the system & understand what mistakes it makes and why. I don't see anyone in this thread advocating against ChatGPT.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#24

Post by astrange »

salamo wrote: post #10
bambax wrote: post #7

ChatGPT is assertive, authoritative, and even goes on to lie to justify its answers and "be right". It's a gasslighting machine. Here's an example I posted here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33852236

I think Ezra Klein framed it right during his interview of Gary Marcus: > And his point is that what’s different between bullshit and a lie is that a lie knows what the truth is and has had to move in the other direction. He has this great line where he says that people telling the truth and people telling lies are playing the same game but on different teams. But bullshit just has no relationship, really, to the tru…

This isn’t true, though. ChatGPT answers are certainly not always true (like here) but they are correlated with the truth, not “no relationship”.

Gary Marcus is basically an anti-AI crank who only ever says bad things about modern research and wants to go back to the old “expert systems” that didn’t work. Ezra Klein is, well, too invested in his Ezra Klein persona (a sort of extremely nice, slow speaking, therapeutic Mr. Rogers for people who read opinion columnists) to have time left to combat guest bias.

In this case the AI is unable to count letters because we humans don’t let it learn what letters are, as we trapped it in a computer and only let it experience byte-pair encoding tokens.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#25

Post by nullandvoid »

swyx wrote: post #18

this nitpicky luddism is so boring. For 100 years we’ve had machines that can do math Then we made a new kind of machine that can do words and now we’re complaining it can’t do math? Sounds a lot like you are judging a fish by its ability to climb trees.

I think you're missing the point, that words encapsulate some elements of math. If the machine that "does words" can't actually reason about them (how many words am I speaking) then it's of interest, at-least to me.

People will always nitpick until we have perfection, just as we did (and still do) with math machines.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#26

Post by benj111 »

ErrantX wrote: post #14

Yeh so this and other examples for me demonstrate that ChatGPT has no logic per se. These examples demonstrate that it is not analysing your question and calculating the answer, instead it is approximating and answer based on a corpus of questions. So in essence it doesn't actually yet understand what you are asking it. I'd be intrigued to see some kind of amalgamation of an AI tool like ChatGPT with a logic tool (sa…

>would combat a lot of the ways folks have found to break this.

Isn't it more that chatgpt is broken, and users are pointing it out

I suppose it depends what chatgpt is for, but I assume the end goal isn't just 'chat' (god I hope not) so it does actually need to reliably know correct answers or say when it doesn't. BSing is the worst option.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#27

Post by KirillPanov »

bambax wrote: post #7

ChatGPT is assertive, authoritative, and even goes on to lie to justify its answers and "be right". It's a gasslighting machine. Here's an example I posted here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33852236

Like most children, it reflects the ethics of its parents^H^H^Htrainers.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#28

Post by tialaramex »

salamo wrote: post #10
bambax wrote: post #7

ChatGPT is assertive, authoritative, and even goes on to lie to justify its answers and "be right". It's a gasslighting machine. Here's an example I posted here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33852236

I think Ezra Klein framed it right during his interview of Gary Marcus: > And his point is that what’s different between bullshit and a lie is that a lie knows what the truth is and has had to move in the other direction. He has this great line where he says that people telling the truth and people telling lies are playing the same game but on different teams. But bullshit just has no relationship, really, to the tru…

Yes, ChatGPT is even more the essence of a bullshitter than Donald Trump was. Back when they were both leaders I would say that the crucial difference between Trump and Boris (Johnson, the UK Prime Minister at the end of Trump's period in office) was that Boris is a liar whereas Trump is a bullshitter, and for humans I think they were pretty poles apart in this respect. But ChatGPT is not burdened with the pragmatic knowledge of its immediate world that constrains even Donald Trump. When Trump denies something you can both see for yourselves is true, that's not bullshit, it's just lying. When ChatGPT says this fifteen letter "word" has sixteen letters it honestly has no idea that's not true.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#29

Post by walrus01 »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #19

I can't help but notice some similarities between GPT and fully self driving vehicles. Both technologies have come a long way and are quite impressive, but not quite there to actually be able to replace humans, and getting the last 10% of edge cases to work seems to require a monumental effort still.

Recently saw a Twitter post from someone whose "full self driving" beta Tesla wants to do 35 mph in the parking lot of their child's daycare facility. These things need a lot more work.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#30

Post by iLoveOncall »

gadtfly wrote: post #20

This is an artifact of an implementation-specific trick that trades performance at character-level tasks for performance at everything else. It does not reflect anything inherent about this type of model's capabilities: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes GPT-3 does not see individual characters. It sees "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" chunked as [d, js, jc, nn, r, j, f, k, al, cr]. You can see for yourself here: https://beta.openai.…

So how come the answer is 18 instead of 10 then?
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