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GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

lukebechtel.com

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Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#241

Post by HervalFreire »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #109
HervalFreire wrote: post #11

quotation from the link: "LLMs in the GPT family have read every programming language in the world, billions of times. It's been known for some time that these agents can write small snippets of code with some limited success. However, to my knowledge, none of these agents have ever been asked to make their own programming language. This type of task is a bit more complex, and requires a bit more creativity and fores…

> The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism. It is not that chatGPT is unreliable because chatGPT makes occasional errors. It is that chatGPT is not intelligent because the type of errors chatGPT makes are indicative of the fact that…

>This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism.

And this a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism of the criticism.

The problem here is that yes the occasional errors demonstrate certain flaws in it's understanding of some topic.

The issue is there are many times where it produces completely novel and creative output that could not have existed in the training data and can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given.

Understanding of the world around us is not developed through the lens of a singular model or a singular piece of understanding. We build multiple models of the world and we have varying levels of understanding of each model. It is the same with chatGPT. The remarkable thing about chatGPT understands a huge portion of these models really really well.

Case in point: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/

There's literally no way it could do the above without understanding what you asked it to do. Read to the end. The end demonstrates awareness of self, relative to the context and task it was asked to perform.

Yet people illogically claim that for some other topic because chatGPT failed to correctly model the topic it therefore MUST be flawed in ALL of it's understanding of the world. This claim is not logical.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#242

Post by [deleted] »

yowzadave wrote: post #141

Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were. And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on. Actual…

[deleted]

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#243

Post by vidarh »

testrun wrote: post #230
marviel wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of 1? I think there are definitely some out there that feel almost "singular" in the way you describe, but each time I try to find a non-predecessor item I end up feeling "nope there are still dependencies"

Relativity for instance. New does not exclude dependencies or partial predecessors. New is something that is totally different from before.

Relativity comes from exploring the problem of the incompatibilities of pre-existing theories and experiments. I don't see anything that suggests it requires anything more than synthesis and a stochastic process to explore the gaps and inconsistencies. In terms of timing, they're the culmination of decades of pre-existing work, with e.g. the Lorentz transformations named the same year Einstein published his paper on special relativity.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#244

Post by HervalFreire »

Xeamek wrote: post #125
HervalFreire wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Edit: Also generating next state based on previous state is literally what the model does and is the definition of a Markov chain, Markov chains is a statistical concept and not just a word chain. There's research (as in actual scientific papers) that shows that in LLMs, while the markov chain is the low level representation of what's going on, at a higher macro level there are other structures at play here. Emergen…

Link the papers.

- GPT style language models try to build a model of the world: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382

- GPT style language models end up internally implementing a mini "neural network training algorithm" (gradient descent fine-tuning for given examples): https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#245

Post by ryanjshaw »

tsunamifury wrote: post #161
ryanjshaw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will almost certainly happen, and it will be a terrible mistake - at least in the story I'm working on :) My theory is that AI generated code will probably look and grow organically (the irony!). Humans will set out requirements, the AI will collate these into a series of tests, and it won't care how neat or understandable the code is, provided the tests pass. Basically an extremely diligent junior developer. Th…

The idea that the AI would attack us once it reached that level is like saying humans would attack ants. It would simply be entirely indifferent towards us and mow us over by accident at best. We won’t live in a human centric universe because power will express itself in a new species.

Humans regularly eradicate ants that overstep their bounds, and that's what I see happening with humans and AI.

We will be allowed to do our thing - provided we don't get too bold.

There will be some who are content with this arrangement, and some who aren't, and that tension is where I believe a story can be told.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#246

Post by nailer »

yowzadave wrote: post #141

Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were. And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on. Actual…

The thing is most humans also have no taste. New programming languages are regularly released with noisy syntax by actual people.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#247

Post by bsaul »

pythonvisa wrote: post #84

This stuff makes me sick to my stomach. I hate this future. How can I continue my career when it is for progressing this monstrosity, watching it claw in another component of my humanity piece by piece? All I want to do is stroke oil paintings, hand written notes, products of the heart and the ernest mind. I feel dread that my life is over. These headlines are killing me inside. I wish I could more easily discriminat…

we ( the software industry ) have spent the last 60 years intruding in other people's job and automating most of their task using computers. Under the saying "it will remove the most boring parts of your activity, and let you focus on where you really make a difference "

i guess it's time to taste a bit of our own medecine.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#248

Post by HervalFreire »

Lewton wrote: post #182
HervalFreire wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a human fails at something it's proof that the human doesn't understand anything and that a human is a stochastic parrot? I think your clock analogy doesn't fit. A car with a broken mirror still runs.

The output of GPT is “random” in a sense that output from humans are not. I can ask it logic puzzles and sometimes it’ll get the logic puzzle right by chance, and other times it won’t. I can’t use the times it gets the logic puzzle right, as evidence that it understood the puzzle. All of these blog posts that are popping up suffer from survivor bias, nobody is sharing blog posts of GPTs failures

> I can’t use the times it gets the logic puzzle right, as evidence that it understood the puzzle.

No this is bias from your end. It really depends on the puzzle. You need to give it a puzzle with trillions of possible answers. In this case if it gets a right answer even once the probability is so low for this to happen by chance that it means an aspect of the model understands the concept; While another aspect of the model doesn't understand it.

It's possible for even humans to have contradictory thinking and desires.

Therefore a claim cannot be made that it understands nothing.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#249

Post by Jensson »

UncleEntity wrote: post #236
Jensson wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many say "LLMs do nothing of value". Many comments say LLMs aren't useful to them, but I haven't seen many say that LLMs aren't useful at all.

I’ve seen countless comments stating that it is just predicting the next token, move along, nothing to see here.

That is literally what LLMs do though. Those comments try to explain how it works so you better can see how it produced the results you see, they aren't trying to say that the program is worthless just that it isn't the magic some people think it is.

These models are trained to produce text snippets that look like text snippets it has seen before, and it has seen all internet. That means it can do a lot of impressive things, but also that it is very dumb in other ways.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#250

Post by dunefox »

UncleEntity wrote: post #234
amoss wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting part of the exchange is the contrast between the surface level syntax of the exchange and the semantics below. It reminds me of teaching in a lot of ways. The level of polish on the immediately apparent surface level of the conversation is very high: reasonable tenents, good justification and ability to explain them. But then applying them directly into an example falls down a bit. The language is a b…

> I like the use of the arrows in the function definitions though :) I've seen that somewhere before… Python type hints probably. I (ab)used them for good effect when I was fiddling around with the spark earley parser that used to be part of the python build system.

Also haskell signatures, for example.
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