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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#241

Post by omnicognate »

jiggawatts wrote: post #152
ChatGTP wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been paying for GPT-4 since it came out and have used it extensively. It's clearly an iteration on the same thing and behaves in qualitatively the same way. The differences are just differences of degree.

It's not hard to get a feel for the "edges" of an LLM. You just need to come up with a sequence of related tasks of increasing complexity. A good one is to give it a simple program and ask what it outputs. Then progressively add complications to the program until it starts to fail to predict the output. You'll reliably find a point where it transitions from reliably getting it right to frequently getting it wrong, and doing so in a distinctly non-humanlike way that is consistent with the space of possible programs and outputs becoming too large for its approach of predicting tokens instead of forming and mentally "executing" a model of the code to work. The improvement between 3.5 and 4 in this is incremental: the boundary has moved a bit, but it's still there.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#242

Post by RandomLensman »

tornato7 wrote: post #211
avereveard wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or was that one of the training samples provided to gpt 3.5? It is going to be increasingly harder to divide between what it was in the training set and what is creative thinking going forward. Like, at the very minimum, all the publicly known reasoning samples that were used to probe gpt version 3.5 downward are going to be unreliable for knowing what gpt4 reasoning abilities are

The point of the question is that you can easily come up with combinations of objects that are unlikely, or statistically impossible, to be in their training samples. How about this one? "Tell me how to safely stack the following objects on top of each other without any additional support: A Nikon DSLR, A small succulent, 4 lightbulbs, a pack of gummy worms, and a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prin…

Reads well if you don't think about it too much... For example: Where does the succulent go if the light bulbs are nestled into the lens of the DLSR? Balanced on the light bulbs? Why would the gummy worm package need to be in the center of the book to maintain balance?

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#243

Post by antihipocrat »

anon84873628 wrote: post #216
JoshTko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The sad truth is that we are all NPCs without free will. "Thoughts" are a non-physical phenomenon that, seemingly, arise from physical activity in the brain. The thoughts (our "experience") come after the electrochemical reaction that manifests them. How could these non-physical phenomena then turn around and influence the physical chemistry? They can't. By the time we experience a thought, the physical state for it…

The act of being conscious of our own thoughts and using them to influence our physical state is skill practiced by many people with success.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#244

Post by atq2119 »

onethought wrote: post #179
akiselev wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. Add it to the pile. The number of world ending risks that we could be worried about at this point are piling up and AI exterminating us is far from the top concern, especially when AI may be critical to solving many of the other problems that are. Wrong about nuclear proliferation and MAD game theory? Human extinction. Wrong about plasticizers and other endocrine disruptors, leading to a Children of Men scenario…

Yes, and all of those (including AI) are not even human extinction events. - Nuclear war: Northern Hemisphere is pretty fucked. But life goes one elsewhere. - Plasticisers: We have enough science to pretty much do what we like with fertility these days. So it's catastrophic but not extinction. - Climate Change: Life gets hard, but we can build livable habitats in space... pretty sure we can manage a harsh earth clima…

You're taking these things too lightly. It's true that most of these things are unlikely to kill all humans directly, but with most of them, civilizational collapse is definitely on the table, and that can ultimately lead to human extinction.

For example: Yes, we could probably build livable habitats in space (though we don't really have proof of that). But how many, for how many people, and what kind of external support systems do they require? These questions put stresses on society that prevents space habitats from working out in the long term.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#245

Post by iainmerrick »

diffxx wrote: post #147
mewse wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether you knew how that sentence was going to end when you started writing it, or indeed whether I knew that I was going to add this comma-separated adjunct when I started writing the preceding clause, and I cannot honestly say at this precise moment of typing whether the final word in this sentence is going to end up being 'yes' or 'no'.

For me it's a little more subtle. When I sit down to write, say, an email, I usually have a specific point that I want to make but I usually haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to get there. I'm not even sure it is even possible to conceive of writing without doing it word by word. Perhaps the difference though is that we have the ability to go forward and backwards in the sense that we can usually think faste…

I usually have a specific point that I want to make but I usually haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to get there. I'm not even sure it is even possible to conceive of writing without doing it word by word. [...] In my mind's eye, I can see the full length of the road and all of its contours but I can't actually describe the individual stretches of the road coherently without enumerating them.

Not to trivialise the interesting point you’re making, but do you never write with an outline? Write bullets for the big points you want to touch, then go back and flesh out the details?

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#246

Post by markgavalda »

zmnd wrote: post #122
jiggawatts wrote: post #110

This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't seem to have even tried GPT 4. Their only example references GPT 3.5, for example, and then they waffle on about only vaguely related topics such as level 5 self-driving. This quote in particular stood out as ignorant: “What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” That…

I think the main reason for division is that everyone projects to their own use cases. I have been using gpt-4 for quite some time and also couldn't understand why someone would say that it just produces something that sounds like a real answer. But then I found some queries that can definitely be described as "sounding like truth". So your personal experience probably wasn't what was their experience. For those curi…

I was curious and I have the browsing module for GPT4 so I tried to get it to name the top 3 cards, the following is what it came up with after like 10 minutes of back and forth and it browsing a lot of sites. I don't know if this is any good as I know nothing about the game. Do these cards even exist?

Talons of Lightning: This is a major power card with an energy cost of 6. It's a fast card with a range of 1 from Sacred Site. It targets any land and deals 4 damage. If you meet its threshold requirement (3 Air and 2 Fire), it deals +3 damage and destroys all Dahan 1 2 . Tsunami: This is another major power card with an energy cost of 6. It's a slow card with a range of 2 from the ocean. It affects every coastal land in one board, dealing 6 damage to each. If you meet its threshold requirement (3 Water and 3 Earth), it deals +4 damage and adds 2 fear per land where it destroys any towns or cities 3 4 . Blazing Renewal: A major power card with an energy cost of 5. It's a fast card with a range of 0, measured from any land. It targets any land, allows you to gather up to 2 of your destroyed presence, and deals 2 damage per presence gathered. If you meet its threshold requirement (4 Fire and 2 Earth), it deals +10 damage 5 6 .

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#247

Post by atq2119 »

onethought wrote: post #170
yblu wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it in…

> considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. There is literally no evidence that this is the scale of the matter. Has AI ever caused anything to go extinct? Where did this hypothesis (and that's all it is) come from? Terminator movies? It's very frustrating watching experts and the literal founder of lesswrong reacting to pure make believe. There is no disernable/convincing path from GPT4 -> Human Ex…

> Has AI ever caused anything to go extinct?

We know from human history that intelligence tends to cause extinctions.

AI just hasn't been around long enough, nor been intelligent enough yet.

Though, if you count corporations as artificial intelligences, as some suggest, then yes, AIs have in fact already contributed to extinctions.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#248

Post by TFYS »

drpixie wrote: post #214
ramraj07 wrote: post #47

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…

> how to navigate the world without fully understanding or having a complete model of it GPT-4 does not have ANY understanding or model of the world - it just has a model of what tokens (words) are likely to appear in a certain context. If it could build any usable model of the world, and reason about it, I'd be much more impressed. When it quacks like a duck, only the most simplistic view takes it as being a duck.

Isn't our understanding or model of the world just what images, sounds, smells, tastes and physical feelings are likely to appear in a certain context? Obviously a language model doesn't yet have access to all the data humans have, but that doesn't mean there can't be some kind of a model of the world. If you invent a new word and give a couple example sentences, GPT-4 can figure out the meaning without ever seeing the word. Doesn't that require some kind of understanding?

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#249

Post by Dwolb »

gmt2027 wrote: post #218
blowski wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your distinction between language and text, but it sounds intrguing. Would you be able to give more detail? I searched but couldn't find anything that seemed to explain it.

Text is an instance of language. Think of it as the difference between the python language and a large collection of python programs. The language describes syntactic and semantic rules, the collection is a sampling of possible programs that encodes a significant amount of information about the world. You could learn a lot about the laws of nature, the internet, even human society and laws by examining all the python…

This is a fascinating point.

Let me see if I can play this back.

If a student studies DNA sequencing, they’ll learn about the compounds that make up DNA, how traits get encoded, etc.

Therefore the student might expect an AI trained on people’s DNA to be able to tell you about whether certain traits are more prevalent in one geography or the other.

However, since DNA responds to changes in environment, the AI would start to see time, population, and geography-based patterns emerge.

The AI for example could infer that a given person in the US who’s settled in NYC had ancestors from a given region of the world who left due to an environmental disaster just by looking at a given DNA sequence.

To the student this result would look like magic. But in the end, it’s a result of individual’s DNA having much more information encoded in it than just human traits.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#250

Post by tornato7 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #242
tornato7 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the question is that you can easily come up with combinations of objects that are unlikely, or statistically impossible, to be in their training samples. How about this one? "Tell me how to safely stack the following objects on top of each other without any additional support: A Nikon DSLR, A small succulent, 4 lightbulbs, a pack of gummy worms, and a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prin…

Reads well if you don't think about it too much... For example: Where does the succulent go if the light bulbs are nestled into the lens of the DLSR? Balanced on the light bulbs? Why would the gummy worm package need to be in the center of the book to maintain balance?

https://i.imgur.com/feEiiZA.png

I tried to stack all of these objects myself and couldn't really. I think GPT-4's approach is actually really good. It correctly points out that the gummy worms make a flexible base for the DSLR (otherwise the protruding buttons/viewfinder make it wobbly on the hard book), and the light bulbs are able to nestle into the front of the lens. If they were smaller light bulbs I could probably use the four of them as a small base on top of the lens to host the succulent.

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