What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#251

Post by goatlover » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:34 AM UTC

bottlepalm wrote: post #110

goatlover wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree when it comes to anything in the real world how we experience things.

What do you mean? Your brain takes in very raw input from air pressure, two eye cameras, chemical sensors, etc.. and reduces that input into a coherent singular experience.. same with reading words, you just 'understand' it, after being trained for many years by your parents and consuming vast amounts of input from your surroundings.

You mean my body interacts with the environment as an organism, so I know what trees and cars and human interaction is, unlike an LLM. Your sensory organs are part of your nervous system. You're not just a brain inside a meat suit.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#252

Post by kilgnad » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:35 AM UTC

vore wrote: post #174

kilgnad wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no rule that implies the explicit design dominates the emergent effect. Evolutionary biology strives to make us logical creatures to fulfill the singular goal of passing on genetic material. Your sentience and your humanity is a side effect of this singular goal. So what dominates the description of who YOU are? Human or vessel for genetic material? I'll say that YOU are human and therefore more then just a…

They really aren't more than just statistical word generators because we can and do build what are exactly statistical word generators and get the behavior of ChatGPT (because that is what ChatGPT is). For what it's worth, this isn't a knock on ChatGPT, but more just how amazing how far you can get with straightforward concepts.

Except the paper in the OPs comment literally talks about how these LLM's are building actual models of the real world. Literally. The root parent post links a research paper that categorically falsifies your statement.

No need to be worried about knocking chatGPT. I have no pride invested in the thing. But I do think that people who view it solely as statistical word generators are biased.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#253

Post by bigDinosaur » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:35 AM UTC

rhaway84773 wrote: post #80

codeulike wrote: post #32

Wow this is 19,000 words. I like his summary at the end: At some level it’s a great example of the fundamental scientific fact that large numbers of simple computational elements can do remarkable and unexpected things. And this: ... But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of th…

I think not very far in the future we are gonna look at the belief that there is something extraordinary about human thought the way we think about geocentrism. That we privileged the human brain simply because it’s ours, because I suspect human thought will end up being not much more than something like a pattern matching mechanism.

There does seem to be something particularly cool about consciousness/qualia. I of course can't qualify that meaningfully beyond just finding it kind of awesome.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#254

Post by jeremyjh » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:35 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #232

jeremyjh wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok that actually sounds hugely useful. It makes sense for very well known APIs it will get them quite accurately.

I wonder how well it would work if you seeded it with the inputs and outputs of custom APIs and then tell it to write code based on your API.

Well I'd hope that is what is going on in Copilot. It definitely does seem to be trained on my code to some extent, but it doesn't have anything I'd call a semantic understanding of it.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#255

Post by galaxyLogic » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:36 AM UTC

spion wrote: post #15

The answer to this is: "we don't really know as its a very complex function automatically discovered by means of slow gradient descent, and we're still finding out" Here are some of the fun things we've found out so far: - 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" (…

We don't know. Maybe we should ask the GPT.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#256

Post by bigDinosaur » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:37 AM UTC

G_z9 wrote: post #249

osswid wrote: post #77

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play" Minsky shut his eyes, "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." A…

This allegory has haunted me for ten years. I always see it posted here and invariably the poster doesn’t elaborate or explain at all. Im pretty sure the people who post this just do it to look smart. I can’t find an explanation anywhere on the web. I asked chatgtp what it means and it said this: This allegory, often referred to as an "AI koan," is a story that conveys a deeper meaning about the nature of artificial…

I can't speak to the technical details but my basic interpretation was the opposite of what ChatGPT just said - no real-world agent ever approaches a problem with zero preconceptions. That's simply not how learning works for humans. Presumably AI models also have 'preconceptions' at least in how they are designed.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#257

Post by kilgnad » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:37 AM UTC

grugagag wrote: post #175

kilgnad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not? It's also a view that misses the point that you are a molecular intelligence made of DNA that continually mutates and reconstructs it's physical form with generational copies to increase fitness in an ever changing environment. But that viewpoint also misses the point that you're a human with w…

> Because of fear. Because of bias. Care to expand a bit more on what you think those fears may be? Or that bias?

I think it's obvious. ChatGPT could be a precursor to a future AI that is more intelligent then humans. I don't think this means skynet apocalypse. I think this means most people will be out of a job.

A lot of people on HN take a lot of pride in thinking they have some sort of superior programming skills that places them on the top end of the programming spectrum. ChatGPT represents the possibility that they can be beaten easily. That their skills are entirely useless and generic in a world dominated by AI programmers.

It truly is a realistic possibility that AI can take over programming jobs in the future, no one can deny this. Does one plan for that future? Or do they live in denial? Most people choose to live in denial, because that AI inflection point happened so quickly that we can't adapt to the paradigm shift.

The human brain would rather shape logic and reality to fit an existing habit and lifestyle rather then acknowledge the cold hard truth. We saw it with global warming and oil execs and we're seeing it with programmers and AI.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#258

Post by Salgat » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:38 AM UTC

space_fountain wrote: post #242

lelanthran wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For now. Give it a truly persistent memory and 100x the size of the dataset I think most people would change their tune. Why does it need 100x the dataset? Sentient creatures, including humans, manage to figure stuff out from as little as a single datapoint . For a human to differentiate between a cat and a dog takes, maybe, two examples of each, not a few million pictures. An adult human who sees a hotdog for the…

There are fascinating studies from people who have been blind through childhood and have their vision restored late enough that we can talk to them. For example ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28533387/ ). In particular it takes several months for these previously blind children to learn to distinguish faces from non faces. I recall a pop science article which I can't find the source for now that explained that peo…

I don't think you understand the scope of training data required for these models. We're talking thousands of lifetimes worth of reading for ChatGPT (GPT-3 for example is trained on 45TB of textual data).

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#259

Post by G_z9 » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:39 AM UTC

G_z9 wrote: post #249

osswid wrote: post #77

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play" Minsky shut his eyes, "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." A…

This allegory has haunted me for ten years. I always see it posted here and invariably the poster doesn’t elaborate or explain at all. Im pretty sure the people who post this just do it to look smart. I can’t find an explanation anywhere on the web. I asked chatgtp what it means and it said this: This allegory, often referred to as an "AI koan," is a story that conveys a deeper meaning about the nature of artificial…

Maybe Marvin is saying that there might be advantageous patterns in the random values, and that the researcher is only selecting for what he can see but not necessarily what exists, since many chess algorithms might just look like random noise to a human. So the point of the allegory is that intelligence is much broader algorithmically than what human intuition is able to grasp.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#260

Post by jeremyjh » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 6:40 AM UTC

yCombLinks wrote: post #207

jeremyjh wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it can produce the current results without anything like a brain - which it does - I don't see how knowing that its 100x better at pulling shit out of its ass is going to make the experience better. Yes it will become impossible to tell by talking to it that has no brain; but since we know the path that brought it there included no brains at all, it would be a mistake to think we've realized General AI. Until it a…

Ahh, so being as intelligent as an average intelligence is no longer sufficient to declare it intelligent. Now it must surpass all of our achievements. 99.9% of people will never "create some substantiative achievement".

I said to call it super-intelligent. To demonstrate super-intelligence it would need to demonstrate real creative powers that are beyond us in both scope and direction. That isn't necessary to prove that this is productive work; but I think it is necessary to temper some of the enthusiasm I see in this thread that all but call it a super-intelligence.