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Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

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Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#31

Post by MauranKilom »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #28
aeternum wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans also think about words in terms of subcomponents, languages make heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for example.

This is not the same.. The masks are randomized and lossy. Although yes there is potential for a transformer specially trained to segment prefixes/affixes/suffixes, it might augment some of its encoding abilities, see e.g spanbert for a related example of opportunity.

What do you mean with "lossy"? What information is being lost? Or do you just mean that there isn't necessarily a unique way to encode a given string?

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#32

Post by tiborsaas »

a65cec93b wrote: post #23

> GPT-3 correctly reverses long words! But to get there, we had to teach GPT-3 the algorithm to use to get around its limitations. Has GPT-3 really been "taught" anything here? If you don't provide an explicit example as the context of your input, GPT-3 does not retain the ability to reverse words.

I'm not sure how you define teaching, but for me getting shown an example and then repeating it successfully with another input does mean teaching/learning. I know the model doesn't update though, let's not focus on that now.

If anthropomorphizing bothers you, then we could just use "prompting", but I feel teaching is a good enough approximation here.

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#33

Post by f38zf5vdt »

tiborsaas wrote: post #32
a65cec93b wrote: post #23

> GPT-3 correctly reverses long words! But to get there, we had to teach GPT-3 the algorithm to use to get around its limitations. Has GPT-3 really been "taught" anything here? If you don't provide an explicit example as the context of your input, GPT-3 does not retain the ability to reverse words.

I'm not sure how you define teaching, but for me getting shown an example and then repeating it successfully with another input does mean teaching/learning. I know the model doesn't update though, let's not focus on that now. If anthropomorphizing bothers you, then we could just use "prompting", but I feel teaching is a good enough approximation here.

It's repeating based on what the trained model has given it about situations where instructions possibly similar to the instructions given are specified and which were about reversing strings in general.

If the author messed with temperature and retried their failing prompt enough times, or simply reworded it a little differently, they might also get the correct answer.

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#34

Post by f38zf5vdt »

yunyu wrote: post #29
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't taught anything. GPT3 text generation is effectively a really fancy autocompletion algorithm based on the n-many previous tokens in a rolling window. You can only "teach" GPT3 something within that window, and it doesn't "learn" there, it just tries its best to generate content based on what is stored in its massive n-dimension table of graph edges for tokens. That is also why it has such a strong propen…

You can update the "graph edges" with content longer than the window by fine tuning: https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning

Yes, training the model is where it learns, not in prompts. Prompting might be considered meta-learning but it will always need a reference point given to it from its training data, and beyond the prompt the original model is never altered.

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#35

Post by jameshart »

mberning wrote: post #16
swid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant it mostly as a joke, but there is a certain amount of irony to it. This goes way beyond prompt engineering - he wrote an algorithm to run on GPT in a way you would not expect a non-programmer to write. I think the idea is cool and the process to write it was revealing.

Right. What non-programmer is going to think to turn a word into character list with positional metadata sprinkled in.

It’s actually weirdly similar to the kind of tricks people use for mental feats like memorizing the order of a complete deck of cards or repeating back a long list of words in reverse order.

When you think about every mental task GPT3 is being asked to do as being something it is being asked to perform immediately and without having prepared and as fast as possible this makes a lot more sense.

Like, a reasonable human response to “quick! What’s encyclopedia backwards?!” Would be more like

“Er.. right. A. I. D. E. O? Oh wait is it one of those OE ligature things? P. A. No, O. P. Hang on did I already say P?”

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#36

Post by jxy »

a65cec93b wrote: post #23

> GPT-3 correctly reverses long words! But to get there, we had to teach GPT-3 the algorithm to use to get around its limitations. Has GPT-3 really been "taught" anything here? If you don't provide an explicit example as the context of your input, GPT-3 does not retain the ability to reverse words.

That's easy to solve. Prepare all K-12 text books as prompts, and train another GPT-N to go from input to those prompts, then feed these prompts to the current GPT-3.

Can we get a GPT-N-3 this way to do SAT?

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#37

Post by skybrian »

a65cec93b wrote: post #23

> GPT-3 correctly reverses long words! But to get there, we had to teach GPT-3 the algorithm to use to get around its limitations. Has GPT-3 really been "taught" anything here? If you don't provide an explicit example as the context of your input, GPT-3 does not retain the ability to reverse words.

You're right for GPT 3, but it's an example of chain of thought reasoning, which seems to be a new area of research [1] and might get integrated into newer versions:

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#38

Post by npew »

a65cec93b wrote: post #23

> GPT-3 correctly reverses long words! But to get there, we had to teach GPT-3 the algorithm to use to get around its limitations. Has GPT-3 really been "taught" anything here? If you don't provide an explicit example as the context of your input, GPT-3 does not retain the ability to reverse words.

(author here) It depends a bit on how you define "retain". Most GPT-3 applications use custom "prompts" to train it for their specific use case. So in that way, the prompt is retained with every request.

You can also fine-tune GPT-3 to retain the ability to reason through problems. For example, check out this work on reasoning for grade school math: https://openai.com/blog/grade-school-math/

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#39

Post by esjeon »

... and this is exactly what programming is - breaking down a task into steps that computer can comprehend. I now get more strong feeling that everyone should be a programmer in the end. Plus, GPT-3 is not exactly a good tool for programming.

Re: Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words

#40

Post by pornel »

a65cec93b wrote: post #23

> GPT-3 correctly reverses long words! But to get there, we had to teach GPT-3 the algorithm to use to get around its limitations. Has GPT-3 really been "taught" anything here? If you don't provide an explicit example as the context of your input, GPT-3 does not retain the ability to reverse words.

Isn’t this a “can submarines swim?” question?

It has performed a novel (to it) task based on instructions, and this is IMHO remarkable. It should be possible to make it retain and recall this procedure.

Everything non-sci-fi AI does is “just” an algorithm, so it won’t live up to standards of human abilities, precisely because we know how this result has been obtained.

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