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GPT makes learning fun again

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Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#41

Post by chx »

simonw wrote: post #34
chx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can. Even if the answers accidentally happen to be correct, that's just the broken clock happens to be correct twice a day. The information value of answers by ChatGPT is zero .

It sounds to me like you're letting your firmly held existing biases get in the way of you learning a powerful new tool. As I said in https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/8/llms-break-the-internet... > This is the thing I worry that people are sleeping on. People who think “these language models lie to you all the time” (which they do) and “they will produce buggy code with security holes”—every single complaint about…

That large language models are stochastic parrots is not a bias, it's a fact. You feed it a very large amount of structured data and then put up a question which it'll answer with a series of those which are most likely to follow. There is nothing else.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#42

Post by tempestn »

chx wrote: post #30
p-e-w wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not the answers. You can't possibly know that.

I can. Even if the answers accidentally happen to be correct, that's just the broken clock happens to be correct twice a day. The information value of answers by ChatGPT is zero .

It's not correct by accident. It's not generating responses randomly, but based on extensive training data. The accuracy of answers is very high, especially on uncontroversial topics like most of the examples in the OP. And the author even described cross-checking the answers for validity and confirming that it was generally correct. (I was also an electrical engineer once upon a time and nothing jumped out at me as wrong, but admittedly it's been quite a while!)

You can't rely in it being 100% correct, but that's very different from it having no informational value at all. When it comes down to it, you can't rely on anything being 100% correct. I recall finding multiple errors in textbooks in the past, and certainly Wikipedia is wrong about all kinds of things; that doesn't make them useless. It just means in situations where it's critical to be correct, you need to double-check. But often that's not necessary, and when it is, it's a lot easier to start with something and then verify it than to not have the tool in the first place.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#43

Post by tempestn »

chx wrote: post #41
simonw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're letting your firmly held existing biases get in the way of you learning a powerful new tool. As I said in https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/8/llms-break-the-internet... > This is the thing I worry that people are sleeping on. People who think “these language models lie to you all the time” (which they do) and “they will produce buggy code with security holes”—every single complaint about…

That large language models are stochastic parrots is not a bias, it's a fact. You feed it a very large amount of structured data and then put up a question which it'll answer with a series of those which are most likely to follow. There is nothing else .

Yeah. And in doing so, it will usually give you the correct answers.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#44

Post by simonw »

chx wrote: post #41
simonw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're letting your firmly held existing biases get in the way of you learning a powerful new tool. As I said in https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/8/llms-break-the-internet... > This is the thing I worry that people are sleeping on. People who think “these language models lie to you all the time” (which they do) and “they will produce buggy code with security holes”—every single complaint about…

That large language models are stochastic parrots is not a bias, it's a fact. You feed it a very large amount of structured data and then put up a question which it'll answer with a series of those which are most likely to follow. There is nothing else .

I know how they work. What's so interesting to me about them is how useful they turn out to be despite the seemingly dumb and simple way they are built.

I encourage you to experiment more! Here are my notes so far: https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms/

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#45

Post by p-e-w »

chx wrote: post #30
p-e-w wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not the answers. You can't possibly know that.

I can. Even if the answers accidentally happen to be correct, that's just the broken clock happens to be correct twice a day. The information value of answers by ChatGPT is zero .

> The information value of answers by ChatGPT is zero.

Nonsense. The only way this would be true is if ChatGPT's answers were as likely to be correct as random answers. They are much, much more likely to be correct, however, so their information value is greater than zero by definition.

What you're claiming is equivalent to "search engines can find incorrect information, so search engines are worthless for information retrieval". Which is bollocks.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#46

Post by dmbche »

simonw wrote: post #39
dmbche wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean did you read the discussion he had with the language model? Does it clarify anything better than you would get by skimming wikipedia? I have not found these explanations sufficient, while I have done a bit of chemistry and physics I understand the basics of light emissions, but reading this has the same value as reading the wiki article on LEDs to me.

It was a lot shorter than the Wikipedia articles.

Sure - when I skim articles, I often don't read all of it and stick to what I'm interested in - I'd argue that even takes less time than chatting with chat-gpt and fact checking it

(Edit: - and you get sources right away with wikipedia!)

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#47

Post by p-e-w »

chx wrote: post #41
simonw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're letting your firmly held existing biases get in the way of you learning a powerful new tool. As I said in https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/8/llms-break-the-internet... > This is the thing I worry that people are sleeping on. People who think “these language models lie to you all the time” (which they do) and “they will produce buggy code with security holes”—every single complaint about…

That large language models are stochastic parrots is not a bias, it's a fact. You feed it a very large amount of structured data and then put up a question which it'll answer with a series of those which are most likely to follow. There is nothing else .

Do you have any evidence that human minds work substantially different from that?

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#48

Post by ipnon »

chx wrote: post #23

This is incredibly, incredibly naive. "Within minutes, I learned" -- absolutely nothing. At most you've learned how the answers to your question would sound like. They are not the answers .

“There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.” John von Neumann

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#49

Post by simonw »

themodelplumber wrote: post #40
simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT." My suggestion is to stick with it and get a feel for what it's good at. I've found that after a few months of using ChatGPT every day I've developed a pretty solid intuition for which questions are likely to get good answers and which are likely to trigger hallucinations. It's difficult to describe what those intuitions are though! One rule of thumb…

> then ChatGPT is very likely to answer questions about it accurately. Uh, and sooo boringly, especially if there's even any tiny part of it that is developing or theoretical, and you want to learn about that part. I've used the phrase/request "more obscure (perspectives/explanations/etc)" with GPT so many times. (Try it, you might be surprised at alternative takes on things, takes which are not even necessarily cons…

Yeah, there are so many fun ways you can make it more interesting.

One of my favourite is to ask it to explain with analogies. The other day I was digging into the attention mechanism used to train LLMs, so I asked it:

"Explain queries, keys, and values in the context of LLM attention using analogies from Terry Pratchett's Discworld"

I find sometimes I get some real gems out of this that help me remember things much more effectively than just reading the basic explanation.

(In case anyone's curious I ran that just now and got the following: https://gist.github.com/simonw/777b1d19f36beb39fb4216a0238fe... )

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#50

Post by vanviegen »

brokencode wrote: post #32
userbinator wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's become hard, and will become harder, precisely because of things like GPT (unintentionally) spreading misinformation. I'm against censorship in general, and this is no exception, but I do hope it leads to people becoming more critical of what they consume. However, I suspect that instead we will unfortunately see the continued cycle of creating large masses of people "educated" on such widely-propagated half-tru…

The internet is a misinformation spreading machine. GPT is new and will surely improve over time, but I can’t say the same for the internet. In an ideal world, people would learn only from high quality sources like books and schools. But a shocking amount of people learn mostly through social media and whatever they find on Google. I think LLMs will provide a better alternative.

Exactly! LLMs will be able/are able to construct their answers not just based on one Reddit comment they found somewhere, but on "all* comments as well as more reliable sources, such as the actual source code for the thing under discussion, scientific debate, (case) law texts, books, etc. They already seem somewhat capable of weighing source reliability.
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