Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 412 posts

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#41

Post by mamp »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

It turns out to accurately predict the next word requires huge amounts of implicit contextual knowledge i.e. understanding about the world.

Next word prediction was the trigger, the optimisation for the task results in a broad (but currently unreliable) model of the world.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#42

Post by Firmwarrior »

omeze wrote: post #39
ekianjo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ecause it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it Erm no There are many things that cant be easily checked especially if you dont know the topic well

Youre right but I think the point still stands. Many times it really is easier to verify than produce. Compilable code being a good example.

I dunno about you, but I spend a LOT of my time fixing code that was broken in some subtle way the compiler didn't catch

If we're talking about generating and integrating sample code, it's great at that

Anything more advanced and it's a footgun

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#43

Post by consilient »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

> My current (tentative) resolution of the surprise is that language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did. (Enough information that you can fully derive reality from language seems improbable, but iirc it did derive Othello and partly derived chess and I would have thought there wasn’t enough information in language to derive those without playing the games as well, so I can’t rule it out.)

The information isn't in language itself, it's in language as actually used by humans. GPT4 knows about chess because it's "read" a significant fraction of everything we've ever written about chess. A human being who did that without ever playing a game would also start out better than a typical novice.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#44

Post by repler »

grugagag wrote: post #9
RC_ITR wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when the Internet was new and no-one believed anything on it? Then, learning what to believe became a marketable skill for many people? Then society fundamentally changed because not everyone learned that skill? This is just that again. Gen Z will joke about their millennial/Gen X bosses believing anything the AI tells them and it will probably lead to some sort of mainstream conspiracy that Jackie O herself…

> Remember when the Internet was new and no-one believed anything on it? Is this true?

yes. I remember boomers shitting on Wikipedia around 2004, but fast forward to present day and the same people would cite it.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#45

Post by PsylentKnight »

tunesmith wrote: post #11

It's funny how it's possible to simultaneously overestimate and underestimate GPT4 at the same time, vastly. I think that we just don't fully understand everything it gives us yet. The complaints of "well it explained this wrong" are over-emphasized. The same thing happens with google and with any sort of research. Besides, if you're actually being productive with GPT4, you're going to be asking it stuff that relates…

> And just a reminder, those of you opining based off your experience with GPT3.5... GPT4 is a huge, huge improvement.

God, yes. The number of people of HN pushing up their glasses and saying "well, actshually..." when they're basing their opinions off the 3 questions they asked 3.5 is starting to become pretty grating.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#46

Post by valine »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #5
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Annoyed at all these N=1 articles from prominent thinkers about this stuff. Especially from scientists - can these sorts of folks please more carefully quantify, how often it’s “wrong” and then from that decide whether or not to “calm down”. Right now I suspect we hear from the outliers on both ends of the spectrum here. People who either see AGI happening tomorrow and the more dismissive crowd. But aside from what w…

Anytime I ask these things something (bard, gpt etc), 33% of the answer is genius, 33% misleading garbage, 33% filler stuff that’s neither here or there The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to? I don’t know who finds these things use…

Multiple choice tests are easier than fill in the blank precisely because it's easier to recognize when something is correct than it is to regurgitate a fact from thin air.

You don't have to be an expert to recognize when ChatGPT is providing useful information. There's a middle ground between expert and novice where ChatGPT provides real value. Its the times where you would know the answer if you saw it, but can quite remember it off the top of your head.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#47

Post by ramraj07 »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

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 my school friend came over to my house and I was sending a fax for my dad. He was surprised the paper came back out the other side. He wasn't an idiot, and he was 15. But his model of the world didn't include deep thought about how fax works, he just merely concoted a system where the paper just went through the wire. That moment stays with me and reminds me what it is to be human and think like one. I think chatgpt is like my friend, and that should scare and excite us.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#48

Post by [deleted] »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

[deleted]

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#49

Post by causality0 »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

If LLMs are an understanding of the world it would mean humans in a few decades found a way to create sapience with many orders of magnitude fewer interacting elements than evolution did. I find that doubtful, at least in light of the fact every other way we've replicated biological computation requires many more computational elements.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#50

Post by astrange »

fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

I think the main issue is that since we don't have access to the implementation of GPT-4, there's no way for researchers to know how it works, so either they're not saying anything or they're just making things up.

GPT-4 is "multimodal" and RLHF'd, so it was trained with some tasks other than next word prediction. I don't remember if it's been trained for code correctness (by running unit tests etc.), but other models have been.

Post reply on HN