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Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

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Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#41

Post by dr_dshiv »

phkahler wrote: post #38
selfhoster11 wrote: post #22

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

>> LLM research is currently in its infancy Everything that went in to creating GPT4 is AI/science or whatever. Probing GPT4 and trying to understand and characterize it is also a very worthy thing to do - else how can it be improved upon? But if making GPT is science, I'd say this stuff is more akin to psychology ;-)

Machine psychology

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#42

Post by elif »

Nah, this is just an early example of many "this is too easy it doesn't count" defensive human arguments against AI.

Parallel to the "you use copilot so your code quality is terrible and you don't really even understand it so it's not maintainable" human coping we are familiar with.

If there is any shred of truth to these defenses, it is temporary and will be shown false by future, more powerful AI models.

Consider the theoretical prompt that allows one of these models to rapidly improve itself into an AGI. Surely you'd want to read that paper right?

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#43

Post by IanCal »

starbugs wrote: post #20
IanCal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT is a closed source/weights, proprietary product that changes every couple of weeks or so. Do you have any evidence that the weights for versioned models are being changed without notifications?

> Do you have any evidence that the weights for versioned models are being changed without notifications? I think in a real scientific process, it's upon those who claim that they are not to provide the evidence.

I'm sorry, but that's entirely ridiculous. You're mangling up a concept of burden of proof here.

You can easily see this because it can be flipped around easily - you made a claim that they are being changed, even every few weeks! Should it really be on me to show that your very specific claim is false?

Aside - but even if the model weights did change, that wouldn't stop research being possible. Otherwise no drug trial could be replicated because you couldn't get the exact same participants at the exact same age.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#45

Post by thesz »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #22

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

> Lower-order ML constructs do not demonstrate emergent capabilities like step by step, stream of consciousness thinking, and so on.

As a matter of fact, I did a project on the normalization of the text, e.g., translate "crossing of 6 a. and 12 s." into "crossing of sixth avenue and 12-th street" with a simple LM (order 3) and beam search on the lattice paths, lattice formed with hypotheses' variants. I got two fold decrease of word error rate compared to simpler approach with just outputting the most probable WFST path. It was not "step by step stream of consciousness," but nevertheless very impressive feat, when system started to know more without much effort.

The large LM's do not just output "most probable" token, they output most probable sequence of tokens and it is done with the beam search.

As you can see, my experience tells me that beam search alone can noticeably, if not tremendously, improve quality of the output, even for very simple LMs.

And if I may, the higher-order construct here is a beam search, not the LMs-as-matrix-coefficients' themselves. Beam search is used in speech recognition for decades now, SR does not work properly without it. LM's, apparently, also do not work without it.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#46

Post by dartos »

phkahler wrote: post #38
selfhoster11 wrote: post #22

Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…

>> LLM research is currently in its infancy Everything that went in to creating GPT4 is AI/science or whatever. Probing GPT4 and trying to understand and characterize it is also a very worthy thing to do - else how can it be improved upon? But if making GPT is science, I'd say this stuff is more akin to psychology ;-)

What is psychology, but applied biology?

https://xkcd.com/435/

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#48

Post by VoodooJuJu »

H8crilA wrote: post #7

If you do enough measurements on that new prompt then I don't see why this shouldn't be a paper. People overestimate the value of "grand developments", and underestimate the value of actually knowing - in this case actually knowing how well something works, even if it is as simple as a prompt. Compare with drug trials: Adderall only differs from regular amphetamine in the relative concentration of enantiomers, and th…

There's a great lesson here for marketers: the prospect can be convinced with the simple presence of graphs and data and measurements.

Even just the mere presence of data and data visuals is enough to legitimize what you're selling in the eyes of the prospect. When the prevailing religion is Scientism, data bestows that blessing of authority and legitimacy upon whatever it is you're trying to sell. Show and tell whatever conclusions you'd like from the data - the soundness of the logic supporting that conclusion is irrelevant. All that matters is you did the ritual of measuring and data-gathering and graph-ifying and putting it on display for the prospect.

There's a great book, How to Lie with Statistics, that covers this particular case, but demonstrates other popular ways in which data and data visuals are manipulated to sell things.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#49

Post by JR1427 »

This reminds me of how there was a boom in half-baked studies around COVID, e.g. modelling this or that aspect of the pandemic, or around mask wearing.

I imagine that most of these will simply have had little to no impact, and will only serve to bolster the publication list of those who wrote them.

Re: Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper

#50

Post by dartos »

IanCal wrote: post #43
starbugs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any evidence that the weights for versioned models are being changed without notifications? I think in a real scientific process, it's upon those who claim that they are not to provide the evidence.

I'm sorry, but that's entirely ridiculous. You're mangling up a concept of burden of proof here. You can easily see this because it can be flipped around easily - you made a claim that they are being changed, even every few weeks! Should it really be on me to show that your very specific claim is false? Aside - but even if the model weights did change, that wouldn't stop research being possible. Otherwise no drug tri…

Apples and oranges comparison.

You couldn’t get the same participants, but you could get the same drugs. If you could get identical participants, that wouldn’t be very helpful since humans are so varied.

But for GPT based papers, what you’re actually testing could change without you knowing. There’s no way to know if a paper is reproducible at all.

If you can’t reproduce results, is it really research, or just show and tell?

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