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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#441
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it improve though? I’m not a GPT hater or denier, but how do you even predict that it hasn’t already hit the wall? They can increase parameter count x100 again, but correctness is not some knob they can just dial up to 10. What if a learning dataset simply has not enough info for a correct answer to have a greater weight than all the “con” noise? What if an answer requires a sort of reasoning inaccessible to LLM…

> What if a learning dataset simply has not enough info for a correct answer to have a greater weight than all the “con” noise? Indeed. I wonder what happens as available training data shifts from purely human-generated (now) to largely AI-generated (soon). Is this an information analogue to the “gray goo” doomsday that an uncontrolled self-replicating nano device could cause? >can it answer “I don’t know this” Such…

>can it answer “I don’t know this” Afaik this is one of the more newer ways of training ML models, I've been looking into using it myself for a few things.

A lot of models were trained to provide some quantifiable output 100% of the time, even if that output was wrong. Ie image recognition models "82.45% certain that is a dog", whereas it makes _all_ the difference for it to be able to say "82.42% certain that is a dog and 95.69% certain I don't know what that is" to indicate that the image has many features of a dog, but not enough for it to be more certain that it is a dog than isn't. It's the negative test problem I guess; us devs often forget to do it too.

In a way I wonder if that's how some of the systems in our brains work as well; ie we evolved certain structures to perform certain tasks, but when those structures fail to determine an action, the "I don't know" from that system can kick back into another. Thing like the fear response: brain tries to identify dark shadow & can't, kicks back to evolutionary defence mechanisms of be scared/cautious feel fear as it's saved the skins of our forebears.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#442

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

I tried it this whole week. I was initially amazed and thinking "maybe it really will replace my job." Then I switched to "it's a useful helper" and "I can use it to study things". Maybe after the gained confidence, I gave it some more difficult tasks - write code that will give a user read-only permissions - it obviously failed to note that the public schema is special, so that the user could still DROP tables. Aske…

Copilot seems pretty magical to me so far. It seems to be aware of not only the AST but also the types, so if you design your types well it can often get things correct.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#443
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it this whole week. I was initially amazed and thinking "maybe it really will replace my job." Then I switched to "it's a useful helper" and "I can use it to study things". Maybe after the gained confidence, I gave it some more difficult tasks - write code that will give a user read-only permissions - it obviously failed to note that the public schema is special, so that the user could still DROP tables. Aske…

Copilot seems pretty magical to me so far. It seems to be aware of not only the AST but also the types, so if you design your types well it can often get things correct.

I really need to try copilot, if it's truly aware of the overall context, it would be way more helpful than chatGPT, which seems truly good for isolated pure functions (clear input, clear output, DRY). At the end of the day, a good coder can write the function faster than they can describe it. Of course, ChatGPT does throw cool new syntax your way once in a while. For example, I didn't know .Chunk existed in .NET to cleanly break up ids and such into batches to process.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#444
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot seems pretty magical to me so far. It seems to be aware of not only the AST but also the types, so if you design your types well it can often get things correct.

I really need to try copilot, if it's truly aware of the overall context, it would be way more helpful than chatGPT, which seems truly good for isolated pure functions (clear input, clear output, DRY). At the end of the day, a good coder can write the function faster than they can describe it. Of course, ChatGPT does throw cool new syntax your way once in a while. For example, I didn't know .Chunk existed in .NET to…

Copilot also describes the function for you. It can code-complete a block of comments which describes the next many lines of code, and then also code-complete the lines of code for you.

It makes mistakes tho. For example, if you have two fields in a struct that could have been used and their names are very similar and they have the same type, then Copilot could use the wrong one. This is effectively a typo, except in code that was autogenerated, and it often takes a LONG TIME to debug a typo like this....

Ideally, you would be in a language with a more expressive type system (like Ocaml) so that those two fields have different types and such a typo cannot be valid.

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