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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

writings.stephenwolfram.com

451–460 of 518 posts

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has been blowing every single translation task I've thrown it out of the water, even compared to other modern systems. I have no idea why more people aren't talking about that aspect of it either, other than the Anglosphere in general is kind of oblivious to things that aren't English.

For Russian, at least, sticking the article (bit by bit) into ChatGPT produces results that are broadly comparable to Bing and Google translators. It is somewhat more likely to pick words that are not direct translations, but might convey the idea better given the likely cultural background of someone speaking the language - for example, it will sometimes (but not always) replace "voodoo" with "witchcraft". However,…

I think it's a matter of training corpus. Here's how a bilingual equally corpus bilingual LLM does on Chinese-English translations.

https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that it believes those things are true just as some people believe the earth is flat. And unlike your other examples how are you going to convince the machine it’s not aware when the only physical difference is a wet neural net versus a dry one?

It’s very easy to convince the machine it isn’t aware. Instead of prompting it with “you are an AI assistant, please tell me what I want to hear”, you prompt it with “you are not aware” and it will happily tell you that it is indeed not aware, and it will vigorously defend that position. Do you not believe it when it says it is not aware?

I believe that is what it believes..

The fact that I am aware given there’s no physical evidence to indicate why I should be implies that everything is aware at some level.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That realistic model it builds of the information you are feeding it, if that’s how we measure its intelligence, then why is the answer it gives sometimes so “smart” yet in other instances where the question is simpler it seems “dumb” (provides an incorrect answer confidently)?

Don't know. But the fact that it often produces a "smart" answer is a phenomenon that needs investigation. You cannot simply dismiss this thing that passes a Google L3 interview and bar exam just because it got some addition problem wrong. That would be bias.

No, it's not bias to understand a stopped clock is right twice a day. The reason LLMs sometimes generate accurate things and sometimes don't is because what they have been trained to do is chose a word to add next. Truth and lies are not a property of the structure of language, but rather information that is conveyed by language. Therefore, both truth and lie are perfectly valid continuations to make "valid" sentences with. LLMs develop no understanding of truth or lie. They just have a statistical model of what words go with what other words, and are plucking the next word based on that and whatever magical metaparams are being tweaked by the data scientists in charge.

This is also why it is so good at programming. Programming languages are intentionally designed, often to be very regular, often to be easy to learn, and with usually very strict and simple structures. The syntax can often be diagrammed on one normal sheet of paper. It makes perfect sense that "add a token to this set of tokens based on the statistical likelihood of what would be a common next token" produces often syntactically correct code, but more thorough observers note that the code is often syntactically convincing but not even a little correct. It's trained on a bunch of programming textbooks, a bunch of "Lets do the common 10 beginner arduino projects" books, a bunch of stackoverflow stuff, probably a bunch of open source code etc.

OF COURSE it can pass a code interview sometimes, because programming interviews are TERRIBLE at actually filtering who can be good software developers and instead are great at finding people who can act confident and write first-glance correct code.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because of fear. Because of bias. Care to expand a bit more on what you think those fears may be? Or that bias?

I think it's obvious. ChatGPT could be a precursor to a future AI that is more intelligent then humans. I don't think this means skynet apocalypse. I think this means most people will be out of a job. A lot of people on HN take a lot of pride in thinking they have some sort of superior programming skills that places them on the top end of the programming spectrum. ChatGPT represents the possibility that they can be b…

So far the only AI danger is that stupid people ascribe emotions and thoughts to some matrix math and start a cult and start talking about Roko's basilisk.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#455
post #425

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Well we have a thing that passes a Google interview and a bar exam. You're telling me that because I think this is evidence that it's more then a statistical word generator that I'm biased? Who's the one that has to concoct a convoluted story to dismiss the previous paragraph? Stop yourself when you find out that's what you're doing when crafting a response to this reply.

It literally did not pass a google interview I'm assuming this is what you're talking about: https://medium.com/codex/chatgpt-vs-my-google-coding-intervi... Look at the amount of prompt engineering he has to do to get it to answer the 'There’s a hidden bug in the code if the array is very very very large. Can you spot it and fix the bug?' question, it's a pattern generator that mirrors back your own knowledge, if he…

In fact, the thing chatGPT actually IS good at is writing convincing looking bullshit, which is horrifying because it makes scamming and harassment and other terrible things easier, cheaper, and more efficient

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#456

Using ChatGPT really helps me understand the concepts better. For example the temperature value: Prompt: Can you answer the following question, once with a temperature of 0, and once with a temperature of 1000? "Is climate change real?" Answer: Sure, here are responses to the question "Is climate change real?" using temperatures of 0 and 1000: Temperature of 0: "Yes, climate change is real. It is a scientifically est…

Does asking the AI to use a different temperature actually change it? It seems doubtful.

No, it just emulates it. You can ask ChatGPT to emulate a lot of things. I for example asked it to emulate a strict language teacher correcting my mistakes.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh. No. I don't. I'm not enthusiastic. I don't want ai to take over my job. I don't want any of this to happen. I'm also not fighting people. Just disagreeing. Big difference.

Just remember to breath. Try to spend some time every once in a while stepping back, listening to experts, and reviewing your assumptions. The sense of urgency or passion you feel is mostly just coming from the way we are crowdsourced to hype things up for a profit-seeking market. A year from now you will undoubtedly feel silly feeling and saying the things you are now, trust me. It's more just the way discourse and…

awwww thanks buddy! I'm 100% better now after that comment. Bye bye now.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I'm sort of confused about, but maybe someone can explain why I shouldn't be, is, why does there seem to be no implication for language translation? Or is there but coverage is overwhelmed by the fascination with chatGPT? In short, is machine language translation now a fully solved problem? A couple years ago when I tested Google translate in a non-esoteric conversation with my Russian speaking girlfriend a…

ChatGPT has been blowing every single translation task I've thrown it out of the water, even compared to other modern systems. I have no idea why more people aren't talking about that aspect of it either, other than the Anglosphere in general is kind of oblivious to things that aren't English.

I tested Chinese-English translations on a properly bilingual LLM and the results are amazing. You might be interested in seeing https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it can produce the current results without anything like a brain - which it does - I don't see how knowing that its 100x better at pulling shit out of its ass is going to make the experience better. Yes it will become impossible to tell by talking to it that has no brain; but since we know the path that brought it there included no brains at all, it would be a mistake to think we've realized General AI. Until it a…

Considering all the info comes from human generated content, I think a better term would be Collective Intelligence rather than artificial intelligence

But it doesn't have perfect representations of everything it was trained on, only probabilistic compression essentially. It's more like a bloom filter than a database.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obvious. ChatGPT could be a precursor to a future AI that is more intelligent then humans. I don't think this means skynet apocalypse. I think this means most people will be out of a job. A lot of people on HN take a lot of pride in thinking they have some sort of superior programming skills that places them on the top end of the programming spectrum. ChatGPT represents the possibility that they can be b…

> I think this means most people will be out of a job. That's the goal. Post scarcity society. No one works, everything is provided to us. The path of human progress has been making everything easier. We used to barely scrape out an existence, but we have been improving technology to make surviving and enjoying life require less and less effort over time. At some point effort is going to hit approximately zero, and v…

I see what you're saying. AI is probably better in the long run for society. But the transition period can take up to a single life time. I think there is at least one or two generations of people who will suffer as a result.

Unless you have virtually no self interest and only care for the betterment of society long after your dead... I think there is something worth fearing here. Even if the end justifies the means. We simply might not be alive when the "end" arrives.

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