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ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 118 posts

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#61
It seems to me that questions like this show how people misunderstand generative AIs.

If you ask DALL-E to draw the Mona Lisa, it won't give you a pixel-perfect copy. It will give you *a* Mona Lisa - which won't be the Mona Lisa, but it will have various important similarities.

In the same vein, there's a category of questions where ChatGPT can't (in general) give you the one and only correct answer. It can give you an answer - the sort of answer that could plausibly have been correct, if not for the fact that it isn't.

Am I missing something? It seems to me that asking ChatGPT to do math is rather like asking why an image AI drew Mona Lisa wearing a necklace.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#62

People are starting to entropomorphise gpt3, stating it's bullshitting or lying, instead of realizing this is just a tool that is useful for some things and not for others. The fact it talks makes people treats it differently than Excel. But when Excel turns your date into a nonsensical value, people understand it's just a program with limitations

I guess the main concern that it's often confidently unreliable. i.e. it's answers sort of make sense most of the time, yet when they are not it's hard to spot. IMHO in most cases where it's difficult to validate its answers or exactness is required this makes more than useless, maybe even harmful.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#63
post #7

ChatGPT is assertive, authoritative, and even goes on to lie to justify its answers and "be right". It's a gasslighting machine. Here's an example I posted here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33852236

It has been described as 'mansplaining as a service'

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#64
This is due to a specific technical decision by OpenAI.

GPT has difficulty with the spelling of words, because they're converted to tokens via a table, before it actually sees them. It doesn't see how they're spelled, it just sees a number for each word. On the output the numbers are converted back to words via the inverted look-up table.

Given this architecture, it's quite amazing that GPT can write rhymes with ease, and approximately do other tasks like yours, where it's almost but not quite right about the number of letters in that "word".

It has learned to understand the spelling & pronunciation of words... indirectly, without EVER SEEING THAT SPELLING ITSELF!

This is honestly, the mind-boggling part.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#65
Just make it try to come up with a function definition f, that satisfies the following outputs:

f(9) = 90

f(8) = 72

f(7) = 56

f(6) = 42

Humans can solve this easily (x^2 + x), ChatGPT says it's f(x) = -x^2 + 18x + 90 (when you say it's supposed to be quadratic)

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#66

Have any of you had experience interacting with a person with Down's syndrome? They might have the same troubles giving correct answers even to simple question and need guidance to answer them correctly. Would you say that they don't possess "general intelligence"? Of course not. Being unable to perform some tasks that seem trivial to us does not, per se, prove a lack of general intelligence.

Are you implying that ChatGPT possesses "general intelligence"? It's very advanced statistical model/search engine. It can be pretty good at imitating humans and provided answers bases on a huge corpus of content it was trained on. However that's not really that close to human intelligence.

I mean it's both several magnitudes more 'intelligent' than humans in some ways and also more stupid in different ways.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#67

That phrasing is very hard to understand even for me. should be “how many letters does the string X have”

Logically the original sentence reads as

  for letter in alphabet:
      If “djsjcnnrjfkalcr” in letter:
          count+=1
So the answer would be zero. There are no letters containing “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”

I’d say it’s rather incredible if ChatGPT figured out the intention, rather than the literal meaning of the above question.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#69
post #3

Yes, it can only guess at something that sounds reasonable. I had the same conversation about counting words in a sentence: > How many words are in this sentence? > In the sentence "How many words are in this sentence?", there are 9 words. > No, that’s actually wrong. Try to write some code that would count the words for you. > Certainly! Here is some Python code that will count the number of words in a given string:…

Also a bit weird that it's assigning a variable with the same name as the function.

Re: ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

#70

While we're pasting in our adventures with ChatGPT... Q: How many punctuation characters are in this sentence? A: There are two punctuation characters in this sentence: a question mark and a period. Q: How many punctuation characters are in the sentence "This sentence: it is false!"? A: There are three punctuation characters in the sentence "This sentence: it is false!": a colon, an exclamation mark, and a period. Q:…

i dont know what is your expectation. there IS a period in each "?" and "!" marks.
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