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

Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

writings.stephenwolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 309 posts

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#61

Post by wardedVibe »

nextaccountic wrote: post #52
agentwiggles wrote: post #18

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

> but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." Just know that the morality systems cost more GPU cycles to run, and they are the first to be gutted when an open source model emerges. See for example stable diffusion, in which people disable watermarking and filtering and other stuff the user didn't ask for.

It's funny to me that they thought they could make systems safer by tacking nanny's onto them, while still accelerating the arms race.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#62

Post by bwanab »

agentwiggles wrote: post #18

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

So, you ask it to write a song about . Let'd say it does and you write about on your blog. Some reporter from with an ax to grind writes a story "AI tells kids to ".

I suspect OpenAI is trying to mitigate scenarios like this.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#63

Post by jerf »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #44
tombert wrote: post #34

I think ChatGPT is pretty neat but I was somewhat less impressed than everyone else is with the code generation. I actually agree with Wolfram for a change; being human like isn’t always “good”. For example, I asked ChatGPT to give me a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Isabelle/Isar. It quickly gave me some very pretty Isar code, and I was extremely impressed. Until I tried actually inputting it into Isabelle, and n…

It's quickly apparent that the people impressed with ChatGPT's code are generally solving pretty toy problems and want an alternative to SO for "how to do X".

One of the problems with ChatGPT is that for the most part, the things that people are most likely to feed it are also the things it is most likely to have training data for.

So, you say, "Write me a heap for Java", and it spits out amazing, wonderful code that is almost right. Well, yeah, that's cool and all, though I would point out that its training data probably included a heap that was entirely correct, but, still, it's a common question.

But I'm not writing a heap for Java. I'm taking business object X and stuffing through system Y and feeding the result to system Z, all internal to the company I work for. Good luck with getting ChatGPT to do that.

But it deceives people, because the very questions they are most likely to ask as a test are the exact questions it knows the answer to, for the very reason that they are also the most likely questions to be in the training data.

(This article kind of doubles as great set of examples of just how quickly you get into confident nonsense if you stick a toe slightly out of line in your query. For instance, even if it knows "What is Y" and "What is Z", it can't necessarily combine them in any correct way. It'll spew out a lot of words that sound very confident, but it'll make mistakes without any indication they were mistakes.)

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#64

Post by MengerSponge »

axus wrote: post #57
agentwiggles wrote: post #18

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

"In order to check the answer to that question, I will need to take control of all planetary resources to manufacture ice cream for the 10^40 years. Please stand by"

I was worried about a paperclip machine, but this? This I can support.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#67

Post by pbw »

agentwiggles wrote: post #18

I'm almost offended by the "cubic light year of ice cream" answer from ChatGPT. It's obviously ridiculous but is also a fairly simply dimensional analysis problem. Do the damn math, don't wag your finger at me and crush my dreams! I'm pretty bullish on ChatGPT and its ilk, but I _really_ dislike when ChatGPT lectures me because my request is against its "moral values." I recently pasted in the lyrics from Sleep's tit…

Plenty of MLM's will be "anything goes". That OpenAI does not want its brand associated with the worst things its users dream up, especially this early while it's still a research preview, makes sense to me. OpenAI was bold enough to put out a live LLM for people to hammer on, something several other companies declined to do. I think they've done a good job keeping the plane flying while plugging holes. Not a perfect job but a decent one.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#68

Post by gfodor »

cs702 wrote: post #54
theptip wrote: post #27

> And, yes, one can imagine finding a way to “fix this particular bug”. But the point is that the fundamental idea of a generative-language-based AI system like ChatGPT just isn’t a good fit in situations where there are structured computational things to do. Put another way, it’d take “fixing” an almost infinite number of “bugs” to patch up what even an almost-infinitesimal corner of Wolfram|Alpha can achieve in its…

Great comment! I didn't see Wolfram's OP as being bearish on the "naive" scaling hypothesis, but more as him being a bit upset and jealous about ChatGPT recently getting so much attention. Maybe he's a bit scared too about what future improvements to ChatGPT-like models could do to his business. In any case, I think his proposal of combining the two approaches makes a lot of sense in the near term , as I wrote here:…

Weird - I thought his post was very kind to the work of OpenAI and was extremely balanced in how it weighed the two approaches against each other. It seems like with Wolfram there is always a lot of people who presume the worst intentions.

Re: Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT

#70

Post by hutzlibu »

Filligree wrote: post #32
hutzlibu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also the Contact Us thing is a red flag for me." Why is that a red flag and not something you see as potentially finding a custom solution to your need?

Usually it means there are no cheap options for home experimentation.

But here they seem to have that option avaiable:

"free non-commercial development account"

But yes, they are clear they don't want to do low volume buisness, once you actually do buisness, which is a shame, for those who start small, but I would not rule out the possibility, that they might arrange for a "try it out".

Post reply on HN