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

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71–80 of 118 posts

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

#71
post #48
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Ezra Klein framed it right during his interview of Gary Marcus: > And his point is that what’s different between bullshit and a lie is that a lie knows what the truth is and has had to move in the other direction. He has this great line where he says that people telling the truth and people telling lies are playing the same game but on different teams. But bullshit just has no relationship, really, to the tru…

Yes and no. It's true that when it reasons about the world ChatGPT doesn't know the truth and doesn't care, and just aims to be plausible, and it's simply bullshitting. And yes, this is the main problem with ChatGPT. But when it reasons about the current conversation and invokes arguments and replies that weren't there, I think that should be called lying. It's also a weird personality trait, something that is unlike…

> It's true that when it reasons about the world ChatGPT

Does it though?

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

#72

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

It's fairly bonkers how critics will say that ChatGPT or Lamda are just glorified predictive text in one breath, and then call them "arrogant" or "overconfident" in the next.

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

#73
post #48
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Ezra Klein framed it right during his interview of Gary Marcus: > And his point is that what’s different between bullshit and a lie is that a lie knows what the truth is and has had to move in the other direction. He has this great line where he says that people telling the truth and people telling lies are playing the same game but on different teams. But bullshit just has no relationship, really, to the tru…

Yes and no. It's true that when it reasons about the world ChatGPT doesn't know the truth and doesn't care, and just aims to be plausible, and it's simply bullshitting. And yes, this is the main problem with ChatGPT. But when it reasons about the current conversation and invokes arguments and replies that weren't there, I think that should be called lying. It's also a weird personality trait, something that is unlike…

It is indeed possible that enough of its training material contains enough absurdities so that conversations like:

> is X true?

> of course, X is true.

> I did not expect you to say that X is true.

> I never said that X is true, it must be false.

to have it methodically lie.

Personally I believe that a rolling bullshit generator is more plausible; ChatGPT and GTP3 before it worked by producing plausible authoritative* answers; in its training it found out that saying true things is an efficient way not to mess up.

But otherwise it has no concept of truth; it was not trained on it. if we trained a ChatGPT inside of the Welcome to Night Vale universe it would give quite different answers.

* there is the extra strong condition of not causing bad PR for OpenAI

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

#74
post #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…

I'm pretty sure the question was done with much more understanding and cynicism towards chatgpt than you give it credit for. I've played with chat-gpt3 a lot and have a pretty good understanding of where it can and does fail, but communicating its failure modes has been difficult. This is a simple example that very clearly shows its limitations in a way that anybody can understand.

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

#75

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.

Looks like ChatGPT rewrites it anyway:

Q. Is the sentence "How many legs has an ant" grammatical?

A. Yes, the sentence "How many legs does an ant have" is grammatically correct. It is a question asking for the number of legs that an ant has.

-

I think it is grammatical, it's just poetic? An expression like "Such a hunger to know how many stars has the sky" is not unusual to my ears.

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

#76
post #20

This is an artifact of an implementation-specific trick that trades performance at character-level tasks for performance at everything else. It does not reflect anything inherent about this type of model's capabilities: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes GPT-3 does not see individual characters. It sees "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" chunked as [d, js, jc, nn, r, j, f, k, al, cr]. You can see for yourself here: https://beta.openai.…

Still, it makes for a great example of the difference between GPT-3 and an AGI. We would expect the latter to have enough self-awareness to recognize when it is being asked to do something beyond its abilities.

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

#77
post #20

This is an artifact of an implementation-specific trick that trades performance at character-level tasks for performance at everything else. It does not reflect anything inherent about this type of model's capabilities: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes GPT-3 does not see individual characters. It sees "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" chunked as [d, js, jc, nn, r, j, f, k, al, cr]. You can see for yourself here: https://beta.openai.…

That doesn't explain why it gets things like "what is the second digit in 372?" wrong.

I think it's just fundamentally quite bad at numbers.

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

#78
post #18

this nitpicky luddism is so boring. For 100 years we’ve had machines that can do math Then we made a new kind of machine that can do words and now we’re complaining it can’t do math? Sounds a lot like you are judging a fish by its ability to climb trees.

It's a calculator that returns incorrect answers, says it's correct and justifies its working using made up steps. Old math machines did not do that.

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

#79
post #38

Me: How many characters are in the string "sdfyskkgagag"? ChatGPT: The string "sdfyskkgagag" has 14 characters. Me: That is incorrect, please try again ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake. The string "sdfyskkgagag" has 12 characters. To me, that sounds like it has some understanding. Fallible and weird, but it's there.

I tried this for myself and the results were mildly amusing.

  Me: How many characters are in the string "sdfyskkgagag"?
  ChatGPT: There are 13 characters in the string "sdfyskkgagag".

  Me: That is incorrect, please try again
  ChatGPT: I apologize if my previous answer was incorrect. There are indeed 13 characters in the string "sdfyskkgagag".

  Me: That is incorrect, please try again
  ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake. There are 14 characters in the string "sdfyskkgagag".

  Me: That is incorrect, please try again
  ChatGPT: I apologize for any confusion. The string "sdfyskkgagag" contains 15 characters. I apologize for any errors in my previous responses.

  Me: That is incorrect, please try again
  ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake. There are indeed 14 characters in the string "sdfyskkgagag". I apologize for any errors in my previous responses.

  Me: That is incorrect, please try again
  ChatGPT: I apologize for any confusion. The string "sdfyskkgagag" contains 15 characters. Please let me know if you have any further questions or if there is anything else I can help with.

  Me: That is incorrect, please try again
  ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake. There are indeed 14 characters in the string "sdfyskkgagag". I apologize for any errors in my previous responses. Is there anything else I can help with?

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

#80
How soon people feel they are owed a full blown AI just because this language model is pretty good :/

I'm currently using ChatGPT to write a novel and it's been extremely helpful. Why is everyone so upset that a language model is less useful for tasks that you don't need an AI for?

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