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ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

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Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#71

Post by bbor »

dougmwne wrote: post #36
bbor wrote: post #14

Ugh I’m beginning to think I’m going to spend the next 6-12 months commenting “no, large language models aren’t supposed to somehow know everything in the world. No, that’s not what they’re designed for. Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.” It’s getting to point where I need to consider stop going on HN. This is like when my fa…

I appreciate where you are coming from and I agree that AI is about to go from relative obscurity where just a few geeks were playing around to insane hype. I feel like I’ve spent the last 7 years wondering why no one in the wider world was as impressed as I was, but starting with Stable Diffusion and now ChatGPT, the hype rocket ship has launched. Search TikTok for ChatGPT for all the evidence of that you could ever…

I don’t have much of a response but this comment is very well written and exactly what I would say if I could write clearly. It’s an exciting time! Hopefully it turns out more like the internet and less like… idk I’m struggling to think of a bad invention haha. Quadcopters I guess

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#72

Post by avereveard »

chapium wrote: post #55
bbor wrote: post #14

Ugh I’m beginning to think I’m going to spend the next 6-12 months commenting “no, large language models aren’t supposed to somehow know everything in the world. No, that’s not what they’re designed for. Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.” It’s getting to point where I need to consider stop going on HN. This is like when my fa…

I’m just searching the comments for novel use cases where its effective. Most articles I’ve read seem like either moral panics or snake oil. I like how it can generate songs and poems based on a prompt. Its not particularly useful, but it is entertaining. It really does seem curated at times, leading me to think this will eventually become a fad or replaced by a more advanced algorithm.

Want niche use case? I feed chatgpt the whole warstuff one page rule miniature combat system, and I can ask it to generate thematic units.

I generated a wide variety of content from LOTR to ships.

it even created new trait to complement the existing one when needed by special units, along with explanation of the mechanics of the trait.

It doesn't quite understand positioning, but it will simulate round of combat between unit when asked.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#73

Post by bbor »

brookst wrote: post #25
bbor wrote: post #14

Ugh I’m beginning to think I’m going to spend the next 6-12 months commenting “no, large language models aren’t supposed to somehow know everything in the world. No, that’s not what they’re designed for. Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.” It’s getting to point where I need to consider stop going on HN. This is like when my fa…

Same. I try to give myself three responses to any particular fallacy, mostly to work through my thinking. Once I have a pretty solid “you are assuming a technical limitation in a first gen product will persist in all future evolutions, when the second gen has already addressed it” response, I try to just smile at the 4th. . . Nth people who discover the exact same topic.

Very true - I’m stealing that rule!

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#74

Post by bbor »

CPLX wrote: post #38
bbor wrote: post #14

Ugh I’m beginning to think I’m going to spend the next 6-12 months commenting “no, large language models aren’t supposed to somehow know everything in the world. No, that’s not what they’re designed for. Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.” It’s getting to point where I need to consider stop going on HN. This is like when my fa…

> This is like when my father excitedly told his friends about the coming computer revolution in the 90s and they responded “well it can’t do my dishes or clean the house, they’re just a fad!” Makes me want screaaaaam Did the computer revolution make your father’s life better? Serious question.

Hmm. I’d say definitely yes. I mean we are on the internet right now, presumably across many km of distance. Do you disagree?

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#75

Post by canjobear »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #69

Any course on information theory typically covers neural network based compression algorithms, so I’m impressed at this observation made by someone who doesn’t have a formal background in CS. Regardless, it’s true.

Ted Chiang has a degree in CS.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#76

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

rideontime wrote: post #63
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #59

Asked ChatGPT to write a short story, in the style of Ted Chiang, about Ted Chiang thinking that a powerful AI cannot write powerful prose and have something strange happen, ChatGPT said: >>> Ted Chiang sat at his desk, staring at the glowing screen in front of him. He had heard of the new generative text AI that was making waves in the tech world, and he was intrigued. Despite its claims of intelligence, Ted believe…

I'll never understand why people find this amusing.

It's just the potential. Something feels in the right direction. Perhaps it will only remain a tool and it will never write the next Infinite Jest, but the next David Foster Wallace will certainly use its potential to become a better writer, just in the same manner auto-spellcheckers make me a better writer.

Incidentally, David Foster Wallace would have loved ChatGPT: finally, he no longer needed to write, he could now dedicate all his time to watching television [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ujr9gi3wk

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#77

Post by kragen »

hnfong wrote: post #46
Ari_Rahikkala wrote: post #31

> Models like ChatGPT aren’t eligible for the Hutter Prize for a variety of reasons, one of which is that they don’t reconstruct the original text precisely—i.e., they don’t perform lossless compression. Small nit: The lossiness is not a problem at all. Entropy coding turns an imperfect, lossy predictor into a lossless data compressor, and the better the predictor, the better the compression ratio. All Hutter Prize c…

Fabrice Bellard has a project that does precisly this. And does it extremely well, apparently. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27244004 Apparently it leads the compression of enwik9 ( http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html ) . Not sure why it isn't eligible for the Hutter Prize, there's some speculations in the previous discussion but I don't know whether they're true.

it takes too long to run

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#78

Post by dhruvdh »

not2b wrote: post #53
dhruvdh wrote: post #19

1. I don't understand how LLMs work. 2. I don't understand how ChatGPT works, but I have used it a few times. 3. I will use ChatGPT as the absolute measure of what LLMs are capable of. --- 1. I don't understand intelligence. 2. Humans are intelligent, humans can learn to do math. 3. LLMs are not good at math. 4. LLMs are not intelligent, they're just text compression. --- 1. I don't understand how LLMs work. 2. I hav…

You are arguing with your own straw man interpretation of the article. It isn't talking about all possible uses of LLMs, but focusing on specific uses now being proposed, to use ChatGPT and its possible successors instead of search. You ignore his points about how achieving really good compression requires learning structure in the data that starts to amount to understanding: if you can understand the rules of arithm…

Who is proposing the use of ChatGPT, in its current form, for search?

Bing search is not just "ChatGPT" added next to bing search results. Please look up how it works, it is quite sophisticated and (imo) designed well.

I have access to it; would you like a demo?

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#79

Post by wvenable »

I don't like this analogy; I think why I don't like it is in the intent. With JPEG in the intent is produce an image indistinguishable from the original. Xerox didn't intend to create photocopier that produces incorrect copies. The artifacts are failures of the JPEG algorithm to do what it's supposed to within its constraints.

GPT is not trying to create a reproduction of it's source material and simply failing at the task. Compression and GPT are both mathematical processes they aren't the same process; JPEG is taking the original image and throwing away some of the detail. GPT is processing content to apply weights to a model; if that is reversible to the original content it is considered a failure.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#80

Post by thundergolfer »

a_brawling_boo wrote: post #26
chrisshroba wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case folks don't know who he is, Ted Chiang wrote the short story collection "Stories of your Life and Others", and one of the stories was "Story of your Life", on which the movie Arrival was based.

It is an amazing book, not just for science fiction fans. The first story, "Tower of Babylon" somehow is like a science fiction story but based on ancient people's cosmology. Great book.

Best story in the book, imo. The first and last story (about the angels) are the best. I was a little underwhelmed by _Story Of Your Life_ and _Understand_, given their reputation.
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