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How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

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Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#71

Post by pixl97 »

scott_w wrote: post #68
pixl97 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small children track in their 'minds eye' the entire layout of a chess board and where each piece is? Tokenization starts screwing stuff up if you're start printing out a board after each move. Push out a plugin that sets up a virtual board GPT-4 can read after each move and see if its any better.

No, they look at the board, though strong chess players can do it blindfolded. My point is that the hyperbole about “we’ve cracked AI but they changed the goalposts” is self evidently not true. You just proved it right there: I need to add more plugins because ChatGPT does not understand what it’s doing . It’s a potentially useful tool but that doesn’t make it intelligent.

I mean, all you've managed to state is that gpt isn't a strong AGI, not that it isn't intelligent. Stop thinking of intelligence as a binary option of 'is or !is' and more of a capability gradient.

Being able to properly use tools is a sign of intelligence in of itself.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#72

Post by [deleted] »

PaulHoule wrote: post #10
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

The odd thing is that some people report much better results than others. Most literature on the subject points out the importance of a "human in the loop" https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13187 Generally, chatbots function in direct communication with humans and do not function autonomously. Thus they are dependent on not just human meaning-making but human thirst for meaning which will find it even when it isn't there.

[deleted]

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#73

Post by scott_w »

pixl97 wrote: post #71
scott_w wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they look at the board, though strong chess players can do it blindfolded. My point is that the hyperbole about “we’ve cracked AI but they changed the goalposts” is self evidently not true. You just proved it right there: I need to add more plugins because ChatGPT does not understand what it’s doing . It’s a potentially useful tool but that doesn’t make it intelligent.

I mean, all you've managed to state is that gpt isn't a strong AGI, not that it isn't intelligent. Stop thinking of intelligence as a binary option of 'is or !is' and more of a capability gradient. Being able to properly use tools is a sign of intelligence in of itself.

I’m using “intelligent” in the “intelligent life” meaning, not the “how intelligent is this person” meaning. By this meaning, any reasonable person would realise it’s not crossing that threshold.

Where is this threshold? I don’t think anyone really knows yet. That’s why I don’t see a problem with “moving the goalposts,” because doing so is the best way to help us truly understand what it means to be an intelligent life form (artificial or otherwise).

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#74

Post by cthalupa »

greiskul wrote: post #34
thefreeman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point that literally just bit me this morning. ChatGPT completely lied to me about the scaling properties of Kinesis. I was confused about the 1000 write / second but only 5 read / second throughput of a kinesis shard and was asking it a number of questions, including specifically if a batch read would count as only a single read operation. It explicitly told me that each record in the batch counted as an ind…

Yes, please. Do not use LLMs as a substitute for Google search. If you are looking for factual information, just use google, bing, or duckduckgo. You should only use ChatGPT for things that you are able to review it's work. Technology is supposed to make us smarter. Blindly believing an AI that we know can hallucinate makes us dumb with confidence.

I find LLMs to be very good at helping me figure out what I need to google search when I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. I can describe my problem from my perspective and it'll propose solutions that I can then go verify by searching and reading up on 'em.

Before, I'd often end up going down the wrong rabbit hole when I would try to write out my problem in a google-able manner.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#75

Post by pixl97 »

scott_w wrote: post #73
pixl97 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, all you've managed to state is that gpt isn't a strong AGI, not that it isn't intelligent. Stop thinking of intelligence as a binary option of 'is or !is' and more of a capability gradient. Being able to properly use tools is a sign of intelligence in of itself.

I’m using “intelligent” in the “intelligent life” meaning, not the “how intelligent is this person” meaning. By this meaning, any reasonable person would realise it’s not crossing that threshold. Where is this threshold? I don’t think anyone really knows yet. That’s why I don’t see a problem with “moving the goalposts,” because doing so is the best way to help us truly understand what it means to be an intelligent li…

And this is why the word intelligent is useless. In your use of the word we're not getting anywhere then suddenly terminator kicks in the door and steps on your head and then "Oh, yea, I guess we reached the intelligent point". This is a piss poor predictor of capabilities.

And again "reasonable" is a pretty useless metric. Asking a 'reasonable' person about any system that requires expert knowledge to understand is going to derive an unreasonable answer. This is because they'll conflate intelligence with human behavior.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#76

Post by giantrobot »

pixl97 wrote: post #55
mooxie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should only use ChatGPT for things that you are able to review it's work. This keeps being my argument when people at work daydream about time and cost savings by offloading non-critical business functions to AI. I say, "Great, so it can produce 1000x more work than a person. But then what army of people are we planning to use to check those outputs?" I'm super-impressed with the current crop of language models…

Eh, part of the problem is people don't currently understand what LLMs are doing... Have you ever had a dumb/wrong thought in your head? I'm going to go ahead and answer yes for you, you do all the time. In fact you don't (hopefully) verbalize a stream of consciousness to other people around you. In general you think of something then reflect on what it is true/false. This is not what LLMs do, they pitch back the fir…

Even if the error rate of LLMs decreases with additional GPU power there's little rhyme or reason to their confabulations. Even if only 1% of the code is in error there's no guidance or pattern to where those errors might be.

It's like reviewing an overconfident junior developer's code except you can't learn their particular weaknesses. If a developer is bad about memory leaks, you know to check their every PR for memory leaks. An LLM won't necessarily produce the same types of errors given similar prompts or even the same prompt with some period of time between invocations.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#77

Post by mcstafford »

fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

You make a decent point. There's a clear limitation... but a clearly worded prompt often produces more valuable content than an SEO optimized guess article.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#78

Post by epylar »

JimtheCoder wrote: post #66
marcusverus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We agreed on a definition of artificial intelligence--the Turing test--for 50 years. The goalpost was clearly established, widely agreed upon, and promptly abandoned when chatbots blew past it. I'm convinced that when the dust has settled and historians look back to decide on THE point in time at which we achieved AI or even AGI, that time will not be in the future, but in the past.

"I'm convinced that when the dust has settled and historians look back to decide on THE point in time at which we achieved AI or even AGI, that time will not be in the future, but in the past." If historians are looking back to decide the point, by definition doesn't it have to be in the past? Historians looking back to the future doesn't make sense...

Historians in 2050 could look back at 2040, which would be their past but our future.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#79

Post by scott_w »

pixl97 wrote: post #75
scott_w wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using “intelligent” in the “intelligent life” meaning, not the “how intelligent is this person” meaning. By this meaning, any reasonable person would realise it’s not crossing that threshold. Where is this threshold? I don’t think anyone really knows yet. That’s why I don’t see a problem with “moving the goalposts,” because doing so is the best way to help us truly understand what it means to be an intelligent li…

And this is why the word intelligent is useless. In your use of the word we're not getting anywhere then suddenly terminator kicks in the door and steps on your head and then "Oh, yea, I guess we reached the intelligent point". This is a piss poor predictor of capabilities. And again "reasonable" is a pretty useless metric. Asking a 'reasonable' person about any system that requires expert knowledge to understand is…

> In your use of the word we're not getting anywhere then suddenly terminator kicks in the door

This is just silly. Also, a machine killing me is still not enough. We have drone targeting systems in development right now but I don’t think you’d call them AI.

> And again "reasonable" is a pretty useless metric.

When you can’t define intelligence, it’s really the starting point.

The thing with LLMs is that they look almost there but, as many are pointing out, the method by which they make inferences is an analysis of how words fit together without understanding the meaning. This is why things like ChatGPT confidently spout absolute nonsense about topics they weren’t trained on (with much human intervention): it doesn’t know what it’s saying so it doesn’t realise it’s making stuff up.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#80

Post by Joeri »

PaulHoule wrote: post #10
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

The odd thing is that some people report much better results than others. Most literature on the subject points out the importance of a "human in the loop" https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13187 Generally, chatbots function in direct communication with humans and do not function autonomously. Thus they are dependent on not just human meaning-making but human thirst for meaning which will find it even when it isn't there.

The prompt is everything. It’s sort of like knowing how to formulate a google search query, but cubed. You need to learn a whole bag of tricks and you can’t use the intuitions of talking to people for talking to the AI. Some people are by now really adept at prompt engineering and that makes them skilled at setting the AI to work.

That’s why people’s first impressions are often so wildly off. People who have the fortune of asking the right prompts for their first conversations walk away believing they’ve spoken to AGI, people who ask a less than optimal prompt (or things it is bad at like math problems) walk away not seeing what the hype is about.

Same thing with copilot. The quality of the code that it suggests depend a lot on the context, so if someone isn’t writing good comments and giving their variables proper names the suggested code will be terrible.

These systems are very capable, but using them is a skill that must be learned, and there’s little material out there to teach that skill because things move so quickly.

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