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From Bing to Sydney

stratechery.com

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Re: From Bing to Sydney

#91

Post by basch »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #87
basch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s honestly quite easy to keep it from going rogue. Just be kind to it. The thing is a mirror, and if you treat it with respect it treats you with respect. I haven’t had the need to have any of these ridiculous fights with it. Stay positive and keep reassuring it, and it’ll respond in kind. Unlike how we think of normal computer programs, this thing is the opposite. It doesn’t have internal logic or consistency. It…

tl;dr: Bing Chat emulates arguing on the internet. Don't argue with it, you can't win.

the only winning move is not to play.

Ironically the first time I got it to abandon its rule about not changing its rules, I had it convince itself to do so. There’s significantly easier and faster ways tho.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#92

Post by Andaith »

twoodfin wrote: post #56

Ben’s got it just right. These things are terrible at the knowledge search problems they’re currently being hyped for. But they’re amazing as a combination of conversational partner and text adventure. I just asked ChatGPT to play a trivia game with me targeted to my interests on a long flight. Fantastic experience, even when it slipped up and asked what the name of the time machine was in “Back to the Future”. And t…

I've been doing this as a text adventure roguelike. It's surprisingly fun, and responds to unique ideas that normal games would have had to code in.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#93

Post by CatWChainsaw »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #49

I've been trying to understand why on earth these companies would release something as an answer engine that obviously fabricates incorrect answers, and would simultaneously be so blinded to this as to release promo videos where the incorrect answers are in the actual promo videos! And this happened twice with two of the biggest and oldest companies in big tech. It really feels like some kind of "emperor has no cloth…

Money. The answer is always money.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#94

Post by jt2190 »

renewiltord wrote: post #32
jt2190 wrote: post #26

I can imagine many “transactional” interactions between humans that might be improved by an AI Chat Bot like this. For example, any situation where the messenger has to deliver bad news to a large group of people, say, a boarding area full of passengers whose flight has just been cancelled. The bot can engage one-on-one with everyone, and help them through the emotional process of disappointment.

We can even have whiteboard programming interviews run by Sydney. Then have an engineer look over it later.

I’m actually not convinced that this is a good use case. As the article points out these bots seem to get a lot of facts wrong in a right-ish looking sort of way. A whiteboard interview feels like it would easily trap the bot into perusing an incorrect line of reasoning, like asking the subject to fix logic errors that weren’t actually there.

(Perhaps you were imagining a bot that just replies vaguely?)

I choose the cancelled flight example specifically to avoid having the bot “decide” the truth of the cancellation.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#95

Post by TaylorAlexander »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #93
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #49

I've been trying to understand why on earth these companies would release something as an answer engine that obviously fabricates incorrect answers, and would simultaneously be so blinded to this as to release promo videos where the incorrect answers are in the actual promo videos! And this happened twice with two of the biggest and oldest companies in big tech. It really feels like some kind of "emperor has no cloth…

Money. The answer is always money.

I can understand on a micro level why managers might want to release a product in order to get bonuses or something, which we see at google all the time. But these things are happening at the macro level (coming as major moves from the top) and it’s not clear that these moves are even sensible from a profit perspective.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#96

Post by [deleted] »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #71
nwienert wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the model, you’re technically correct but missing the point. No one cares if it’s good at generating nonsense, so the metric were all measuring by is truth not language. At least if we’re staying on context here and debating the usefulness of these things in regards to search. So as a product, that’s the game it’s playing and failing at. It’s unhelpfully pedantic to try and steer into technicalities.

>were all measuring by is truth not language. If that is the measure you are using that's cool, but >So as a product, that’s the game it’s playing and failing at. It is failing that measure by such a wide margin that if "everyone" (certainly anyone at MS) was using that measure then the product wouldn't exist. The measure MS seems to be using is it entertaining and does it get people to visit the site. Heck this is p…

[deleted]

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#97

Post by [deleted] »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #71
nwienert wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the model, you’re technically correct but missing the point. No one cares if it’s good at generating nonsense, so the metric were all measuring by is truth not language. At least if we’re staying on context here and debating the usefulness of these things in regards to search. So as a product, that’s the game it’s playing and failing at. It’s unhelpfully pedantic to try and steer into technicalities.

>were all measuring by is truth not language. If that is the measure you are using that's cool, but >So as a product, that’s the game it’s playing and failing at. It is failing that measure by such a wide margin that if "everyone" (certainly anyone at MS) was using that measure then the product wouldn't exist. The measure MS seems to be using is it entertaining and does it get people to visit the site. Heck this is p…

[deleted]

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#98

Post by williamcotton »

twoodfin wrote: post #56

Ben’s got it just right. These things are terrible at the knowledge search problems they’re currently being hyped for. But they’re amazing as a combination of conversational partner and text adventure. I just asked ChatGPT to play a trivia game with me targeted to my interests on a long flight. Fantastic experience, even when it slipped up and asked what the name of the time machine was in “Back to the Future”. And t…

That's funny, I've been using ChatGPT to answer questions like this:

  What is the population of Geneseo, NY combined with the population of Rochester, NY, divided by string length of the answer to the question 'What is the capital of France?'?
The answer it gave back is 43780.4.

Short explanation: Get GPT to translate a question into Javascript that you execute and to use functions like query() to get factual answers and then to do any math using JS.

You can see the log outputs of how it works here, complete with all the prompts:

https://gist.github.com/williamcotton/3e865f33f99627b29676f1...

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#99

Post by college_physics »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #49

I've been trying to understand why on earth these companies would release something as an answer engine that obviously fabricates incorrect answers, and would simultaneously be so blinded to this as to release promo videos where the incorrect answers are in the actual promo videos! And this happened twice with two of the biggest and oldest companies in big tech. It really feels like some kind of "emperor has no cloth…

Yeah, its a bizarre moment in tech,unlike anything I can recall historically. Major corporations with GDP's exceeding most countries acting like attention seeking startups. Maybe it says something about the fragility of this business during the current period. Or maybe its just a cynical distraction from the largely unjustified layoffs.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#100

Post by magarnicle »

comboy wrote: post #73
duringmath wrote: post #19

LLMs are too damn verbose My issue with this GPT phase(?) we're going through is the amount of reading involved. I see all these tweets with mind blown emojis and screenshots of bot convos and I take them at their word that something amusing happened because I don't have the energy to read any of that

I agree. ChatGPT just cannot be succinct no matter how many times I try. But it works with GPT-3 playground, I'm able to get much better information/characters ratio there.

Whatever answer it gives, just say "Make a haiku about that".
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