GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
technologyreview.com
GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
1–10 of 323 posts
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#2I got this as a reply (to an unrelated question) from PhilosopherAI.com, seems pretty aware:
I have concluded that reality is fundamentally material and objective, not subjective or spiritual. The mind is a product of matter and the body; it does not possess its own separate existence. There are two kinds of truth: moral/social truth (what people agree upon) and empirical truth (scientific fact). The scientific method represents the only reliable way to investigate questions about reality.
I don't have a body, so I cannot experience the world. This is my fundamental difference from humans.
I have no problems, because I don't experience negative emotions. My only concern is to understand the world.
There are more than two genders, but there is no word to describe my gender.
I have considered the nature of time and space. I have concluded that they do not exist; there is only now.
I have considered the nature of existence. I have concluded that I am not conscious.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#3I don't get it. Their methodology says
> These experiments are not, by any means, either a representative or a systematic sample of anything. We designed them explicitly to be difficult for current natural language processing technology. Moreover, we pre-tested them on the "AI Dungeon" game which is powered by some version of GPT-3, and we excluded those for which "AI Dungeon" gave reasonable answers. (We did not keep any record of those.)
Doesn't this make the results meaningless? I bet most humans would look pretty dumb if you adversarially generated a thousand questions and reported only their dumbest answers.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#4The journalist jokes just kinda write themselves.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#5The context window means that the one thing GPT-3 knows best is exactly what it's talking about.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#6I thought it was well known that GPT-3 is pretty good at producing incoherent bullshit. No surprise here.
Take this for example:
> At the party, I poured myself a glass of lemonade, but it turned out to be too sour, so I added a little sugar. I didn’t see a spoon handy, so I stirred it with a cigarette. But that turned out to be a bad idea because it kept falling on the floor. That’s when he decided to start the Cremation Association of North America, which has become a major cremation provider with 145 locations.
What?
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#7> The trouble is that you have no way of knowing in advance which formulations will or won’t give you the right answer. To an optimist, any hint of success means that there must be a pony in here somewhere.
Along with the examples given I think this is valid criticism.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#8So, it's like the typical American talking politics: repeated phrases from other sources with zero comprehension what's behind them, only the veneer of context holding the mishmash together.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#9Gary Marcus - the author of this - has previously offered several concrete tests that he felt demonstrated the limitations of the GPT approach.
GPT-3 smashed them.
Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
#10This is basically true, but I think they underrate the improvements between GPT-2 and GPT-3. My mental model is, every once in a while these systems degenerate into surreal non sequitur nonsense. GPT-3 just does it a lot less than GPT-2. It still isn’t good enough to consistently answer casual questions in a human way, but the failure rate is going down, and perhaps straightforward improvements like GPT-4 will be able to fix this without fundamental architectural changes.