ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
simonwillison.net
ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#2As a long time LLM enjoyer I just want to mention https://generative.ink/posts/simulators/ as I think it's by far the most insightful take on the GPT LLMs even though it was from before ChatGPT. It's better than blurry jpeg and stochastic parrot etc.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#3It makes me sad that the next time I enjoy a piece of writing, I'm going to have to wonder if it was "enhanced" or even written wholesale by ChatGPT. I don't feel the same with arithmetic at all.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#4I think the editorial capabilities of ChatGPT are fantastic, and the author provides a good list of examples. On top of that I would add that ChatGPT is really good as composing text. The meaning making is therefore still what we have to do.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#5Often it's a hint generator that tells you where to look and what you could try.
The hints are not calculated from the input, they're from the training set.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#6The author does a good job of pointing out what may be the strongest skills of LLMs but the claim they aren't useful as a search engine didn't ring particularly true. For many questions I have ChatGPT is the best tool to use because I know the topics I'm asking about are mentioned hundreds of times in the web, and the LLM can distill down at knowledge to the specifics I'm asking about. If you treat it as a friend who has a ton of esoteric knowledge in many areas but is prone to making stuff up to sound like they know what they're talking about you can still get lots of use pulling facts and some basic reasoning out of the models.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#7It makes me sad that the next time I enjoy a piece of writing, I'm going to have to wonder if it was "enhanced" or even written wholesale by ChatGPT. I don't feel the same with arithmetic at all.
Is this a result of the machine-instead-of-human-reviewer/editor difference, or because of a sense that the writing is less a "pure" output of a singular author?
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#8The author does a good job of pointing out what may be the strongest skills of LLMs but the claim they aren't useful as a search engine didn't ring particularly true. For many questions I have ChatGPT is the best tool to use because I know the topics I'm asking about are mentioned hundreds of times in the web, and the LLM can distill down at knowledge to the specifics I'm asking about. If you treat it as a friend who…
I think it's best used in conjunction in with a search engine. For example, you can ask it to recommend a paper to read and then search for the paper.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#9As a long time LLM enjoyer I just want to mention https://generative.ink/posts/simulators/ as I think it's by far the most insightful take on the GPT LLMs even though it was from before ChatGPT. It's better than blurry jpeg and stochastic parrot etc.
I think that article is misleading, because a simulator has rules. An LLM is better thought of as a storyteller, because at best it's going to follow whatever implicit rules there are very loosely and let you make rule changes of your own, more like Calvinball.
Also, whatever loose rules it has are more literary than mathematical. Plot twists often work.
Re: ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
#10I've seen this take a lot, and I find it frustrating as it flies in the face of the information theory underpinning how large neural networks learn information.
This is more than just a fancy zip file of Markov sequences. Someone has got to put a stop to this silly line of reasoning, I'm not sure why more people familiar with the math of deep learning aren't doing their best to dispel this particular belief (which people will then use as the foundation for other arguments, and so on, and so on, and this is how misconceptions somehow become canon in the larger body of work).