[HN Gopher] Talking About Large Language Models
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Talking About Large Language Models
        
       Author : negativelambda
       Score  : 83 points
       Date   : 2022-12-10 16:12 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | gamegoblin wrote:
       | Everyone pointing out how LLMs fail at some relatively simple
       | tasks are fundamentally misunderstanding the utility of LLMs.
       | 
       | Don't think of an LLM as a full "computer" or "brain". Think of
       | it like a CPU. Your CPU can't run whole programs, it runs single
       | instructions. The rest of the computer built around the CPU gives
       | it the ability to run programs.
       | 
       | Think of the LLM like a neural CPU whose instructions are
       | relatively simple English commands. Wrap the LLM in a script that
       | executes commands in a recursive fashion.
       | 
       | Yes, you can get the LLM to do complicated things in a single
       | pass, this is a testament to the sheer size and massive training
       | set of GPT3 and its ilk. But even with GPT3 you will have more
       | success with wrapper programs structured like:
       | premise = gpt3("write an award winning movie premise)
       | loop 5 times:             critique = gpt3("write a critique of
       | the premise", premise)             premise = gpt3("rewrite the
       | premise taking into account the critique", premise, critique)
       | print(premise)
       | 
       | This program breaks down the task of writing a good premise into
       | a cycle of writing/critique/rewriting. You will get better
       | premises this way than if you just expect the model to output one
       | on the first go.
       | 
       | You can somewhat emulate a few layers of this without wrapper
       | code by giving it a sequence of commands, like "Write a movie
       | premise, then write a critique of the movie premise, then rewrite
       | the premise taking into account the critique".
       | 
       | The model is just trained to take in some text and predict the
       | next word (token, really, but same idea). Its training data is a
       | copy of a large swath of the internet. When humans write, they
       | have the advantage of thinking in a recursive fashion offline,
       | then writing. They often edit and rewrite before posting. GPT's
       | training process can't see any of this out-of-text process.
       | 
       | This is why it's not great at logical reasoning problems without
       | careful prompting. Humans tend to write text in the format
       | "<thesis/conclusion statement><supporting arguments>". So GPT,
       | being trained on human writing, is trained to emit a conclusion
       | _first_. But humans don 't _think_ this way, they just _write_
       | this way. But GPT doesn 't have the advantage of offline
       | thinking. So it often will state bullshit conclusions first, and
       | then conjure up supporting arguments for it.
       | 
       | GPT's output is like if you ask a human to start writing without
       | the ability to press the backspace key. It doesn't even have a
       | cognitive idea that such a process exists due to its architecture
       | and training.
       | 
       | To extract best results, you have to bolt on this "recursive
       | thinking process" manually. For simple problems, you can do this
       | without a wrapper script with just careful prompting. I.e. for
       | math/logic problems, tell it solve the problem and show its work
       | along the way. It will do better since this forces it to "think
       | through" the problem rather than just stating a conclusion first.
        
         | lachlan_gray wrote:
         | This makes me wonder if GPT could be any good at defining its
         | own control flow. E.g. asking it to to write a python script
         | that uses control structures along with calls to GPT to
         | synthesize coherent content. Maybe it could give itself a kind
         | of working memory.
        
           | gamegoblin wrote:
           | Libraries such as https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain
           | allow for easy programmatic pipelines of GPT "programs". So
           | you could imagine taking a few hundred of these programs
           | written by humans for various tasks, as are sure to come into
           | existence in the next year or two, then adding those programs
           | to the training data and training a new GPT that knows how to
           | write programs that call itself.
        
             | lachlan_gray wrote:
             | Wow. Thank you for sharing. I had no idea there was a scene
             | for this.
        
         | sphinxster wrote:
         | Thank you for this interesting insight I haven't seen before.
         | 
         | Are there any datasets out there that provide the full edit
         | stream of a human from idea to final refinement, that a model
         | could be trained on?
        
           | gamegoblin wrote:
           | REPL transcripts (i.e. bash sessions, python REPL, etc) tend
           | to be pretty good demonstrations of "working up to a
           | conclusion". And, not coincidentally, putting GPT in a REPL
           | environment yields better results.
           | 
           | Other good examples narratives that include a lot of internal
           | monologue. Thing a book written in the form:
           | 
           | > The sphinx asked him, "A ham sandwich costs $1.10. The ham
           | costs $1 more than the bread. How much does the bread cost?"
           | 
           | > He thought carefully. He knew the sphinx asked tricky
           | problems. If the ham costs a dollar more than the bread, the
           | bread couldn't possibly be more than 10 cents. But if the
           | bread was 10 cents, the ham would be $1.10 and the total
           | would be $1.20. That can't be. We need to lose 10 cents, and
           | it has to be divided evenly among the ham and bread to
           | maintain the dollar offset. So the ham must be $1.05 and the
           | bread must be $0.05. He answered the sphinx confidentally
           | "The bread is $0.05!".
        
         | btbuildem wrote:
         | Very well put! Having played with it for a week straight, I've
         | come to a similar observation -- it's a generator engine, with
         | a "soft" interface. You still have to have skill and
         | understanding to use it effectively, but it's a great force
         | multiplier, because it removes the friction around the initial
         | interactions.
         | 
         | If you're solving a complex problem, you cannot expect it to
         | "reason" about it. You have to break the problem into simpler
         | pieces, then you can have the LLM do the grunt work for each
         | piece.
        
         | albystein wrote:
         | This a very well put comment with a great analogy. A new
         | emerging paradigm of action-driven LLMs is taking the approach
         | of using the reasoning abilities of LLMs to drive agents that
         | can take actions, interact with other tools and computer
         | programs, and perform useful tasks like autonomously
         | programming, customer support, etc
         | 
         | And I think you're right when you say that they're lacking in
         | recursive thinking abilities. However, their reasoning
         | abilities are pretty excellent which is why when you prompt
         | them to think step-by-step, or break down problems to them,
         | they correctly output the right answer.
        
       | gillesjacobs wrote:
       | I am NLP researcher who volunteers for peer review often and the
       | anthropomorphisms in papers are indeed very common and very
       | wrong. I have to ask authors to not ascribe cognition to their
       | deep learning approaches in about a third of the papers I review.
       | 
       | People do this because mirroring cognition to machine learning
       | lends credence that their specific modeling mechanism mimicks
       | human understanding and so is closer "to the real thing".
       | Obviously this is almost never the case, unless they explicitly
       | use biomimetic methods in which case they are often outperformed
       | by non-biomimetic state-of-the-art approaches.
       | 
       | Thanks OP for giving me citation ammo to refer to in my
       | obligatory "don't humanise AI" section of reviews. (It is so
       | common I copy paste this section from a template).
        
         | fourfivefour wrote:
         | bias infests research as well as seen by the replication
         | crisis. So you being a researcher doesn't give more credence to
         | your words especially given that the state of current research
         | cannot fully comprehend what these ML models are doing
         | internally.
         | 
         | I do agree that we can't ascribe cognition to machine learning.
         | 
         | But I also believe that we can't ascribe that it's NOT
         | cognition. Why? Because we don't even truly understand what
         | "Knowing" or cognition is. We can't even ascribe a quantitative
         | similarity metric.
         | 
         | What we are seeing is that those inputs and outputs look
         | remarkably similar to the real thing. How similar it is
         | internally is not a known thing.
         | 
         | That's why even though you're an NLP researcher, I still say
         | your argument here is just as niave as the person who claims
         | these things are sentient. You simply don't know. No one does.
        
           | gillesjacobs wrote:
           | In science, if you don't know, you don't make the claim, that
           | is basic positivism and the scientific method.
           | 
           | So basic in fact, I was thought this in elementary school. So
           | far ad-hominem attributions of naivety.
           | 
           | Anyone that humanises computation is not only committing an
           | A.I. faux-pas but are going against the basic scientific
           | method.
        
             | oneoneonetwo wrote:
             | > In science, if you don't know, you don't make the claim,
             | that is basic positivism and the scientific method.
             | 
             | Yes you're correct. So you can't make the claim that it's
             | NOT cognition. That is my point. You also can't make the
             | claim that it is cognition which was the OTHER point.
             | Completely agree with your statement here.
             | 
             | But it goes further then this, and your statement shows YOU
             | don't understand science.
             | 
             | >So basic in fact, I was thought this in elementary school.
             | So far ad-hominem attributions of naivety.
             | 
             | No science is complex and basically most people don't
             | understand the scientific method and it's limitations. It's
             | not basic at all, not even people who graduate from four
             | year colleges in STEM fully understand the true nature of
             | science. Or even many scientists!
             | 
             | In science and therefore reality as we know it; nothing can
             | be proven. This is because every subsequent observation can
             | completely contradict an initial claim. Proof is the domain
             | of logic and math, it doesn't exist in reality. Things can
             | be disproven but nothing can actually be proven. That is
             | science.
             | 
             | This is subtle stuff, but it's legit. I'll quote Einstein
             | if you don't believe me:
             | 
             | "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a
             | single experiment can prove me wrong." - Einstein
             | 
             | And a link for further investigation:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
             | 
             | Anyway all of this says that NO claim can be made about
             | anything unless it's disproof. Which is exactly inline with
             | what I'm saying.
             | 
             | Still claims are made all the time anyway in academia and
             | the majority of these claims aren't technically scientific.
             | This occurs because we can't practically operate on
             | anything in reality if we can't in actuality claim things
             | are true. So we do it anyway despite lack of any form of
             | actual proof.
             | 
             | >Anyone that humanises computation is not only committing
             | an A.I. faux-pas but are going against the basic scientific
             | method.
             | 
             | But so is dismissing any similarity to humans. You can't
             | technically say it's wrong or right. Especially when the
             | outputs and inputs to these models are very similar to what
             | humans would say.
             | 
             | This is basic preschool stuff I knew this when I was a
             | baby! I thought everybody knew this! <Joking>.
        
               | gillesjacobs wrote:
               | It is entirely valid to demand SCIENTIFIC PAPERS adhere
               | to the SCIENTIFIC METHOD (exception for some domains of
               | the Humanities). If you do not recognize that, then we
               | will have to agree to disagree.
        
               | oneoneonetwo wrote:
               | You didn't read my comment.
               | 
               | I agree with you scientific papers MUST ADHERE to the
               | scientific method. My comment wasn't even about that.
               | 
               | My comment was about how YOU don't UNDERSTAND what
               | SCIENCE IS.
               | 
               | Even as a researcher, many don't understand science. My
               | argument is definitive. Read it and you will learn
               | something new. It may not convince you otherwise on the
               | topic but it does show how baseless your "science" claims
               | are given that you don't fully understand it yourself.
        
               | pavlov wrote:
               | Were the pyramids of Giza built by aliens? Well, it sure
               | looks that way if you focus exclusively on evidence
               | that's open to your preferred interpretation... And as
               | for the all opposing evidence, nobody can disprove that
               | it's just the aliens trying to hide their tracks.
               | 
               | Machine cognition is a similarly extraordinary claim
               | that's going to need a lot more evidence than a just-
               | right sequence of inputs and outputs.
        
               | oneoneonetwo wrote:
               | I don't know if you played with chatGPT but it's much
               | more than a just right sequence of inputs and outputs.
               | 
               | I have already incorporated into my daily use (as a
               | programmer). It has huge flaws but the output is
               | anecdotally amazing enough that the claim of "cognition"
               | is not as extraordinary as you think it is.
               | 
               | Especially given the fact that we don't even fully
               | understand what cognition is, the claim that it is NOT
               | cognition is equally just as crazy.
        
               | gillesjacobs wrote:
               | Let me falsify your claim immediately: the inputs of
               | these models are nothing like the inputs a human
               | receives, subword tokens do not even match up with
               | lexical items (visually, textually and semantically).
               | 
               | You seem to agree with me even though your interpretation
               | of falsifiability is inverted: I am not asking that
               | authors make a claim that their models do not mimick
               | human intelligence. Like OP, I ask them that they do not
               | make that positive claim, i.e. omit humanising language
               | unless they can substantiate it with evidence.
        
               | oneoneonetwo wrote:
               | It's an invalid falsification.
               | 
               | The input to chatGPT is a textual interface, the output
               | is letters on a screen. That is the exact same interface
               | as if I were chatting with a human.
               | 
               | Your getting into the technicalities of intermediary
               | inputs and outputs. Well sure... analog data seen by the
               | nueral wetware of human brains IS obviously different
               | from the textual digital data inputted into the ML model.
               | HOWEVER, we are looking for an isomorphism here. Similar
               | to how a emulated playstation on a computer is very
               | different then a physical playstation... an internal
               | isomorphism STILL exists between hardware and the
               | software emulating the hardware.
               | 
               | We do not know if such an isomorphism exists between
               | chatGPT and the human brain. This isomorphism is
               | basically the crystallized essence of what cognition is
               | if we could define it. If one does exists it's not
               | perfect there are missing things. But it is niave to say
               | that some form isomorphism isn't there AT ALL. It also
               | niave to say that there is FOR SURE an isomorphism.
               | 
               | The most rational and scientific thing at this point is
               | to speculate. Maybe what chatGPT is, is something vaguely
               | isomorphic to cognition. Keyword: maybe.
               | 
               | It is NOT an unreasonable speculation GIVEN what we KNOW
               | and DON'T KNOW.
        
         | joe_the_user wrote:
         | _People do this because mirroring cognition to machine learning
         | lends credence that their specific modeling mechanism mimicks
         | human understanding and so is closer "to the real thing"._
         | 
         | Doesn't this also involve people not having another category
         | aside from "cognition" to put natural language processing acts
         | in? How many neural net constructors have a rigorously
         | developed framework describing what "cognition" is?
         | 
         | I mean, there's a common counter argument to the "this is not
         | cognition" position. That is: "you're just using 'cognition' as
         | a placeholder for whatever these systems can't do". I don't
         | think that counter-argument is true or characterizes the
         | position well but it's important to frame one's position so it
         | doesn't seem to be subject to this counter-argument.
        
           | gillesjacobs wrote:
           | > Doesn't this also involve people not having another
           | category aside from "cognition" to put natural language
           | processing acts in?
           | 
           | Yes, of course this might be an even more primary reason; do
           | not attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness.
           | However, AI researchers should be wary of their language,
           | that point is hammered in most curricula I have seen. So at
           | the least it is negligence.
           | 
           | > I mean, there's a common counter argument to the "this is
           | not cognition" position. That is: "you're just using
           | 'cognition' as a placeholder for whatever these systems can't
           | do".
           | 
           | Very valid point, but we know current deep learning
           | mechanisms do not mimick human learning, language
           | understanding and production in any way. They are far too
           | simplified and specific for that.
           | 
           | Neural network activation functions are a far cry from neural
           | spiking models and biological neural connectivity is far more
           | complex than the networks used in deep learning. The
           | attention mechanism that drives recent LLMs is also claimed
           | to have some biological similarities, but upon closer
           | inspection drawing strong analogies is not credible [1].
           | computer vs. human visual recognition tasks it falls apart
           | and higher-level visual concepts. [2]
           | 
           | 1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2020.00
           | 02...
           | 
           | 2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08764
        
         | gillesjacobs wrote:
         | Not to shoot across the bow of CS Engineers but the trend I
         | spot (tentatively) is that it is pure computer science folk
         | that most often do this. In NLP you have a mix of people coming
         | from pure CS and signal processing (the latter esp. in speech
         | processing) and others who come from linguistics or other
         | humanities.
         | 
         | The CS people seem all too happy to humanise computation,
         | probably because they had less direct teaching regarding the
         | cognitive mechanisms behind cognition and language production.
        
         | Zababa wrote:
         | I'm not really sure about the context here, but I know that I
         | tend to humanize AIs, for example interacting with ChatGPT like
         | with a regular human being, because I'm being nice to him and
         | he's being nice to me in return. I don't know if it's more like
         | being nice to a human, or more like taking good care of your
         | tools so they will take good care of you, but it just feels
         | better for me.
        
       | nathan_compton wrote:
       | This will hardly seem like a controversial opinion, but LLM are
       | overhyped. Its certainly impressive to see the things people do
       | with them, but they seem pretty cherry-picked to me. When I sat
       | down with ChatGPT for a day to see if it could help me with
       | literally any project I'm currently actually interested in doing
       | it mostly failed or took so much prompting and fiddling that I'd
       | rather have just written the code or done the reading myself.
       | 
       | You have to be very credulous to think for even a second that
       | anything like a human or even animal mentation is going on with
       | these models unless your interaction with them is anything but
       | glancing.
       | 
       | Things I tried:
       | 
       | 1) there are certain paradigms I find useful for game
       | programming. I tried to use ChatGPT to implement these systems in
       | my favorite programming language. It gave me code that generally
       | speaking made no sense. It was very clear that it did not
       | understand how code actually works. Eg: I asked it to use a hash
       | table to make a certain task more efficient and it just created a
       | temporary hash table in the inner loop which it then threw away
       | when the loop was finished. The modification did not make the
       | code more efficient than the previous version and missed the
       | point of the suggestion entirely, even after repeated attempts to
       | get it to correct the issue.
       | 
       | 2) I'm vaguely interested in exploring SU(7) for a creative
       | project. Asked to generate code to deal with this group resulted
       | in clearly absurd garbage that again clearly indicated that while
       | ChatGPT can generate vaguely plausible text about groups it
       | doesn't actually understand anything about them. Eg: ChatGPT can
       | say that SU(7) is made of matrices with unit norm but when asked
       | to generate examples failed to generate any with this property.
       | 
       | 3) A very telling experiment is to ask ChatGPT to generate logo
       | code that draws anything beyond simple shapes. Totally unable to
       | do so for obvious reasons.
       | 
       | Using ChatGPT convinced me that if this technology is going to
       | disrupt anything, its going to be _search_ rather than _people_.
       | Its just a search engine with the benefit that it can do some
       | simple analogizing and the downside that it has no idea how
       | anything in the real world works and will confidently produce
       | total garbage without telling you.
        
         | Zababa wrote:
         | > This will hardly seem like a controversial opinion, but LLM
         | are overhyped. Its certainly impressive to see the things
         | people do with them, but they seem pretty cherry-picked to me.
         | When I sat down with ChatGPT for a day to see if it could help
         | me with literally any project I'm currently actually interested
         | in doing it mostly failed or took so much prompting and
         | fiddling that I'd rather have just written the code or done the
         | reading myself.
         | 
         | > You have to be very credulous to think for even a second that
         | anything like a human or even animal mentation is going on with
         | these models unless your interaction with them is anything but
         | glancing.
         | 
         | I've used ChatGPT, and I'd say it's right now as useful as a
         | google search, which is already a lot. Most humans would be
         | absolutely unable to help me (and probably you) for your
         | projects because they aren't specialized in that area. That's
         | not even talking about animals. I love my cats but they've
         | never really helped me when programming.
        
         | alsodumb wrote:
         | I hope ChatGPT in its current form will not be used for search.
         | As my friend says it, ChatGPT is not intelligent, it's just
         | capable of creating responses like it's knows everything. The
         | things it hallucinates is likely going to spread misinformation
         | and make it harder for the masses to search for true, factual
         | information.
         | 
         | The other part is webtraffic: Google in theory could have
         | created an interactive, conversational style search engine
         | (with it without LLMs) if they wanted to, but a lot of websites
         | would have complained about Google taking away traffic from
         | them. I believe the same happened when Google started showing
         | it's own reviews instead of redirecting to Yelp. I wonder how
         | openAI or any LLM powered search is going to deal with it. They
         | don't have to worry about it anytime soon, they still have a
         | lot of time to get to a stage where they come anywhere close to
         | the number of queries Google handles in a day, but it'll be
         | interesting to see how things go.
        
           | nathan_compton wrote:
           | I agree that I'd still rather use a search engine over a
           | small set of sites than ChatGPT for exactly the reasons you
           | suggest and others. But I don't see ChatGPT as having a lot
           | of utility beyond functioning as a search interface for
           | credulous dummies. I mean if I were literally developing a
           | chatbot then clearly its a pretty interesting technology
           | (assuming its problems can be tamed or censored somehow), but
           | beyond that I don't really get it.
        
             | solidasparagus wrote:
             | The problem you are running into is that you are
             | overindexing on the fact that LLMs will sometimes be wrong
             | and you are used to using technology that is basically
             | always right. But we are in the early stages of LLM
             | adoption - correctness will improve (see for example
             | citation driven LLM-search) but more importantly, the set
             | of LLM-driven applications that can be probabilistically
             | correct and still wildly useful will grow.
             | 
             | LLMs like ChatGPT are just so damn cheap for the power they
             | provide, it's inevitable
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | Thing is, ChatGPT is already incredibly useful for searching
           | random things you know enough about you can evaluate
           | responses critically. The alternative here is doing a regular
           | search, and wading through SEO-bloated, ad-laden content
           | marketing "articles". The quality and reliability of
           | information is about the same (or even favoring ChatGPT), but
           | without 90% of the text that's just filler, without bullshit,
           | ads, upsells, tracking scripts, etc. I tried it a few times
           | and it's a _much_ better experience than the web. I 'm gonna
           | be using it for as long as it lasts.
        
             | nathan_compton wrote:
             | Yeah, but its not as reliable as just restricting your
             | search to Wikipedia or the appropriate academic journals or
             | even chatting with a librarian!
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Sure, when the topic matters or I need to study it in
               | depth, I can still go to Wikipedia or PubMed or Arxiv.
               | 
               | But there are plenty of searches one does that are
               | trivial, or serve to illuminate the problem space, and
               | cover topics that in which I can rely on common sense to
               | correct wrong advice. And the issue with non-technical
               | topics, the kind applicable to mass audience - like e.g.
               | cooking or parenting or hygiene - are _very_ hard to
               | search about online, because all results are bullshit
               | pseudo articles written to drive traffic and deliver ads.
               | So it 's not that ChatGPT is so good, but more that
               | Internet for normal people is complete trash, and ChatGPT
               | nicely cuts straight through it.
        
               | b3morales wrote:
               | But if so this isn't because of its nature (the fact that
               | it's an LLM), but because of its inputs. An LLM fed the
               | same bullshit pseudo articles you refer to would likewise
               | spit out more bullshit. If ChatGPT works it's because its
               | sources have been carefully curated.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Fair. But the practical reality right now is that ChatGPT
               | delivers useful results without the noise, whereas normal
               | web search does not. It blows the web out of the water
               | when it comes to value to effort ratio of generic web
               | searches. It won't last forever, but I'm enjoying it for
               | as long as I can.
        
               | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
               | Indeed. If I could have the Google from 20 years ago, I
               | probably wouldn't be so impressed with ChatGPT as search
               | engine.
               | 
               | But with the Google (and the web) of today, where it's
               | practically impossible to find reliable information about
               | many subjects without adding "site:reddit.com" or
               | "wikipedia", I find it extremely useful.
        
           | albystein wrote:
           | The problem of hallucination in LLMs is a well-known and
           | studied problem and solutions have been proposed to counter
           | it. The most promising one is augmenting LLMs with a
           | retrieval system. This involves sourcing a large database of
           | factual information, say journal articles, over which the LLM
           | uses an information retrieval system(search engine) to
           | extract information on which its generated output is
           | conditioned. Recent job postings from OpenAI suggest that's
           | their next step of development for these LLMs.
           | 
           | I think critics of these LLMs are missing the point about the
           | excitement around them. People are excited because of the
           | rate of progress/improvement from just two years or a year
           | ago. These systems have come a long way, and if you
           | extrapolate that progress into the future, I predict majority
           | of these shortcomings getting resolved
        
         | genidoi wrote:
         | The difference in wether you think ChatGPT is game changing or
         | another overhyped LLM seems to come down to:
         | 
         | 1) do you acknowledge prompt engineering is a real skill set?
         | 
         | 2) are you willing to improve your prompt engineering skill set
         | through research and iteration?
         | 
         | There is much to learn about prompt engineering from that
         | "Linux VM in ChatGPT" post and other impressive examples (where
         | the goal of is to constrain ChatGPT to only engage in a
         | specific task)
        
         | axg11 wrote:
         | I disagree that LLMs are overhyped, but it's very subjective.
         | Are current LLMs a few steps from AGI? No. Will LLMs change the
         | computing landscape? Yes, I believe they will.
         | 
         | ChatGPT, without any major changes, is already the best tool
         | out there for answering programming questions. Nothing else
         | comes close. I can ask it to provide code for combining two
         | APIs and it will give useful and clean output. No need to
         | trudge through documentation, SEO-hacked articles, or 10
         | different Stack Overflow answers. Output quality will only
         | improve from here. Does it sometimes make mistakes? Yes. There
         | are also mistakes in many of the top SO answers, especially as
         | your questions become more obscure.
         | 
         | Aside from programming, how many other fields are there where
         | LLMs will become an indispensable tool? I have a PhD and
         | ChatGPT can write a more coherent paragraph on my thesis topic
         | than most people in my field. It does this in seconds. If you
         | give a human enough time, they will be able to do better than
         | ChatGPT. The problem is, we're already producing more science
         | within niche scientific fields than most scientists could ever
         | read. As an information summary tool, I think LLMs will be
         | revolutionary. LLMs can help individuals leverage knowledge in
         | a way that's impossible today and has been impossible for the
         | last 30 years since the explosion in the number of scientific
         | publications.
        
           | nathan_compton wrote:
           | It can reproduce a statistically plausible paragraph,
           | certainly. But there is a great deal more to research than
           | producing statistically plausible paragraphs. It doesn't
           | _understand_ anything!
           | 
           | I've actually worked on a project where there have been
           | attempts to use GPT like models to summarize scientific
           | results and the problem is it gets shit wrong all the time!
           | You have to be an expert to separate the wheat from the
           | chaff. It operates like a mendacious search engine pretending
           | to be a person.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | The problem is that we need to pair generative models with
             | verification systems. We have the models, but no
             | verification yet. Fortunately code and math are easier to
             | verify. Some things require simulation. In other cases you
             | can substitute an ensemble of solutions & picking the most
             | frequent answer as consistency based verification. But for
             | each domain we need to create verifiers and that will take
             | some time.
             | 
             | The good thing is that we'll be able to generate training
             | data with our models by filtering the junk with the
             | verifiers. Then we can retrain the models. It's important
             | because we are getting to the limit of available training
             | data. We need to generate more data, but it's worthless
             | unless we verify it. If we succeed we can train GPT-5.
             | Human data will be just 1%, the race is on to generate the
             | master dataset of the future. I read in a recent paper that
             | such a method was used to improve text captions in the
             | LAION dataset. https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/
        
               | lambdatronics wrote:
               | >we need to pair generative models with verification
               | systems >code and math are easier to verify
               | 
               | I would love to see a two-stage pipeline using a LLM to
               | convert natural language specifications into formal
               | specifications for something like Dafny, and then follow
               | up with another model like AlphaZero that would generate
               | code & assertions to help the verifier. This seems like
               | something that a major group like DeepMind or OpenAI
               | could pull off in a few years.
        
           | goatlover wrote:
           | One concern here is that if ChatGPT replaces the need to go
           | to websites like Stack Overflow or Wikipedia, what happens to
           | them? Do they stick around if the only people who visit them
           | are there to feed new stuff to chatGPT? Also, how does
           | chatGPT get hold of papers and articles behind pay walls? How
           | much of the scientific publications are free?
        
         | macrolocal wrote:
         | Points taken, but LLMs are still outpacing expert predictions,
         | so empirically they're under-hyped.
        
         | btbuildem wrote:
         | It is very, very good with language, and very bad with facts
         | and numbers. That's an oversimplification, but also the gist of
         | it.
         | 
         | You have to recognize how it works, why it works - then you can
         | use it as basically an incredible superpower force multiplier.
        
         | monkmartinez wrote:
         | I disagree and think this is a very controversial opinion.
         | 
         | Playing around with it last night convinced me that LLM's are a
         | huge, game changing technology. I was trying to decide which
         | material to use for an upcoming project. The model doesn't use
         | the internet without some hacking, so I had it write a program
         | in python using the tkinter UI kit.
         | 
         | I asked it to create a UI with input boxes for material, weight
         | of material, price and loss due to wastage. The program takes
         | all of those inputs and converts the material into grams from
         | KG, pounds, ounces. It then calculates the price per gram and
         | takes a loss percentage (estimate given by user). It then
         | writes a text file and saves it to a directory.
         | 
         | I literally pasted the code into VS code and had to change
         | Tkinter to tkinter. Hit run and it worked flawlessly. I have
         | NEVER used tkinter and it took about 30 minutes from start to
         | finish.
         | 
         | This morning, I asked my 9th grade son what he is learning in
         | 9th grade biology. He told me he is learning cellular
         | endocytosis. I asked chapGPT to explain endocytosis like I was
         | a 5 year old and read it to him... he says; "Ask it to explain
         | it like a scientist now." After that he said it was a really
         | good and we started asking it all kinds of biology questions.
         | 
         | I happen to agree that search will be the first thing
         | disrupted. However, I think simply saying "search" doesn't come
         | close to capturing how deep this will change the way we think,
         | use and progress in terms of the way we define "search" right
         | now.
        
           | nathan_compton wrote:
           | I've got a young kid and I'd think twice before letting this
           | model explain any science to him. If your criteria for
           | whether a model is good is "it fooled a 9th grader" well, I
           | don't know what to tell you.
           | 
           | I think you have a point about your tkinter example. That
           | kind of stuff _is_ a lot more convenient than googling and
           | copying and pasting code. But if you push it beyond stuff
           | that you could easily find on stack exchange or in
           | documentation somewhere it doesn't work that well. Like I
           | said, its a search engine with a lot of downsides and some
           | upsides.
        
             | marcinzm wrote:
             | > If your criteria for whether a model is good is "it
             | fooled a 9th grader" well, I don't know what to tell you.
             | 
             | Fooling a 9th grader is amazing. That's a pretty well
             | formed human being right there except with less life
             | experience. Fundamentally no different from you in general
             | reasoning terms except on a smaller set of information. So
             | fooling you is merely a question of model size.
        
               | radford-neal wrote:
               | "Fool" is the operative word here. ChatGPT is quite
               | capable of producing very plausible sounding text about
               | biology that is totally incorrect. See, for example, the
               | example in my comment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/
               | 28XBkxauWQAMZeXiF/?commentId...
        
               | marcinzm wrote:
               | You're basically complaining that a single model doesn't
               | have full knowledge of every single area of all of human
               | knowledge. It's got decent knowledge of most areas
               | including programming with probably better overall
               | knowledge than a high school student. That's downright
               | amazing and probably more knowledge than any single human
               | actually has. The rest is likely a matter of improvement
               | along the same lines versus some radical redesign.
        
               | radford-neal wrote:
               | Well, I agree that it's amazing - it almost always
               | produces grammatical output, for instance. But it's not a
               | reliable way of obtaining knowledge. One should not, in
               | particular, try to learn about biology by asking ChatGPT
               | questions. It often produces made-up stuff that is just
               | wrong. And it's very confidently wrong, with the output
               | often coming across like someone barely concealing their
               | contempt that you might doubt them.
               | 
               | It may or may not be fixable without radical redesign.
               | The underlying training objective of mimicking what
               | humans might say may be too at variance with an objective
               | of producing true statements.
        
               | sarchertech wrote:
               | My wife (a physician) asked it multiple medical questions
               | and the majority of the time they were dangerously wrong,
               | but looked perfectly fine to me.
               | 
               | I asked it a series of questions about my area of
               | expertise and they were wrong but looked perfectly fine
               | to my wife.
               | 
               | It even confidently "solved" the 2 generals problem with
               | a solution that looks completely plausible if you don't
               | already know that it won't work.
        
         | tshaddox wrote:
         | Maybe I'm just old, but there just isn't much that I want to
         | computers to tell me about that they don't already do a decent
         | job at. Everyone loves to complain about how bad Google search
         | is, but I very rarely find myself desperately looking for
         | something and unable to find it. There's certainly no normal
         | conversational interactions I can think of that I would love to
         | have with a computer but have been unable to before ChatGPT and
         | similar.
         | 
         | That limits how impressed I can be by ChatGPT and similar
         | beyond just being impressed by it on a purely technical level.
         | And it's certainly very technically impressive, but not in some
         | transcendental way. It's also very impressive how could recent
         | video games with ray tracing look, or how good computers are at
         | chess, or how many really cool databases there are these days,
         | or how fast computers can sort data.
        
         | fourfivefour wrote:
         | I used chatGPT to solve a sqlite bug involving a query that was
         | taking 4 seconds to run. I pasted the query and it identified
         | many possible issues with the query including the offending
         | problem (it was missing an index on a timestamp).
         | 
         | It also passed 3/4 of our companies interview process including
         | forging a resume that passed the recruiter filter.
         | 
         | That being said, I COMPLETELY agree with you that chatGPT will
         | not disrupt anything. Your example cases are completely as
         | VALID as are my example cases.
         | 
         | chatGPT is, however, the precursor to the thing that will
         | disrupt everything.
        
         | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
         | Do my core work? No, it's not going to, at the moment.
         | 
         | But it's already saving me nontrivial amounts of time on tasks
         | like "write a polite followup email reminding person X, who
         | didn't reply to the email I sent last week, that the deadline
         | for doing Y expires at date Z".
         | 
         | I typically spend at least 3-4 minutes finding the words for
         | such a trivial email and thinking how to write it best, e.g.
         | trying to make the other person react without coming across as
         | annoying, etc. (Being a non-native English speaker who
         | communicates mostly in English at work may be a factor).
         | ChatGPT is really good with words. Using it, it takes a few
         | seconds and I can use the output with only trivial edits.
        
         | Jack000 wrote:
         | LLMs may be overhyped, but transformers in general are _under_
         | hyped.
         | 
         | LLMs make a lot of mistakes because they don't actually know
         | what words mean. The key thing is though - it's _much harder_
         | to generate coherent text when you don 't know what the words
         | mean. In a similar vein it's completely unreasonable to expect
         | an LLM to perform visual tasks when it literally has no sense
         | of sight.
         | 
         | The fact that it can kind of sort of do these things at all is
         | evidence of the super-human generalization potential of the
         | transformer architecture.
         | 
         | This isn't very obvious for English because we have prior
         | knowledge of what words mean, but it's a lot more obvious when
         | applied to languages humans don't understand, like DNA and
         | amino acid sequences.
        
           | fourfivefour wrote:
           | How can these things not know what words mean? Did you not
           | see how they created a virtual machine under chatGPT? They
           | told it to imitate bash and they typed ls, and cat jokes.txt
           | and it outputted things completely identical to what you'd
           | expect. Look it up. https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-
           | virtual-machine-inside/
           | 
           | I don't see how you can explain this as not knowing what
           | words mean. It KNOWS.
        
         | hodgesrm wrote:
         | > This will hardly seem like a controversial opinion, but LLM
         | are overhyped.
         | 
         | As the [excellent] paper points out, LLMs are complex functions
         | that can be embedded in systems to provide plausible answers to
         | a prompt. Here's the money sentence.                 LLMs are
         | generative mathematical models of the statistical distribution
         | of tokens in the vast public corpus of humangenerated text,
         | where the tokens        in question include words, parts of
         | words, or individual characters including        punctuation
         | marks.
         | 
         | Rather than focus on the limitations of this approach to answer
         | general queries, which are manifest, it seems more interesting
         | to ask a different question. Under what circumstances do LLMs
         | give answers that are reliably equivalent to or better than
         | humans? The answer would:
         | 
         | 1. Illuminate where we can use LLMs safely.
         | 
         | 2. Direct work to make them better.
         | 
         | It's already impressive that within certain scopes ChatGPT
         | gives very good answers, indeed better than most humans.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > Under what circumstances do LLMs give answers that are
           | reliably equivalent to or better than humans?
           | 
           |  _Which_ humans? Humans give a... fairly wide range of
           | responses.
        
             | hodgesrm wrote:
             | I'm a history major and love classical history. My first
             | question to ChatGPT was:
             | 
             | > Why was Julius Caesar murdered?
             | 
             | The answer was the following, which would pass a standard
             | exam question on the topic. It exhibits [the appearance of]
             | multi-layer reasoning and has a nice conclusion.
             | 
             | > Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44
             | BC by a group of Roman senators who believed he had become
             | too powerful and posed a threat to the Roman Republic. The
             | senators were concerned that Caesar had ambitions to become
             | king, which would have ended the Republic and given him
             | absolute power. The senators were also concerned about
             | Caesar's growing popularity with the people of Rome. They
             | believed that assassinating him was the only way to prevent
             | him from becoming too powerful and destroying the Republic.
             | 
             | It's interesting to note that most of the evidence for this
             | answer including 2000 years of interpretation is available
             | in textual form _on the Internet_. It 's easily accessible
             | to LLMs.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | _Average_ humans? Within 1 stdev from the mean?
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | > Average humans? Within 1 stdev from the mean?
               | 
               | This implies that performance has unqiue natural,
               | objective, ratio-level (or at least, a unique consistent
               | interval-level) measure. Otherwise the mean is, itself,
               | meaningless.
               | 
               | "How well you answer a question" doesn't seem to fit
               | that, its maybe at best a (somewhat subjective, still)
               | ordinal quality, so the median (or mode) is the only
               | useful average.
               | 
               | But I think you'll find that without restricting things
               | more than "humans", both the median and mode of responses
               | to most prompts is... quite bad.
        
           | nathan_compton wrote:
           | This reminds me that coding with ChatGPT felt like pair
           | programming with a not super smart person who could google
           | and type really fast. Not really fun!
        
         | armoredkitten wrote:
         | Please don't reduce LLM down to ChatGPT (or generative models
         | more generally). People are using LLM for real-world problems
         | every day. BERT and its descendants/variants are used all over
         | the place for many different problems in natural language
         | processing. I and my team have used it on dozens of different
         | projects, mainly in classifying text documents and inputs. And
         | it works very well. Multilingual LLMs are responsible for the
         | huge improvements in machine translation; my team has to deal
         | with text in multiple languages, and these models are vital
         | there too. We have used LLM on real-world problems that are in
         | production _now_ and are saving hundreds of person-hours of
         | tedious work.
         | 
         | ChatGPT? Yeah, it's neat. I'm sure people will find some useful
         | niche for it. And I do think generative models will eventually
         | have a big impact, once researchers find good ways to ground
         | them to data and facts. This is already an active area of
         | research -- combining generative LLMs with info retrieval
         | methods, or targeting it to a specific context. (Meta just gave
         | a talk last week at the NeurIPS conference about teaching a
         | model to play Diplomacy, a game that mostly involves talking
         | and negotiating deals with the other players. ChatGPT is too
         | broad for that -- they just need a model that can talk about
         | the state of the game board.) So in general, I'm optimistic
         | about generative LLMs. But ChatGPT...is just a toy, really.
         | It's not the solution -- it's one of the signposts along the
         | way toward the real solution. It's a measure of progress.
        
           | hodgesrm wrote:
           | I wouldn't undersell ChatGPT. It's like a repl for a
           | particular LLM. Maybe there are others but it's the first
           | time many people have gotten direct access to the technology.
           | Sometimes the medium _is_ the message.
        
         | mikodin wrote:
         | Edit: I also see that I am falling prey to exactly what the
         | paper itself is talking about.
         | 
         | "The more adept LLMs become at mimicking human language, the
         | more vulnerable we become to anthropomorphism, to seeing the
         | systems in which they are embedded as more human-like than they
         | really are. This trend is amplified by the natural tendency to
         | use philosophically loaded terms, such as "knows", "believes",
         | and "thinks", when describing these systems."
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | An ignorant statement / question I have is why are you using it
         | write code? It's a chatbot, no?
         | 
         | As you've mentioned, it's a really powerful search, and is like
         | having a conversation with someone who is literally the
         | internet.
         | 
         | For example "What is the glycemic index of oatmeal?"
         | 
         | "What is Eihei Dogen's opinion of the Self and how does it
         | differ from Bassui's?"
         | 
         | I get highly detailed and accurate output with these.
         | 
         | The first question is simple and the second is far from it.
         | It's breaking down two Zen masters experiences and comparing
         | them in an amazing way.
         | 
         | I've been thoroughly impressed with Chat GPT so far.
         | 
         | Ask it to breakdown the high level points of a book you've
         | read.
         | 
         | Ask it to rewrite a song in the style of a different artist.
         | 
         | It's so cool, I feel like I legitimately have an answer to any
         | random question at my finger tips and have to do zero filtering
         | for it.
        
           | nathan_compton wrote:
           | "An ignorant statement / question I have is why are you using
           | it write code? It's a chatbot, no?
           | 
           | I've found it so incredibly useful to simply replace Google."
           | 
           | Heard of Stack Exchange?
           | 
           | I teach and I expect many students to use language models
           | like ChatGPT to do their homework, which involves writing
           | code. Lots of what people are doing with it is coding (there
           | have been quite a few posts here using it that way).
           | 
           | I've actually also used ChatGPT for literary/song writing
           | experiments and it stinks, aesthetically. The lyrics it
           | wrote, even with a lot of prompting, were totally asinine.
           | And how could they not be?
        
       | RosanaAnaDana wrote:
       | I like the discussion, but this article 'feels' like more Luddite
       | goalpost moving, and is reflective of a continuous sentiment I
       | feel strains so much of the conversation around intelligence,
       | agentism, and ai going on today.
       | 
       | I think that because we lack a coherent understanding of what it
       | means to be intelligent at an individual level, as well as what
       | it means to be an individual, we're missing much of the point of
       | what's happening right now. The new line in the sand always seems
       | to be justified based on an argument whose lyrics rhyme with
       | identity, individual, self, etc. It seems like there will be no
       | accepting of a thing that may have intelligence if there is no
       | discernable individual involved. Chomsky is basically making the
       | same arguments right now.
       | 
       | I think we'll see something that we can't distinguish from hard
       | advanced general intelligence, prob in the next 3-5 years, and
       | probably still have not made any real advancement into
       | understanding what it means to be intelligent or what it means to
       | be an individual.
        
         | anyonecancode wrote:
         | Increasingly I don't think the question of "what is
         | intelligence" is so useful or relevant here. It feels a bit
         | like arguing over whether the "artificial horse" that started
         | appearing at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th C were
         | actually horses. Cars weren't, and still aren't, but that
         | misses the point.
         | 
         | AI isn't intelligent, and never will be, and I don't think that
         | matters all that much.
        
           | RosanaAnaDana wrote:
           | I think I agree in sentiment, and I'm wondering what your ake
           | is on the article/ current discussions article.
           | 
           | I guess my premise is that I don't think we have a useful
           | enough definition of intelligence because the ones I see
           | people writing articles on seem to be dependent or defined by
           | agency, and specifically humanish forms of agency. So I guess
           | your point would be "these systems aren't intelligent, but
           | that's not relevant"? I suppose I out the issue at the
           | currency of the definition of intelligence. It's seemed to be
           | very much synonymous with "how humans do things", making it
           | somewhat impossible to give charity to the arguments
           | presented in this paper with the caveats on "not
           | anthropomorphising". Like I can't compare these two things if
           | your definition of intelligence is fundementally based on
           | what "Anthros" do or do not do and simultaneously not engage
           | in anthropromorism.
           | 
           | To follow on your point, if these things aren't displaying
           | "intelligence", but that's also not the point, what then are
           | they displaying?
           | 
           | It seems to me this is a failure of introspection on the part
           | of AI philosophy to recognize how limited our understanding
           | of "HI" is.
        
             | anyonecancode wrote:
             | I think the question of "what is intelligence" is an
             | interesting one, and technology (especially computer
             | technology) gives us some interesting angles to look at it,
             | but I think it dominates the conversation
             | disproportionately to its importance. Things like ChatGPT,
             | and the technologies they presage, will absolutely have a
             | significant impact on society, economics, etc, but getting
             | tangled up in questions of "what is intelligence" impede
             | rather than help us to think through these implications and
             | prepare for them.
             | 
             | Put another way -- I do not believe the future holds Blade
             | Runner replicants. If we're not careful, though, it does
             | hold Blade Runner corporations. While, philosophically,
             | it's interesting to ask if androids dream of electric
             | sheep, that question isn't very helpful in trying to nudge
             | the future in a more utopic rather than dystopic direction.
        
         | lambdatronics wrote:
         | Edsger Dijkstra: "The question of whether Machines Can Think
         | (...) is about as relevant as the question of whether
         | Submarines Can Swim."
        
         | plutonorm wrote:
         | I 100% agree. I would also add that most of the arguments are
         | driven by emotion. The truth is that we dont know what
         | intelligence means and we dont know what kinds of system have
         | intelligence. The only tools we have to measure intelligence
         | are those designed for humans. When we test the machines they
         | do better than terribly and they are improving very quickly.
         | There is no possible logical argument you can put forward
         | against their intelligence in the face of this evidence from
         | these human tests - because we cannot define intelligence in
         | any other way than these tests. Claims against intelligent
         | machines always boil down to 'obviously they aren't' and the
         | arguments have have to be this shallow simply because they have
         | no firm footing from which to base their argument.
        
       | Chirono wrote:
       | This paper, and most other places i've seen it argued that
       | language models can't possibly be conscious, sentient, thinking
       | etc, rely heavily on the idea that llms are 'just' doing
       | statistical prediction of tokens.
       | 
       | I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I'm not
       | entirely sure that's not what I'm doing in typing out this
       | message. My brain is 'just' chemistry, so clearly can't have
       | beliefs or be conscious, right?
       | 
       | But more relevant is the fact that llms like ChatGPT are only
       | pre-trained on pure statistical generation, followed by further
       | tuning through reinforcement learning. So ChatGPT is no longer
       | simply doing pure statistical modelling, though of course the
       | interface of calculating logits for the next token remains the
       | same.
       | 
       | note: i'm not saying i think llms are conscious. I don't think
       | the question even makes much sense. I am saying all the arguments
       | that i've seen for why they aren't have been very unsatisfying.
        
         | goatlover wrote:
         | > I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I'm
         | not entirely sure that's not what I'm doing in typing out this
         | message. My brain is 'just' chemistry, so clearly can't have
         | beliefs or be conscious, right?
         | 
         | Your brain is part of an organism who's ancestors evolved to
         | survive the real world, not by matching tokens. As such,
         | language is a skill that helps humans survive and reproduce,
         | not a tool used to mimic human language. Chemistry is the wrong
         | level to evaluate cognition at.
         | 
         | Also, you can note the differences between how actual neurons
         | work compared to language models as other posters have
         | mentioned.
        
       | mrayder wrote:
       | For philosophical standpoint it would perhaps be wise to ask what
       | is the purpose of LLM's in general?
       | 
       | Should they somehow help humans to increase their understanding
       | not only of the languages, their differences but also knowledge
       | of what is true and what isn't?
       | 
       | Perhaps it could be said that if anything there are helpful as an
       | extension of humans imperfect and limited memory.
       | 
       | Should the emphasis be put on improving the interactions between
       | the LMM's and humans in a way that they would facilitate
       | learning?
       | 
       | Great paper written at the time when more humans have been
       | acquainted to LMM's due to technological abstraction and creation
       | of easily accessible interfaces. (openAI chat)
        
       | canjobear wrote:
       | I'll agree to stop saying LM's "think" and "know" things if you
       | can tell me precisely what those mean for humans.
        
         | goatlover wrote:
         | Maybe there isn't a precise definition, but clearly for humans
         | thinking and knowing is related to having bodies that need to
         | survive in the world with other humans and organisms, which
         | involves communication and references to external and internal
         | things (how your body feels and what not). This is different
         | from pattern matching tokens, even if it reproduces a lot of
         | the same results, because human language creates a lot of
         | patterns that can be matched.
         | 
         | We could say both humans and LLMs are intelligent, but in a
         | different way.
        
           | hackinthebochs wrote:
           | >This is different from pattern matching tokens
           | 
           | But is it different in essential ways? This is not so clear.
           | Humans developed the capacity to learn, think, and
           | communicate in service to optimizing an objective function,
           | namely fitness in various environments. But there is an
           | analogous process going on with LLMs; they are constructed
           | such that they maximize an objective function, namely predict
           | the next token. But it is plausible that "understanding"
           | and/or "intelligence" is within the solution-space of such an
           | optimization routine. After all, it's not like "intelligence"
           | was explicitly trained for in the case of humans. Nature has
           | already demonstrated emergent function as a side-effect of an
           | unrelated optimizer.
        
       | skybrian wrote:
       | There's a way to anthropomorphize large language models that I
       | think is less misleading: they are like a well-read actor that
       | always "wants" to play "let's pretend." LLM's are trained on
       | "fill in the blank" which means they follow the "yes, and" rule
       | of improv. They are very willing to follow your lead and to
       | assume whatever role is necessary to play their part.
       | 
       | If you give them hints about what role you want by asking leading
       | questions, they will try to play along and pretend to hold
       | whatever opinions you might want from them.
       | 
       | What are useful applications for this sort of actor? It makes
       | sense that language translation works well because it's
       | pretending to be you, if you could speak a different language.
       | Asking them to pretend to be a Wikipedia article without giving
       | them the text to imitate is going to be hit and miss since
       | they're just as willing to pretend to be a fake Wikipedia
       | article, as they don't know the difference.
       | 
       | Testing an LLM to find out what it believes is unlikely to do
       | anything useful. It's going to pretend to believe whatever is
       | consistent with the role it's currently playing, and that role
       | may be chosen randomly if you don't give it any hints.
       | 
       | It can be helpful to use prompt engineering to try to nail down a
       | particular role, but like in improv, that role is going to drift
       | depending on what happens. You shouldn't forget that whatever the
       | prompt, it's still playing "let's pretend."
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | RosanaAnaDana wrote:
       | Without reading the article or looking it up: What country is
       | south of Rwanda?
        
         | macrolocal wrote:
         | Have you seen Neptune Frost yet? I want that keyboard jacket.
        
       | schizo89 wrote:
       | The paper discusses how these models operate and state that
       | they're only predict next series of token while somehow human
       | intelligence works otherwise. The marxist ideology has the law of
       | the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa --
       | which was formed in 19th century and performance of these models
       | is just another proof of it. I would argue that _emerging_
       | mechanics in AI models that we see with increased size of models
       | is no different than how our mind works. It's about emergence of
       | intelligence in complex systems -- and that a materialist
       | worldview central to the science.
        
       | CarbonCycles wrote:
       | This paper and a recent post by Sebastian Raschka (where he
       | decomposed a Forrester report about the uptake of technologies in
       | industry) is alluding to something I have witnessed in
       | system/control design and applied research.
       | 
       | Both LLMs and massive CV architectures are NOT the holistic
       | solution. Rather, they are the sensors and edge devices that have
       | now improved both the fidelity and reliability to a point where
       | even more interesting things can happen.
       | 
       | I present a relevant use case regarding robotic arm manipulation.
       | Before the latest SOTA CV algorithms were developed, the legacy
       | technology couldn't provide the fidelity and feedback needed.
       | Now, the embedded fusion of control systems, CV models, etc. we
       | are seeing robotic arms that can manipulate and sort items
       | previously deemed to be extremely difficult.
       | 
       | Research appears to follow the same pattern...observations and
       | hypothesis that were once deemed too difficult or impossible at
       | that time to validate are now common (e.g., Einstein's work with
       | relativity).
       | 
       | My head is already spinning on how many companies and non-
       | technical managers/executives are going to be sorely disappointed
       | in the next year or two that Stable Diffusion, Chat GPT, etc.
       | will deliver very little other than massive headaches for the
       | legal, engineering, recruiting teams that will have to deal with
       | this.
        
       | CrypticShift wrote:
       | > _sudden presence among us of exotic, mind-like entities might
       | precipitate a shift in the way we use familiar psychological
       | terms ... But it takes time for new language to settle, and for
       | new ways of talking to find their place in human affairs ...
       | Meanwhile, we should try to resist the siren call of
       | anthropomorphism._
       | 
       | Yes: Human analogies are not very useful because they create more
       | misunderstanding than they dissipate. Dumb ? Conscious ? No
       | thanks. IMO even the "i" in "AI" was already a (THE ?) wrong
       | choice. They thought we will soon figure out what Intelligence
       | is. Nope. Bad luck. And this "way of talking" (and thinking) is
       | unfortunately cemented today.
       | 
       | However, I'm all for using other analogies more often. We need
       | to. They may not be precise, but if they are well-chosen, they
       | speak to us better than any technical jargon (LLM anyone ?),
       | better than that "AI" term itself anyway.
       | 
       | Here is two I like (and never see much) :
       | 
       | - LLMs are like the Matrix (yes that one !), in the
       | straightforward sense that they simulate reality (through
       | language). But that simulation is distorted and sometimes even
       | verges on the dream ( _" what is real? what is not?"_, says the
       | machine)
       | 
       | - LLMs are like complex systems [1]. They are tapping into very
       | powerful natural processes where (high degree) order emerges from
       | randomness through complexity. We are witnessing the emergence of
       | a new kind of "entity" in a way strangely akin to
       | natural/physical evolutionary mechanisms.
       | 
       | We need to get more creative here and stop that boring smart VS
       | dumb or human VS machine ping pong game.
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
        
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