OpenAI \ ChatGPT

[odysseus2000]

Buffett & Munger on AI (3 mins), starts off slow:

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1654876 ... 92771?s=20

Regards,

[Mike4]

AI is not intelligent.

I too find the term AI, oxymoronic.

[odysseus2000]

AI is not intelligent.

I too find the term AI, oxymoronic.

What term would your prefer?

Regards,

[Sorcery]

Been busy with other aspects of my work, but finally got round to registering for ChatGPT v4 today and attempting to use it for something useful. Thought the day of the King's coronation was appropriate somehow.
Watched a few YouTube videos mentioned on this thread, which piqued my interest. Am not especially interested in the philosophical aspects (yet) such as is this product intelligent? More focused on the question, is it useful?

I was particularly interested in whether it could critique or find bugs in a software project I have been working on for roughly 23 years, lets call it OCR. It's possible that there are bugs on my side of things but they are unlikely to be huge ones. On the other hand I do think there are potential important improvements to be made in OCR particularly in the area of character&word prediction which ChatGPT seems to utilise well.

ChatGPT seems to be pass the Turing test, does it sound human from what is said/written? Yes but with attitude. Tick for ChatGPT.

I see the bug re Red Kite's classification has been fixed to now recognise it's name as a bird. Need to check the bird's pounce(?) speed though, it seems over the top fast. Tick for ChatGPT.

Ok so far.

Tried loading my most used (in CPU time) module into ChatGPT, cut & paste the entire module/file into it. Unfortunately too big. My C source file had 2300 lines in it with many trivial comments or brace {} lines. However the interface will only accept a maximum of 2048 characters (upon questioning). Untick for ChatGPT. There seem to be alternative ways of getting information into it, yet to be investigated.

Still, if I can do this rather than a real sweaty, smelly proper programming, then it's a relief.

[mc2fool]

I see the bug re Red Kite's classification has been fixed to now recognise it's name as a bird. Need to check the bird's pounce(?) speed though, it seems over the top fast. Tick for ChatGPT.

Ok so far.

Ahem.

Me: what is the fastest flying mammal?
ChatGPT: The fastest flying mammal is the Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis). These bats are known for their exceptional flight speed and agility. They are capable of reaching speeds up to 99 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour) when in rapid flight. Their streamlined bodies and long, narrow wings allow them to achieve impressive speeds while hunting for insects in the night sky.

[Well that is an improvement over before]

Me: what is the fastest aerial mammal?
ChatGPT: The fastest aerial mammal is the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus). While not technically capable of sustained flight like bats, the peregrine falcon is known for its incredible diving speed during hunting. When it goes into a hunting stoop or dive, it can reach speeds over 240 miles per hour (386 kilometers per hour), making it the fastest recorded animal in level flight. Its aerodynamic body shape, strong wings, and specialized adaptations enable it to achieve such remarkable speeds.

Oh dear....

[9873210]

...True.

And I'd just like to point out, once again, that a simulation of a 'thing' is not the thing itself.

But is "intelligence" a "thing"? A map is not the territory, but a simulation of a map is a map. Not the original map, but still a map.

[JohnB]

The "secret sauce" argument about intelligence in the AI community has been bouncing round for 70 years. But fundamentally if something acts in a way that an observer would label intelligent, its intelligent to that observer. "hey, that's dumb", can be a flaw in the observer as much as the system, as anyone writing political copy knows. And if the system understands the nuances of the problem better than the observer, then who is at fault.

The flying creature is just a bug, pure and simple. And bugs in software are easier to report, analyse and fix than bugs with people's preconceptions.

[CliffEdge]

The "secret sauce" argument about intelligence in the AI community has been bouncing round for 70 years. But fundamentally if something acts in a way that an observer would label intelligent, its intelligent to that observer. "hey, that's dumb", can be a flaw in the observer as much as the system, as anyone writing political copy knows. And if the system understands the nuances of the problem better than the observer, then who is at fault.

The flying creature is just a bug, pure and simple. And bugs in software are easier to report, analyse and fix than bugs with people's preconceptions.

The Turing test was always a crock. Turing was probably autistic.
There's an artwork, a picture, I forget what of, one of you will know, titled something like "this is not a pipe". Think it was Magritte.
If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, don't necessarily mean it's a duck. As I said before, AI doesn't play chess, humans play chess.
The real danger of AI is that the elite can persuade enough stupid humans to believe that AI entities are as valuable as humans. Already I hear the prole morons (and the elite crooks ie nobility) saying that maybe AI should be given rights.
Oh the irony, at last religion may protect the proles. Or not, going on religions ' record.
Frightening the beliefs of some posters on here.

[servodude]

Frightening the beliefs of some posters on here.

True.

But in this case I think it's more a case of Clarke's third law than anything else; probably won't stop the formation of cargo cults, but that's nothing new.

[dealtn]

. Turing was probably autistic.

The relevance of anyone's (probable) disability is what?

[mc2fool]

The flying creature is just a bug, pure and simple. And bugs in software are easier to report, analyse and fix than bugs with people's preconceptions.

Maybe, maybe not. Some people in the field think hallucinations are a feature!

"Recently, Microsoft employee Mikhail Parakhin, who works on Bing Chat, tweeted about Bing Chat's tendency to hallucinate and what causes it. "This is what I tried to explain previously: hallucinations = creativity," he wrote. "It tries to produce the highest probability continuation of the string using all the data at its disposal. Very often it is correct. Sometimes people have never produced continuations like this."

Parakhin said that those wild creative leaps are what make LLMs interesting. "You can clamp down on hallucinations, and it is super-boring," he wrote. "[It] answers 'I don't know' all the time or only reads what is there in the Search results (also sometimes incorrect). What is missing is the tone of voice: it shouldn't sound so confident in those situations."

Balancing creativity and accuracy is a challenge when it comes to fine-tuning language models like ChatGPT. On the one hand, the ability to come up with creative responses is what makes ChatGPT such a powerful tool for generating new ideas or unblocking writer's block. It also makes the models sound more human. On the other hand, accuracy to the source material is crucial when it comes to producing reliable information and avoiding confabulation. Finding the right balance between the two is an ongoing challenge for the development of language models, but it's one that is essential to produce a tool that is both useful and trustworthy."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/why-ai-chatbots-are-the-ultimate-bs-machines-and-how-people-hope-to-fix-them/

[JohnB]

Not unlike children then, who have elaborate fantasy worlds, but learn what is the real world.

[mc2fool]

Not unlike children then, who have elaborate fantasy worlds, but learn what is the real world.

Umm, no, I don't think that anthropomorphisation is an accurate analogy at all. The article is well worth reading, it explains why hallucinations [conflabulations] occur and what may or may not be able to be done about them and, indeed, as per the last quote, to what degree it should be done. It's not clear that it isn't just an inherent nature of the LLM method....

"...the best way to think about confabulation is to think about the very nature of large language models: The only thing they know how to do is to pick the next best word based on statistical probability..."

[odysseus2000]

Not unlike children then, who have elaborate fantasy worlds, but learn what is the real world.

Umm, no, I don't think that anthropomorphisation is an accurate analogy at all. The article is well worth reading, it explains why hallucinations [conflabulations] occur and what may or may not be able to be done about them and, indeed, as per the last quote, to what degree it should be done. It's not clear that it isn't just an inherent nature of the LLM method....

"...the best way to think about confabulation is to think about the very nature of large language models: The only thing they know how to do is to pick the next best word based on statistical probability..."

How exactly do children learn?

Do they not learn by finding something that fits with what they already know & then some thing else that fits with these things, slowly building an understanding of the world & finding sounds that describe what they know from other humans?

As far as I can tell the emergence of skills not specifically taught to AI is exactly the same process as one expects for a mechanism based on the human brain. For example an AI learns English & during its hunts for the next word finds a foreign language version of what it knows & before long with many such interactions it learns how to translate between languages. This ability & many others appears like magic, just as if you take a child to a foreign country the child quickly learns the new language.

It is currently very fashionable to deride AI, to give examples of its many failures & laugh, just as a stupid person might laugh & put their child down if the child says things that are not sensible, but in the by & by the child becomes an adult.

Many of the people who are laughing at AI & feeling superior are like the folk who ridiculed the internet, the World Wide Wait as they joked, but the internet grew up to become one of the most powerful tools ever invented & AI looks to be orders of magnitude more capable.

Ideally folk would study AI and then demand controls, but that requires work. It is much easier to get high on ridicule & stupidity & stick ones head in the sands of ignorance.

Regards,

[scotview]

Tried loading my most used (in CPU time) module into ChatGPT, cut & paste the entire module/file into it.

Thanks for that interesting and over my head post. Just one question which you might be capable of answering or having a stab at.

Is it fairly easy for ChatGPT to analyse code/logic as opposed to it providing mathematical, scientific or engineering solutions?

Thanks.

[9873210]

The Turing test was always a crock.

Turing was a mathematician. He recognized that there was no good definition of "intelligence" and proposed one. People who believe it is a crock are welcome to propose their own, but as far as I know nobody has a better one. The leading contender appears to be "I don't know what intelligence is but I know it when I see it" which is quite useless.

"The Turing test was always a crock" is a crock.

[mc2fool]

Umm, no, I don't think that anthropomorphisation is an accurate analogy at all. The article is well worth reading, it explains why hallucinations [conflabulations] occur and what may or may not be able to be done about them and, indeed, as per the last quote, to what degree it should be done. It's not clear that it isn't just an inherent nature of the LLM method....

"...the best way to think about confabulation is to think about the very nature of large language models: The only thing they know how to do is to pick the next best word based on statistical probability..."

How exactly do children learn?

An interesting question in itself, but we do know that they do not learn by being loaded with "millions of books, websites, articles, poems, transcripts, and other sources" and then building a word map based on statistical probability. As the article says, "ChatGPT does not work like the human brain".

It is currently very fashionable to deride AI, to give examples of its many failures & laugh

Actually I think most people, including myself, are absolutely blown away by what these large language models -- well, ChatGPT specifically -- have achieved in conversational natural language and their ability to pull up and tie together facts and knowledge mostly correctly. It is, as one poster previously said, awesome.

However, it is not derision to also recognise their limitations and failings, indeed as the CEO of OpenAI himself has, and to point out to over eager people that have attributed godlike capabilities to them that, as that CEO says, they give "a misleading impression of greatness".

[9873210]

Is it fairly easy for ChatGPT to analyse code/logic as opposed to it providing mathematical, scientific or engineering solutions?

Thanks.

Yes, mostly because of the utter awfulness of most code and most computer languages. Code reviews are a target rich environment, you don't have to be very good to find something significant.

I have on many occasions applied non-intelligent static analyzers such as lint to production code. The number of reported errors is usually a multiple of the number of lines of code, and IMHO about half of the gripes are justified. Other people have the humble opinion that writing through an uninitialized pointer is perfectly fine unless I can come up with a test case that demonstrates failure.

[Sorcery]

Tried loading my most used (in CPU time) module into ChatGPT, cut & paste the entire module/file into it.

Thanks for that interesting and over my head post. Just one question which you might be capable of answering or having a stab at.

Is it fairly easy for ChatGPT to analyse code/logic as opposed to it providing mathematical, scientific or engineering solutions?

Thanks.

Had to do something else today, so have not really progressed further. ChatGPT can write code, saw it do that on one of the Youtube videos, so I am hoping it can analyse mine and suggest improvements. too early to tell for me though.

[ursaminortaur]

...True.

And I'd just like to point out, once again, that a simulation of a 'thing' is not the thing itself.

Our brains only deal with a simulation of physical reality - the model of the world that it constructs from the electrical impulses provided by our senses.