Ethan Mollick on imaginative uses; Mollick on simulations; Infovores and Dr. Hammer on mentorship; Anton Korinek provides a useful background paper. Stephen Wolfram on the simplicity of language
Re: "ChatGPT—even with its ultimately straightforward neural net structure—is successfully able to “capture the essence” of human language and the thinking behind it."—Stephen Wolfram
"[ChatGPT] does not have program elements that are designed to represent the meanings of any of the words. [...]
What it shows is that (perhaps surprisingly), it is possible to produce text similar to that of a person with understanding, using a completely different method from the person. The person would rely on their knowledge of the subject matter that the words are about; ChatGPT does a huge mathematical calculation based on word statistics in a huge database. [...]
[...] the Turing Test is a bad test for awareness. [...]
[...] every time a human tester finds a question that ChatGPT answers wrongly, revealing its lack of understanding, they can modify the program to make it answer that question correctly.
Eventually, people will run out of ways of uncovering the thing’s lack of understanding, and the program will be able to fool people. But it will remain the case that what the chatbot is doing is completely different from what an actual person with understanding does."
"As you know, I have been emphasizing simulation as a key use and abuse case of the new AI."
Have you heard of the idea Heaven Banning?
"heavenbanning, the hypothetical practice of banishing a user from a platform by causing everyone that they speak with to be replaced by AI models that constantly agree and praise them, but only from their own perspective, is entirely feasible with the current state of AI/LLMs" - https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561
The distinction between using ChatGPT as a simulator and using it as a search tool to look up information is a good, and I think, underappreciated, one. Earlier this week someone on Twitter expressed irritation at ChatGPT not giving him a good response to the search query "Tell me all the movies from the 1930s in which Chopin's music was featured." I suggested that, rather than using ChatGPT as a latter day Google, why not use ChatGPT to write a web scraper for you, which extracts that data from IMDB.com? He either was not interested in my suggestion or didn't understand it. But I decided to build that scraper myself, using ChatGPT--and it worked. One can easily imagine a future ChatGPT, or possibly the presently AI-endowed Bing, in which you can just tell it: "scrape the data from [URL] and return extract all data [which meets these criteria] and save it to Excel."
Re: "ChatGPT—even with its ultimately straightforward neural net structure—is successfully able to “capture the essence” of human language and the thinking behind it."—Stephen Wolfram
Compare Michael Huemer:
https://fakenous.substack.com/p/are-we-on-the-verge-of-true-ai
Here are exceprts, re: ChatGPT and language:
"[ChatGPT] does not have program elements that are designed to represent the meanings of any of the words. [...]
What it shows is that (perhaps surprisingly), it is possible to produce text similar to that of a person with understanding, using a completely different method from the person. The person would rely on their knowledge of the subject matter that the words are about; ChatGPT does a huge mathematical calculation based on word statistics in a huge database. [...]
[...] the Turing Test is a bad test for awareness. [...]
[...] every time a human tester finds a question that ChatGPT answers wrongly, revealing its lack of understanding, they can modify the program to make it answer that question correctly.
Eventually, people will run out of ways of uncovering the thing’s lack of understanding, and the program will be able to fool people. But it will remain the case that what the chatbot is doing is completely different from what an actual person with understanding does."
"As you know, I have been emphasizing simulation as a key use and abuse case of the new AI."
Have you heard of the idea Heaven Banning?
"heavenbanning, the hypothetical practice of banishing a user from a platform by causing everyone that they speak with to be replaced by AI models that constantly agree and praise them, but only from their own perspective, is entirely feasible with the current state of AI/LLMs" - https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561
The distinction between using ChatGPT as a simulator and using it as a search tool to look up information is a good, and I think, underappreciated, one. Earlier this week someone on Twitter expressed irritation at ChatGPT not giving him a good response to the search query "Tell me all the movies from the 1930s in which Chopin's music was featured." I suggested that, rather than using ChatGPT as a latter day Google, why not use ChatGPT to write a web scraper for you, which extracts that data from IMDB.com? He either was not interested in my suggestion or didn't understand it. But I decided to build that scraper myself, using ChatGPT--and it worked. One can easily imagine a future ChatGPT, or possibly the presently AI-endowed Bing, in which you can just tell it: "scrape the data from [URL] and return extract all data [which meets these criteria] and save it to Excel."
A 175 Billion Parameter Goldfish
https://allenpike.com/2023/175b-parameter-goldfish-gpt?utm_campaign=iOS%2BDev%2BWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_source=iOS%2BDev%2BWeekly%2BIssue%2B597
If anyone is working on AI-centric direct instruction, send me a note!
Rough drafts for real writers is what ChatGTP could produce, and full final drafts for the vast majority of writers.