From what I’ve seen, here’s what happened. GPT 4 came out, and it can pass the bar exam and medical boards. Then more recently some studies came out. Some of them from before GPT 4 was released that just finally got out or picked up by the press, others that were poorly done or used GPT 3 (probably because of gpt 4 being expensive) and the press doesn’t pick up on the difference. Gpt 4 is really good and has lots of uses. Gpt 3 has many uses as well but is definitely way more prone to hallucinating.

Yeah what’s interesting is it was just published this week even though they did the tests in April. April is like 100 AI years ago.

Hah! That’s the response I always give! I’m not saying our brains work the exact same way because they don’t and there’s still a lot missing from current AI but I’ve definitely noticed that at least for myself, I do just predict the next word when I’m talking or writing (with some extra constraints). But even with LLMs there’s more going on then that since the attention mechanism allows it to consider parts of the prompt and what it’s already written as it’s trying to come up with the next word. On the other hand, I can go back and correct mistakes I make while writing and LLMs can’t do that…it’s just a linear stream.

I agree, but only because they used GPT 3.5 and not 4. Not that I think 4 would have been perfect or that you should follow medical advice from LLMs right now, but it would have been much more accurate.

What’s with all the hit jobs on ChatGPT?

Prompts were input to the GPT-3.5-turbo-0301 model via the ChatGPT (OpenAI) interface.

This is the second paper I’ve seen recently to complain ChatGPT is crap and be using GPT3.5. There is a world of difference between 3.5 and 4. Unfortunately news sites aren’t savvy enough to pick up on that and just run with “ChatGPT sucks!” Also it’s not even ChatGPT if they’re using that model. The paper is wrong (or it’s old) because there’s no way to use that model in the ChatGPT interface. I don’t think there ever was either. It was probably ChatGPT 0301 or something which is (afaik) slightly different.

Anyway, tldr, paper is similar to “I tried running Diablo 4 on my Windows 95 computer and it didn’t work. Surprised Pikachu!”

Yeah, I generally agree there. And you’re right. Nobody knows if they’ll really be the starting point for AGI because nobody knows how to make AGI.

In terms of usefulness, I do use it for knowledge retrieval and have a very good success rate with that. Yes, I have to double check certain things to make sure it didn’t make them up, but on the whole, GPT4 is right a large percentage of the times. Just yesterday I’d been Googling to find a specific law or regulation on whether airlines were required to refund passengers. I spent half an hour with no luck. ChatGPT with GPT4 pointed me to the exact document down to the right subsection on the first try. If you try that with GPT3.5 or really anything else out there, there’s a much higher rate of failure, and I suspect a lot of people who use the “it gets stuff wrong” argument probably haven’t spent much time with GPT4. Not saying it’s perfect-- it still confidently says incorrect things and will even double down if you press it, but 4 is really impressive.

Edit: Also agree, anyone saying LLMs are AGI or sentient or whatever doesn’t understand how they work.

As I see it, anybody who is not skeptical towards “yet another ‘world changing’ claim from the usual types” is either dumb as a doorknob, young and naive or a greedy fucker invested in it trying to make money out of any “suckers” that jump into that hype train.

I’ve been working on AI projects on and off for about 30 years now. Honestly, for most of that time I didn’t think neural nets were the way to go, so when LLMs and transformers got popular, I was super skeptical. After learning the architecture and using them myself, I’m convinced they’re part of but not the whole solution to AGI. As they are now, yes, they are world changing. They’re capable of improving productivity in a wide range of industries. That seems pretty world changing to me. There are already products out there proving this (GitHub Copilot, jasper, even ChatGPT). You’re welcome to downplay it and be skeptical, but I’d highly recommend giving it an honest try. If you’re right then you’ll have more to back up your opinion, and if you’re wrong, you’ll have learned to use the tech and won’t be left behind.

extraordinary claims without extraordinary proof

What are you looking for here? Do you want it to be self aware and anything less than that is hot garbage? That latest advances in AI have many uses. Sure Bitcoin was over hyped and so is AI, but Bitcoin was always a solution with no problem. AI (as in AGI) offers literally a solution to all problems (or maybe the end of humans but hopefully not hah). The current tech though is widely useful. With GPT4 and GitHub Copilot, I can write good working code at multiple times my normal speed. It’s not going to replace me as an engineer yet, but it can enhance my productivity by a huge amount. I’ve heard similar from many others in different jobs.