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A comment on Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode's code quality. Parent comment

Re:Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode's code quality by johnfn on Friday December 16, 2022 @07:27PM (#34022631)
Hardly. Go ask a 6 or 7 year old to write down their "reasoning" at multiplying 203948029384029384 by 7834928734982374982374 and, assuming you can even get them to do it, I argue that the words they write will be very similar to what ChatGPT wrote. Perhaps the vocabulary will be less refined, but the essence will be similar.

In any case, the point is that it's an objective thing anyone can observe: compare the two outputs. See if they differ.

> This is purely ignorant magical thinking.

I counter that you ascribe "magical" thinking to the human condition.

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Re:Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode's code quality by imperfect_blue on Saturday December 17, 2022 @04:01AM (#34026118)
A 7 year old would know that you would want to use a calculator, and indeed, would be capable of multiplying those numbers with a calculator.
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Re:Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode's code quality by ben_w on Saturday December 17, 2022 @05:44AM (#34026660)
But by that standard, I could just ask GPT to write code to multiply the numbers. It's not even trying you be an embodied agent with a hand able to type onto a calculator.

GPT is remarkable to me not for its failings, but because of how far it can get when it's only trying to win the game of "predict what token comes next".

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Re:Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode's code quality by imperfect_blue on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:54PM (#34033544)
To be more accurate, the 7 year old will tell you they can't do it and suggest the use of a calculator.

GPT simply gives you a complete hallucination. This can be gotten around imperfectly with prompt engineering to get GPT to admit it doesn't know. But still, hallucinations are pretty dangerous failure modes in many applications, and definitely something we don't want in a future iteration. I don't know how much of a change it is to create a GPT without hallucinations, but I suspect that it is non-trival.

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