News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Wolfram Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge... by CrushItNerds519 on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @06:51PM (#34333146)
This comment and many others speculate on the limits of ChatGPT based on assumptions about what ChatGPT does that are not quite accurate. In particular, ChatGPT does not simply output the “most semantically popular result”. That description applies only to the base model, before instruction tuning and RLHF.

As for the speculation itself, e.g., “as soon as you merge two subjects, you are right back to gambling semantics as logic”, it may be suggestive to consider that such models have learned to translate between English and French after having only trained on the two languages separately.

Re:Wolfram Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge... by thomastjeffery on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @07:07PM (#34333295)
Much like ChatGPT, you seem to have comprehended the words I said, but not their meaning.
Re:Wolfram Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge... by CrushItNerds519 on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:55AM (#34335853)
Nope.

If you were to consider carefully enough the language example that I gave, you would see that it already refutes your speculation.

Another way would be to apply your argument to humans, who have managed to be useful despite having been trained only on (a broader class of) semantics (i.e., the sum of all qualia) and the logical imperfections that this entails (cf. your comments).

Happy new year!

Re:Wolfram Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge... by gavanwilhite on Sunday January 15, 2023 @07:50PM (#34395400)
Thank you for this comment!

I haven't spent much time learning about how ChatGPT works, but:

'ChatGPT does not simply output the “most semantically popular result”. That description applies only to the base model, before instruction tuning and RLHF.'

was exactly the explanation I needed!