Re:GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language
by geraneum on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:25AM
(#35178807)
> As I mention in the post -- creativity often involves remixing existing ideas
Creativity involves remixing but is not all remixing. Is it? Not even all humans are at the same level in this. Number of attempts means nothing if you don’t add features that the LLM desperately needs to be grounded in the reality, or perform logical reasoning beyond RLHF.
You're totally right -- random recombination isn't good enough. not trying to make that case at all.
Ok, but take a step back and really look at the whole situation here. So you've created a machine that solves problems in kind of the same way humans do. Yay? What overall problem is a machine like this solving? How is this better than just having a human do the job? It seems to have most of the same drawbacks as humans, and then some on top of that
It's a hard question to be honest. If you look at the incentives involved, people are very incentivized to create these machines to reduce the amount of toil humans have to endure. I don't disagree about the risks at scale of something like this; as I mention in the post -- I don't get pure warm fuzzies about this at all. But I also don't know how to stop AI progress, because the incentives to keep it going are so real.
Government regulation has been brought up multiple times, most recently by Sama himself on twitter. I think it will have to come, but I don't know what flavor it should take.
Re:GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language
by justinclift on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:32AM
(#35178844)
> How is this better than just having a human do the job?
The cynical take is quite clearly: "Because sales people can sell it"
eg wrap some pretty UX around it, tell people it's "nearly human", then have your sales people try and get non-technical CxO types (or consultancies) to cut them a cheque
I don’t have a massive pool of skilled slave labor I can delegate work to, but I can delegate work to ChatGPT.
Re:GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language
by KyeRussell on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:59AM
(#35179009)
What!? Look back at the last few hundred years, where the majority of great leaps have been the result of getting a machine to do something that humans did.
While the language it generated needs refinement, the design process is iterative, and it takes time to develop a programming language that is worth using.
I encourage you to consider how you would approach designing a programming language. Like you, I would likely start by incorporating my favorite features from languages I love and addressing problems I've encountered in the past, similar to the dialogue GPT and I have in the post.
As I mention in the post -- creativity often involves remixing existing ideas, and GPT-4's attempt at generating a programming language is no exception. Notably, it also called out explicitly the constructs it was borrowing from other languages when designing the language.
It's worth noting that this was GPT-4's initial attempt at something highly complex, and even if there are "plot holes" -- it's a noteworthy achievement in and of itself.