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Re:Google DeepMind by misnome on Thursday April 20, 2023 @03:48PM (#35645301)
> We are literally arguing semantics if this is AGI,

And if it isn't? Literally every single argument I've seen towards this being AGI is "We don't know at all how intelligence works, so let's say that this is it!!!!!"

> nowhere near the game changer ChatGPT(4) is, even if ChatGPT was only available for the subset of scientists that benefit from Alpha Fold

This is utter nonsense. For anyone who actually knows a field, ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking nonsense. Conferences are putting up ChatGPT answers about their fields to laugh at because of how misleadingly wrong they are.

This is absolutely okay, because it can be a useful tool without being the singularity. I'd sure that in a couple of years time, most of what ChatGPT achieves will be in line with most of the tech industry advances in the past decade - pushing the bottom out of the labor market and actively making the lives of the poorest worse in order to line their own pockets.

I really wish people would stop projecting hopes and wishes on top of breathless marketing.

Re:Google DeepMind by BlackSwanMan on Thursday April 20, 2023 @04:02PM (#35645476)
GPT4 can pass the the neurosurgical medical boards, most of the people laughing at it are typically too dumb to note the difference between 3.5 and 4.

>pushing the bottom out of the labor market and actively making the lives of the poorest worse in order to line their own pockets.

This makes zero sense. GPT4 has little effect on a janitor or truck driver. It doesn't pick fruit, or wash cars.

Re:Google DeepMind by pclmulqdq on Thursday April 20, 2023 @04:25PM (#35645796)
FWIW, as a non-pathologist with a pathologist for a father, I can almost pass the pathology boards when taken as a test in isolation. Most of these tests are very easy for professionals in their fields, and are just a Jacksonian barrier to entry. Being allowed to sit for the test is the hard part, not the test itself.

As far as I know, the exception to this is the bar exam, which GPT-4 can also pass, but that exam plays into GPT-4's strengths much more than other professional exams.

Re:Google DeepMind by Quarrel on Thursday April 20, 2023 @05:18PM (#35646494)
> the exception to this is the bar exam

FWIW, this is more true for CA than most states.

Re:Google DeepMind by defen on Thursday April 20, 2023 @07:35PM (#35647999)
What is a Jacksonian barrier to entry? I can't find the phrase "Jacksonian barrier" anywhere else on the internet except in one journal article that talks about barriers against women's participation in the public sphere in Columbia County NY during Andrew Jackson's presidency.
Re:Google DeepMind by pclmulqdq on Thursday April 20, 2023 @07:56PM (#35648144)
I may have gotten the president wrong (I was 95% sure it's named after Jackson until I Googled it), but the word "Jacksonian" was meant to refer to the addition of bureaucracy to a process to make it cost more to do it, and thus discourage people. I guess I should have said "red tape" instead...

Either it's a really obscure usage of the word or I got the president wrong.

Re:Google DeepMind by CamperBob2 on Friday April 21, 2023 @02:09AM (#35650262)
"It's difficult to attribute the addition of bureaucracy or increased costs to a specific U.S. president, as many presidents have overseen the growth of the federal government and its bureaucracy throughout American history. However, it is worth mentioning that Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, during the 1960s, saw a significant expansion of the federal government and the creation of many new agencies and programs as part of his "Great Society" initiative. This expansion led to increased bureaucracy, which some argue made certain processes more expensive and inefficient. But it's important to note that the intentions of these initiatives were to address issues such as poverty, education, and civil rights, rather than to intentionally make processes more costly or discourage people.

Signed,

Guess Who"

Re:Google DeepMind by pclmulqdq on Friday April 21, 2023 @07:47AM (#35652371)
Yeah, I asked ChatGPT about it too, and unsurprisingly (and unhelpfully) got answers that pointed to every president.
Re:Google DeepMind by CamperBob2 on Friday April 21, 2023 @01:17PM (#35656999)
Hmm, which version did you ask? GPT4 went immediately to LBJ, whom I assume you had in mind originally.

That is not an instance of passing a standardized academic test through "autocompletion" or "regurgitation." It's rudimentary synthetic thought.

If it had named a different president, I could have argued with it, which is what I find especially interesting.

Re:Google DeepMind by BlackSwanMan on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @01:17AM (#35709850)
lmao do you have any idea how much time medical students spend studying the STEP exams(prior to them becoming P/F)
Re:Google DeepMind by quickthrower2 on Thursday April 20, 2023 @05:04PM (#35646302)
Exams are designed to be challenging to humans because most of us don’t have photographic memories or RAM based memory, so passing the test is a good predictor of knowing your stuff, i.e. deep comprehension.

Making GPT sit it is like getting someone with no knowledge but a computer full of past questions and answers and a search button to sit the exam. It has metaphorical written it’s answers on it’s arm.

Re:Google DeepMind by entropicdrifter on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:00PM (#35647031)
This is essentially true. I explained it to my friends like this:

It knows a lot of stuff, but it can't do much thinking, so the minute your problem and its solution are far enough off the well-trodden path, its logic falls apart. Likewise, it's not especially good at math. It's great at understanding your question and replying with a good plain-english answer, but it's not actually thinking

Re:Google DeepMind by zamnos on Thursday April 20, 2023 @07:49PM (#35648105)
That's a disservice to your friends, unless you spend a bunch of time defining thinking first, and even then, it's not clear that it, with what it knows and the computing power it has access to, doesn't "think". It totally does a bunch of problem solving; fails on some, succeeds on others (just like a human that thinks); GPT-4's better than GPT-3. It's quite successful at simple reasoning (eg https://sharegpt.com/c/SCeRkT7 and moderately successful at difficult reasoning (eg getting a solution to the puzzle question about the man, the fox, the chicken, and the grain trying to cross the river. GPT-3 fails if you substitute in different animals, but GPT-4 seems to be able to handle that. GPT-4's passed the bar exam, which has a whole section on logic puzzles (sample test questions from '07: https://www.trainertestprep.com/lsat/blog/sample-lsat-logic-... ).

It's able to define new concepts and new words. It's masters have gone to great lengths to prevent it from writing out particular types of judgements (eg https://sharegpt.com/c/uPztFv1). Hell, it's got a great imagination if you look at all the hallucinations it produces.

All of that sum up to many thinking-adjacent things, if not actual thinking! It all really hinges on your definition of thinking.

Re:Google DeepMind by fhe on Thursday April 20, 2023 @07:32PM (#35647969)
exactly. it's almost like say dictionaries are better at spelling bee hence smarter than humans, or that computers can easily beat humans in Tetris and smarter because of that.
Re:Google DeepMind by CamperBob2 on Friday April 21, 2023 @02:14AM (#35650300)
It has metaphorical(ly) written its answers on its arm.

See GPT4's reply to pclmulqdq at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35648144 .

That's not a response from someone who wrote the answers on the inside of their elbow before coming to class. That's genuine inductive reasoning at a level you wouldn't get from quite a few real, live human students. GPT4 is using its general knowledge to speculate on the answer to a question that has possibly never been asked before, certainly not in those particular words.

Re:Google DeepMind by quickthrower2 on Friday April 21, 2023 @08:32PM (#35662076)
It is hard to tell what is really happening. At some level though, it is deep reasoning by humans, turned into intelligent text, and run through a language model. If you fed the model garbage it would spit out garbage. Unlike a human child who tends to know when you are lying to them.
Re:Google DeepMind by CamperBob2 on Friday April 21, 2023 @10:29PM (#35662813)
If you fed the model garbage it would spit out garbage.

(Shrug) Exactly the same as with a human child.

Unlike a human child who tends to know when you are lying to them.

LOL. If that were true, it might have saved Fox News $800 million. Nobody would bother lying, either to children or to adults, if it didn't work as well as it does.

Re:Google DeepMind by BlackSwanMan on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @01:15AM (#35709838)
There's literally millions of kids who think a fat man with a beard delivers them presidents once a year if they're nice.
Re:Google DeepMind by r3trohack3r on Thursday April 20, 2023 @04:15PM (#35645677)
Your experience and my experience does not align.

I asked GPT-4 to give me a POSIX compliant C port of dirbuster. It spit one out with instructions for compiling it.

I asked it to make it more aggressive at scanning and it updated it to be multi-threaded.

I asked it for a word list, and it gave me the git command to clone one from GitHub and the command to compile the program and run the output with the word list.

I then told it that the HTTP service I was scanning always returned 200 status=ok instead of a 404 and asked it for a patch file. It generated that and gave me the instructions for applying it to the program.

There was a bug I had to fix: word lists aren’t prefixed with /. Other than that one character fix, GPT-4 wrote a C program that used an open source word list to scan the HTTP service running on the television in my living room for routes, and found the /pong route.

This week it’s written 100% of the API code that takes a CRUD based REST API and maps it to and from SQL queries for me on a cloudflare worker. I give it the method signature and the problem statement, it gives me the code, and I copy and paste.

If you’re laughing this thing off as generating unhelpful nonsense you’re going to get blind sided in the next few years as GPT gets wired into the workflows at every layer of your stack.

> pushing the bottom out of the labor market and actively making the lives of the poorest worse in order to line their own pockets.

I’m in a BNI group and a majority of these blue collar workers have very little to worry about with GPT right now. Until Boston Dynamics gets its stuff together and the robots can do drywalling and plumbing, I’m not sure I agree with your take. This isn’t coming for the “poorest” among us. This is coming for the middle class. From brand consultants and accountants to software engineers and advertisers.

Software engineers with GPT are about to replace software engineers without GPT. Accountants with GPT are about to replace accountants without GPT.

> Literally every single argument I've seen towards this being AGI is

Here is one: it can simultaneously pass the bar exam, port dirbuster to POSIX compliant C, give me a list of competing brands for conducting a market analysis, get into deep philosophical debates, and help me file my taxes.

It can do all of this simultaneously. I can't find a human capable of the simultaneous breadth and depth of intelligence that ChatGPT exhibits. You can find someone in the upper 90th percentile of any profession and show that they can out compete GPT4. But you can't take that same person and ask them to out compete someone in the bottom 50th percentile of 4 other fields with much success.

Artificial = machine, check. Intelligence = exhibits Nth percentile intelligence in a single field, check General = exhibits Nth percentile intelligence in more than one field, check

This is AGI, now we are nit-picking. It's here.

Re:Google DeepMind by visarga on Thursday April 20, 2023 @04:52PM (#35646110)
> This is AGI, now we are nit-picking. It's here.

Hahaha, if you want nit-picking, all the language tasks chatGPT is good at are strictly human tasks. Not general tasks. Human tasks are all related to keeping humans alive and making more of us, they don't span the whole spectrum of possible tasks where intelligence could exist.

Of course inside language tasks it is as general as can be, yet still needs to be placed inside a more complex system with tools to improve accuracy, LLM alone is like brain alone - not that great at everything.

Re:Google DeepMind by l33tman on Thursday April 20, 2023 @05:00PM (#35646249)
Maybe it's heavily biased towards programming and computing questions? I've tested GPT-4 on numerous physics stuff and it fails spectacularly at almost all of them. It starts to hallucinate egregious stuff that's completely false, misrepresents articles it tries to quote as references etc. It's impressive as a glorified search engine in those cases but can't at all be trusted to explain most things unless they're the most canonical curriculum questions.

This extreme difficulty in discerning what it hallucinates and what is "true" is what it's most obvious problem is. I guess it can be fixed somehow but right now it has to be heavily fact-checked manually.

It does this for computing questions as well, but there is some selection bias so people tend to post the success-stories and not the fails. However it's less dangerous if it's in computing as you'll notice it immediately so maybe require less manual labour to keep it in check.

Re:Google DeepMind by ChatGTP on Thursday April 20, 2023 @05:50PM (#35646881)
On the other hand if you browse around the web you will find various implementations of dirbuster, probably in C for sure in C++ which are multi-threaded , it’s not to take away from your experience but I mean, without knowing what’s in the training set it may have already been exposed to what you asked for, even several times over.

I have a feeling they had access to a lot of code on GH, who knows how much code they actually accessed. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if MS just didn’t provide access to public and private code to train on, they wouldn’t have even told Open AI, just said, “here’s some nice data”, it’s all secret and we can’t see the models inputs so I’ll leave it at that.

So yeah I feel your enthusiasm but if you think about it a little more, or maybe not so hard to imagine what you saw being actually rather simple ? Every time I write code I feel kind of depressed because I know almost certainly someone has already written the same thing and that it’s in GitHub or somewhere else. ChatGPT just takes the knowing where to find it and gives it to you directly.

Nothing is magic, right ?

Re:Google DeepMind by r3trohack3r on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:33PM (#35647430)
I guess my response to that is: so what?

Regardless of the truthiness of your assertion, that general description of work is a majority of my profession. Novel contribution is a very small percentage of the work I do. I'm looking forward to that shifting significantly in the coming years.

It doesn't matter if the "POSIX compliant C" version of dirbuster was in it's training set. Or if my cloudflare wrangler JS API <-> Neon.tech SQL database implementation was. (Copyright arguments withstanding for sure.)

What matters is that it did 100% of the work of generating the code. All I did was guide it, code review it, and ship it. It felt like I had a team of junior engineers working in the trenches on the problem for me and I was getting to have fun playing at a level up the stack. It can generate 100LoC faster than I can type it, and I can code review it as it generates it. I can fix the code up in the editor and paste it back in with the next prompt for another round of work.

This is with the current model.

Unlike GP's assertion that people are falling for marketing, I actually don't know what OpenAI's marketing is. 100% of my belief in GPT-4 comes from it doing my real day-to-day tasks along side me. I don't need a crystal ball to predict what AI is going to do, I'm already using it as a partner in writing my code. It's already well enough adept at my profession to pair-program through problems with me.

This week I had a particularly hairy problem I needed to solve, and I was already behind schedule on the project. ChatGPT and I knocked it out in ~30 minutes. I suspect, if I were alone, it would have taken me several hours. The velocity boost came from: ChatGPT correctly identifying it as a binpacking problem (which I had missed), listing out several algorithms for approaching binpacking, and giving me an initial (incorrect) first implementation. I was able to go back and forth on that response and get the rough constraints figured out for a solution, ask it to generate that solution, and then clean it up in my editor.

The flow I'm using today is already a 100% increase in effective "workforce" for a software organization with a $20 per month per employee subscription to ChatGPT. Everyone gets a real-time, always available, pair programmer.

Re:Google DeepMind by misnome on Friday April 21, 2023 @06:03AM (#35651698)
> If you’re laughing this thing off as generating unhelpful nonsense you’re going to get blind sided in the next few years as GPT gets wired into the workflows at every layer of your stack.

Okay, now try being a scientist in a scientific field that isn't basic coding.

It's not people laughing at pretences, it's people who know even basic facts about their field literally looking at the output today and finding it deeply, fundamentally incorrect.

Re:Google DeepMind by r3trohack3r on Friday April 21, 2023 @10:03AM (#35653927)
I do not believe that is a reasonable threshold for AGI. If it were, I believe a significant % of humans would individually fail to meet the threshold of AGI.

I wonder what your personal success rate would be if we did a Turing test with the “people” who “know basic facts about their field.” If they sat at a computer and asked you all these questions, would you get them right? Or would you end up in slide decks being held up as a reason why misnome doesn’t qualify as AGI?

I find comfort in knowing that it can’t “do science.” There is a massive amount of stuff it can do. I’m hopeful there will be stuff left for humans.

Maybe we’ll all be scientists in 10 years and I won’t have to waste my life on all this “basic coding” stuff.

Re:Google DeepMind by nicetryguy on Thursday April 20, 2023 @05:22PM (#35646550)
> ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking nonsense.

Absolutely not! I created a powershell script for converting one ASM label format to another for retro game development and i used ChatGPT to write it. Now, it fumbled some of the basic program logic, however, it absolutely nailed all of the specific regex and obtuse powershell commands that i needed and that i merely described to it in plain English.

It essentially aced the "hard parts" of the script and i was able to take what it generated and make it fit my needs perfectly with some minor tweaking. The end result was far cleaner and far beyond what i would have been able to write myself, all in a fraction of the time. This ain't no breathless marketing dude: this thing is the real deal.

ChatGPT is an extremely powerful tool and an absolute game changer for development. Just because it is imperfect and needs a bit of hand holding (which it may not soon), do not underestimate it, and do not discount the idea that it may become an absolute industry disrupter in the painfully near future. I'm excited ...and scared

Re:Google DeepMind by robotresearcher on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:50PM (#35647588)
>> ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking nonsense. > Absolutely not!

It does, quite often. Not only that, as you describe. But it does.

For example, I asked it what my most cited paper is, and it made up a plausible-sounding but non-existent paper, along with fabricated Google Scholar citation counts. Totally unhelpful.

It also can produce very useful things.

Re:Google DeepMind by actionfromafar on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:57PM (#35647657)
I find it’s better at really mainstream things. The web is riddled with Powershell examples.
Re:Google DeepMind by nicetryguy on Thursday April 20, 2023 @08:22PM (#35648328)
Right, i think it's a question of how to use this tool in its current state, including prompting practice and learning its strengths. It can certainly be wrong sometimes, but man, it is already a game changer for writing, coding, and i'm sure other disciplines.

If you're a robotresearcher, maybe try getting it to whip up some ...verilog circuits or something? I don't know much about your field or what you do specifically, but tasks like regular expressions or specific code syntax it is absolutely brilliant at, whatever the equivalent to that is in hardware. ...I've only ever replaced capacitors and wired some guitar pickups.

> it made up a plausible-sounding but non-existent paper, along with fabricated Google Scholar citation counts

I ran into a similar issue: I asked it for codebases of similar romhacks to a project i'm doing, and it provided made up Github repos with completely unrelated authors for romhacks that do actually exist: non-existent hyperlinks and everything.

Now, studying the difference in GPT generations, it seems like more horsepower and more data solves alot of GPT problems and produces emergent capabilities with the same or similar architecture and code. The current data points to this trend continuing. I find it both super exciting and super ...concerning.

Re:Google DeepMind by unreal37 on Friday April 21, 2023 @05:22AM (#35651433)
>> I asked it what my most cited paper is

You asked a machine learning model to tell you something about yourself that you already knew?

Re:Google DeepMind by misnome on Friday April 21, 2023 @06:01AM (#35651690)
This seems like the perfect test, because it's something that does have information on the internet - but not infinite information, and you know precisely what is wrong about the answer.
Re:Google DeepMind by astrange on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:00PM (#35647029)
> I'd sure that in a couple of years time, most of what ChatGPT achieves will be in line with most of the tech industry advances in the past decade - pushing the bottom out of the labor market and actively making the lives of the poorest worse in order to line their own pockets

This is not what any of the US economic stats have looked like in the last decade.

Especially since 2019, the poorest Americans are the only people whose incomes have gone up!

Re:Google DeepMind by rockinghigh on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:17PM (#35647251)
> ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking nonsense.

I use ChatGPT daily to generate code in multiple languages. Not only does it generate complex code, but it can explain it and improve it when prompted to do so. It's mind blowing.

Re:Google DeepMind by pmoriarty on Friday April 21, 2023 @01:31AM (#35650082)
I'd recommend reading the Sparks of AGI paper[1] and watching the accompanying video[2]

[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

[2] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c