If my mind worked like a LLM I would generate some BS reply.

Instead, I’ll respond by saying “I don’t know” what you mean.

Who knew the ability (or inability) to say “I don’t know” would be so critical to intelligence until now.

When I asked ChatGPT what "jdnrirmd-gurlksjd" is, it says it doesn't recognize it and needs more context, but is readily able to tell me about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

https://chat.openai.com/share/4f36fe14-0201-4a69-aaf5-2e2e29...

When asked what happened last week, ChatGPT will be honest and tell me that its training data only goes up until Jan 2022, and that it doesn't know anything after that date.

https://chat.openai.com/share/ca5bd2e1-e91c-468c-9594-be3ac8...

Except, for your first example I would have said “that’s gibberish” instead of asking for more context since I know more context wouldn’t help.

Edit: how did you get GPT to only output bullet points? If the answer is you told it to, why do you have to tell it every time? Don’t you think it would be smart enough to get the hint about your preferences?

I’ll stop now though. The debate about whether people think like LLM’s is silly. We clearly don’t, and it doesn’t make sense why people want us to think we do.

Edit 2: it’s also frustrating that the “I don’t know” example you’re using was hard coded by OpenAI and not generated by the LLM itself.

Unfortunately the chat link doesn't show the custom instructions that I've set.

User message:

> Be terse. Do not offer unprompted advice or clarifications.

> Remain neutral on all topics.

> Never apologize.

Model message:

> Outline key points

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its strongest form (the idea that your thoughts are necessarily always expressed in concrete words of the host language you have grown), has always been crap. Advocates for it have constantly had this back and forth of making very strong statements in support of it then sullenly backing off "oh uh I didn't mean it that way" whenever they actually get challenged on it.

For instance, a definite prediction would be "Therefore, nobody -- at least nobody who is not bilingual -- has ever had, and will ever have, trouble putting their thoughts to words. Their thoughts, after all, are already in words, they just need to say the words that are already in their head." But almost everybody, monolingual or bilingual, has experienced a situation where they have had trouble putting their thoughts into words.

Another definite prediction would be "Writing stuff down never aids thought directly, it only acts as an expansion of short-term memory of things that you have already put together. You had the words in your head, after all." But almost everybody reports that writing things down changes the qualitative aspects of how they think, it makes the ideas less "fuzzy" and more "concrete" to have to express them in written words. Similarly with folks who confidently state "I am an external processor" -- reporting similar "concreteness" if they speak their thoughts out loud versus trying to process them without speaking out loud.

So then you get people to back off and say "well, no, I just mean that learning a new language can broaden your horizons" or so, and it's like, sure, that's fine. Famously Whorf himself was an insurance investigator who was concerned about the connection between language and thought because he noticed that people told others "this gas tank is empty" and they thought, "oh, empty, that means that it's safe to smoke around!" and caused explosions because an empty gas tank is actually full of gasoline vapor and thus is highly explosive. So Whorf's motivating example actually supports a weaker version of Sapir-Whorf which is just "when we think about something linguistically given to us, we often use linguistic shorthand categories like the one that groups 'empty' near 'safe', that might be inaccurate in our language but might not be inaccurate in some other language."

If you have something to say, pleas say it. But don't bring these annoying content-free Redditisms like "X would like a word with you" onto this forum.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't say HN is turning into Reddit, I criticised one specific comment. Thanks for your input but you can take it elsewhere.