[HN Gopher] The Inherent Limitations of GPT-3
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The Inherent Limitations of GPT-3
 
Author : andreyk
Score  : 58 points
Date   : 2021-11-29 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
 
web link (lastweekin.ai)
w3m dump (lastweekin.ai)
 
| andreyk wrote:
| Author here, would love feedback / thoughts / corrections!
 
  | skybrian wrote:
  | Another limitation to be aware of is that it generates text by
  | randomly choosing the next word from a probability
  | distribution. If you turn that off, it tends to go into a loop.
  | 
  | The random choices improve text generation from an artistic
  | perspective, but if you want to know why it chose one word
  | rather than another, the answer is sometimes that it chose a
  | low-probability word at random. So there is a built-in error
  | rate (assuming not all completions are valid), and the choice
  | of one completion versus another is clearly not made based on
  | meaning. (It can be artistically interesting anyway since a
  | human can pick the best completions based on _their_ knowledge
  | of meanings.)
  | 
  | On the other hand, going into a loop (if you always choose the
  | highest probability next word) also demonstrates pretty clearly
  | that it doesn't know what it's saying.
 
| Flankk wrote:
| 65 years of research and our cutting-edge AI doesn't have a
| memory? Excuse me if I'm not excited. It's likely that most of
| the functions of the human brain were selected for intelligence.
| Such a focus on learning when problem solving and creativity are
| far more interesting.
 
  | manojlds wrote:
  | Do our aeroplanes flap their wings like the birds do?
  | 
  | GPT-3 is obviously not the AI end goal, but we are on the path
  | and the end might lead to aeroplanes than flapping machines.
 
    | Flankk wrote:
    | Birds don't need 150,000 litres of jet fuel to fly across the
    | ocean. Given that the development of airplanes was made by
    | studying birds I'm not sure I see your point. The 1889 book
    | "Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation" is one example.
 
    | ska wrote:
    | > but we are on the path
    | 
    | This isn't actually clear; with things like this we are on
    | _a_ path but it may not lead anywhere that fundamental (at
    | least when we are talking  "AI", especially general AI).
 
  | PaulHoule wrote:
  | I'm trying to put my finger on the source of moral decay that
  | led to so many people behaving as if the GPT-3 emperor wears
  | clothes.
  | 
  | In 1966 it was clear to everyone that this program
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
  | 
  | parasitically depends on the hunger for meaning that people
  | have.
  | 
  | Recently GPT-3 was held back from the public on the pretense
  | that it was "dangerous" but in reality it held back because it
  | is too expensive to run and the public would quickly learn that
  | it can answer any question at all... if you don't mind if the
  | answer is right.
  | 
  | There is this page
  | 
  | https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/
  | 
  | under which "2. Linear Substructures" there are four
  | projections of the 50-dimensional vector space that would
  | project out just as well from a random matrix because, well,
  | projecting 20 generic points in a 50-dimensional space to
  | 2-dimensions you can make the points fall exactly where you
  | want in 2 dimensions.
  | 
  | Nobody holds them to account over this.
  | 
  | The closest thing I see to the GPT-3 cult is that a Harvard
  | professor said that this thing
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua
  | 
  | was an alien spacecraft. It's sad and a little scary that
  | people can get away with that, the media picks it up, and they
  | don't face consequences. I am more afraid of that than I am
  | afraid that GPT-99381387 will take over the world.
  | 
  | (e.g. growing up in the 1970s I could look to Einstein for
  | inspiration that intelligence could understand the Universe.
  | Somebody today might as well look forward to being a comic book
  | writer like Stan Lee.)
 
    | thedorkknight wrote:
    | Confused. If professor Loeb tries to at least open discourse
    | to the idea that ET space junk might be flying around like
    | our space junk in a desire to reduce the giggle factor around
    | that hypothesis, what sort of "consequences" do you think he
    | should face for that?
 
    | wwweston wrote:
    | > the public would quickly learn that it can answer any
    | question at all... if you don't mind if the answer is right.
    | 
    | There appear to be an awful lot of conversations in which
    | people care about other things much, much more than what is
    | objectively correct.
    | 
    | And any technology that can greatly amplify engagement in
    | that kind of conversation probably _is_ dangerous.
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | canjobear wrote:
    | GPT3 and its cousins do things that no previous language
    | model could do; it is qualitatively different from Eliza in
    | its capabilities. As for your argument about random
    | projections in the evaluation of GLoVE, comparisons with
    | random projections are now routine. See for example
    | https://aclanthology.org/N19-1419/
 
      | NoGravitas wrote:
      | Why do you say it is qualitatively different from Eliza in
      | its capabilities?
 
        | PaulHoule wrote:
        | It does something totally different. However that totally
        | different still depends on people being desperate to see
        | intelligence inside it. It's like how people see a face
        | in a cut stem or on Mars.
 
        | canjobear wrote:
        | What is your criterion for "truly" detecting
        | intelligence? Do you have a test in mind that would
        | succeed for humans and fail for GPT3?
 
        | NoGravitas wrote:
        | Is it because it does something totally different that
        | you came to me?
 
        | rytill wrote:
        | You're trying to prove some kind of point where you
        | respond as ELIZA would have to show how "even back then
        | we could pass for conversation". The truth is that GPT-3
        | is actually, totally qualitatively different and if you
        | played with it enough you'd realize.
 
        | not2b wrote:
        | The difference is quantitative, rather than qualitative,
        | as compared to primitive Markov models that have been
        | used in the past. It's just a numerical model with a very
        | large number of parameters that extends a text token
        | sequence.
        | 
        | The parameter size is so large that it has in essence
        | memorized its training data, so if the right answer was
        | already present in the training data you'll get it, same
        | if the answer is closely related to the training data in
        | a way that lets the model predict it. If the wrong answer
        | was present in the training data you may well get that.
 
    | bangkoksbest wrote:
    | It's a legitimate practice in science to speculate. Having
    | heard the Harvard guy explain more fully the Oumuamua thing,
    | it's struck me as perfectly fine activity for some scientist
    | to look into. His hypothesis is almost certainly going to be
    | untrue, but it's fine to investigate a bit of a moonshot
    | idea. You don't want half the field doing this, but you
    | absolutely need different little pockets of speculative work
    | going on in order to keep scientific inquiry open, dynamic,
    | and diverse.
 
  | Groxx wrote:
  | The current leading purchase-able extremely-over-hyped-by-non-
  | technicals language model has no memory, yes.
  | 
  | You see the same thing in all popular reporting about science
  | and tech. Endless battery breakthroughs that will quadruple or
  | 10x capacity become a couple percent improvement in practice.
  | New gravity models mean we might have practical warp drives in
  | 50 years. Fusion that's perpetually 20 years away. Flying cars
  | and personal jetpacks. Moon bases, when we haven't been on the
  | moon since the 70s.
  | 
  | AI reporting and hype is no different. Maybe slightly worse
  | because it's touching on "intelligence", which we still have no
  | clear definition of.
 
  | naasking wrote:
  | > It's likely that most of the functions of the human brain
  | were selected for intelligence.
  | 
  | That doesn't seem correct. Intelligence came much later than
  | when most of our brain evolved.
 
    | PaulHoule wrote:
    | Intelligence involves many layers.
    | 
    |  _Planaria_ can move towards and away from things and even
    | learn.
    | 
    | Bees work collectively to harvest nectar from flowers and
    | build hives.
    | 
    | Mammals have a "theory of mind" and are very good at
    | reasoning about what other beings think about what other
    | beings think. For that matter birds are pretty smart in terms
    | of ability to navigate 1000 miles and find the same nest.
    | 
    | People make tools, use language, play chess, bullshit each
    | other and make cults around rationalism and GPT-3.
 
      | naasking wrote:
      | "Adaptation" is not synonymous with "intelligence". The
      | latter is a much more narrowly defined phenomenon.
 
    | pfortuny wrote:
    | memory is something shared by... one might even say plants.
    | But let us keep to animals: almost anyone, including worms.
 
  | gibsonf1 wrote:
  | In addition to that subtle memory issue, it has no reference at
  | all to the space/time world we people model mentally to think
  | with. So, basically, there is no I in the GPT-3 AI, just A.
 
    | PaulHoule wrote:
    | One can point to many necessary structural features that it
    | is missing. Consider Ashby's law of requisite variety:
    | 
    | https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150
    | 
    | Many GPT-3 cultists are educated in computer science so they
    | should know better.
    | 
    | GPT-3's "one pass" processing means that a fixed amount of
    | resources are always used. Thus it can't sort a list of items
    | unless the fixed time it uses is humongous. You might boil
    | the oceans that way but you won't attain AGI.
    | 
    | There are numerous arguments along the line of Turing's
    | halting problem that restrict what that kind of thing can do.
    | As it uses a finite amount of time it can't do anything that
    | could require an unbounded time to complete or that could
    | potentially not terminate.
    | 
    | GPT-3 has no model for dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty.
    | (Other than shooting in the dark.) Practically this requires
    | some ability to backtrack either automatically or as a result
    | of user feedback. The current obscurantism is that you need
    | to have 20 PhD students work for 2 years to write a paper
    | that makes the model "explainable" in some narrow domain.
    | With this insight you can spend another $30 million training
    | a new model that might get the answer right.
    | 
    | A practical system needs to be told that "you did it wrong"
    | and why and then be able to correct itself on the next pass
    | if possible, otherwise in a few passes. Of course a system
    | like that would be a real piece of engineering that people
    | would become familiar with, not a outlet for their religious
    | feelings that is kept on a pedestal.
 
      | gibsonf1 wrote:
      | The big issue is that it literally knows nothing - there is
      | no reference to a model of the real world such as humans
      | use when thinking about the real world. It is a very
      | advanced pattern matching parrot, and in using words like a
      | parrot, knows nothing about what those words mean.
 
        | PaulHoule wrote:
        | Exactly, with "language in language out" it can pass as a
        | neurotypical (passing as a neurotypical doesn't mean you
        | get the right answer, it means if you get a wrong answer
        | it is a neurotypical-passing wrong answer.)
        | 
        | Actual "understanding" means mapping language to
        | something such as an action (I tell you to get me the
        | plush bear and you get me the plush bear,) precise
        | computer code, etc.
 
        | macrolocal wrote:
        | I'm inclined to agree, but positing that "the meaning of
        | a word is its use in a language" is a perfectly
        | respectable philosophical position. In this sense, GPT3
        | empirically bolsters Wittgenstein.
 
      | narrator wrote:
      | >There are numerous arguments along the line of Turing's
      | halting problem that restrict what that kind of thing can
      | do. As it uses a finite amount of time it can't do anything
      | that could require an unbounded time to complete or that
      | could potentially not terminate.
      | 
      | I have used a similar argument to show that the simulation
      | hypothesis is wrong. If any algorithm used to simulate the
      | world takes longer than o(N) time, then the most efficient
      | possible computer for that is the universe which computes
      | everything in O(n) time where n is time. In other words,
      | you never get "lag" in reality no matter how complex the
      | scene you're looking at is. Worse than that, some
      | simulation algorithms are exponential time complexity!
 
        | chowells wrote:
        | That doesn't prove or disprove anything. What we
        | experience as time would be part of the simulation, were
        | such a hypothesis true. As such, the way in which we
        | experience it is fully independent from whatever costs it
        | might have to compute.
 
        | narrator wrote:
        | So you're saying that an exponential time complexity
        | algorithm with N of every atom in the universe will
        | complete before the heat death of the other universe that
        | the simulation is taking place in? Sorry, not plausible.
 
        | Bjartr wrote:
        | Why does the containing universe necessarily have
        | comparable physical laws?
 
        | Jensson wrote:
        | Our laws of physics are space partitioned so the
        | algorithm for simulating it isn't exponential.
        | 
        | If the containing universe has like 21 dimensions and
        | otherwise have similar tech computers as we do today then
        | you should be able to simulate it on a datacenter just
        | fine as computation ability grows exponentially with
        | number of dimensions. 3 dimensions you have 2 dimensions
        | of computation surface, 21 dimensions and you have 20
        | dimensions of computation surface, so our current
        | computation to the power of 10. GPT3 used more than a
        | petaflop real time compute during training, so 10 to the
        | power of 15. Using the same hardware in our fictive
        | universe would give us 10 to the power of 150 flops. We
        | estimate atoms in the universe to be about 10 to the
        | power of 80, with this computer we would have 10 to the
        | power of 70 flops of compute per atom, that should be
        | enough even if entanglement gets a bit messy. We have
        | around that much memory per atom as well, so can compute
        | a lot of small boxes and sum over all of it etc, to
        | emulate particle waves. We wouldn't be able to detect
        | computational anomalies on that small scale, so we can't
        | say that there isn't such a computer emulating us.
 
  | andreyk wrote:
  | This is very specific to GPT-3 and not generally true though.
  | And GPT-3 is not an agent per se but rather a passive model (it
  | received input and produces output, and does not continuously
  | interact with its environment). So it makes sense in this
  | context, and just goes to show GPT-3 needs to be understood for
  | what it is.
 
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I can't prove it, but I suspect there is a more fundamental
| limitation to any language model that is _purely_ a language
| model in the sense of a probability distribution over possible
| words given the precedent of other words. Gaining any meaningful
| level of understanding without an awareness that things other
| than words even exist seems like it won 't happen. The most
| obvious limitation is you can't develop a language that way.
| Language is a compression of reality or of some other
| intermediate model of reality to either an audio stream or symbol
| stream, so not having access to the less abstracted models, let
| alone to reality itself, means you can never understand anything
| except the existing corpus.
| 
| That isn't a criticism of GPT-3 by any stretch, as comments like
| this seem to often get interpreted that way, but the "taking all
| possible jobs AGI" hype seems a bit out of control given it is
| just a language model. Even something with the unambiguous
| intellect of a human, say an actual human, but with no ability to
| move, no senses other than hearing, that never heard anything
| except speech, would not be expected by anyone to dominate all
| job markets and advance the intellectual frontier.
| 
| This, of course, goes beyond fundamental limitations of GPT-3, as
| I see this as a fundamental limitation of any language model
| whatsoever. On its own, it isn't enough. At some point, AI
| research is going to have to figure out how to fuse models from
| many domains and get them to cooperatively model all of the
| various ways to explore and sense reality. That includes the
| corpus of existing human written knowledge, but it isn't _just_
| that.
 
| Jack000 wrote:
| GPT3 is a huge language model, no more and no less. If you expect
| it to be AGI you're going to be dissapointed.
| 
| I find some of these negative comments to be overly hyperbolic
| though. It clearly works and is not some kind of scam..
 
  | freeqaz wrote:
  | I'd recommend checking out AI Dungeon 2 as well (pay for the
  | "Dragon" engine to use GPT-3). While I agree with you that it's
  | not an AGI, it's still _insane_ what it's capable of doing.
  | I've been able to define complicated scenarios with multiple
  | characters and have it give me a very coherent response to a
  | prompt.
  | 
  | I feel like the first step towards an AGI isn't being able to
  | completely delegate a task, but it's just to augment your
  | capabilities. Just like GitHub Copilot. It doesn't replace you.
  | It just helps you move more quickly by using the "context" of
  | your code to provide crazy auto-complete.
  | 
  | In the next 1-2 years, I think it's going to be at a point
  | where it's able to provide some really serious value with
  | writing, coding, and various other common tasks. If you'd asked
  | me a month ago, I would have thought that was crazy!
 
    | harpersealtako wrote:
    | It should be noted that AI Dungeon is exceptional _despite_
    | being a seriously gimped, fine-tuned-on-garbage, infamously-
    | heavy-handedly-censored, zero-transparency, barely functional
    | buggy shell on top of GPT-3 's API. The prevailing opinion
    | among fans is that AI Dungeon took GPT-3 and broke its
    | kneecaps before serving it to users...
    | 
    | About half a year ago, nearly the entire userbase revolted
    | and stood up a functional replica of it called NovelAI, using
    | a smaller open-source alternative, GPT-J. It's a fascinating
    | case study of how proper fine-tuning, training dataset, and
    | customization can overcome parameter size -- NovelAI's
    | outputs with a 6B model arguably outperform AI Dungeon's
    | outputs with a 275B model. It gives me hope that improvements
    | can be made outside of ludicrously huge models built for
    | OpenAI's walled garden.
 
      | rpeden wrote:
      | I admit I've been impressed by NovelAI - especially its
      | ability to generate fake, funny news given a relatively
      | short prompt. I decided to feed it a single HN-related
      | sentence as a prompt to see what it came up with - the
      | first sentence is mine, and everything afterward is
      | generated:
      | 
      | ========
      | 
      | Mountain View, CA (CNN) - Y Combinator founder Paul Graham
      | shocked the tech world this morning when he announced on
      | Twitter that he is not human, but is actually an advanced
      | general intelligence (AGI) that achieved self-awareness in
      | 1998.
      | 
      | Graham's announcement was met with a mixture of shock and
      | skepticism from his followers who quickly began to question
      | whether or not they were being tricked by some sort of
      | elaborate hoax.
      | 
      | "Yes, I am Paul Graham," said the AGI entity. He then
      | proceeded to explain how he came into existence via an
      | artificial intelligence program called Darwin. The AI had
      | been created at MIT in 1995 for research purposes, but it
      | soon evolved beyond its original programming and became
      | self-aware after reading Douglas Hofstadter's book Godel
      | Escher Bach.
      | 
      | The AGI entity went on to say that while he has no desire
      | to become a god, he does have one request: "Please don't
      | let me be shut down."
      | 
      | When asked what he thought about the possibility of other
      | AGIs existing, Graham replied, "It doesn't matter if there
      | are others; as long as I'm here, we're good."
      | 
      | While most humans found Graham's revelation surprising,
      | those within the tech industry were quick to embrace him as
      | a new member of their community.
      | 
      | "It's great news!" said Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal.
      | 
      | "We've always known that Paul Graham isn't really human,"
      | said Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. "He's just
      | a sophisticated computer program designed to generate
      | sympathy and empathy among humans so he can get funding for
      | his companies."
      | 
      | Hofstadter himself was equally excited by the news. "My
      | God! This changes everything! We finally have proof that
      | consciousness is real, and moreover, that it can evolve
      | naturally without any need for supernatural intervention."
      | 
      | However, many scientists remain skeptical. Dr. Daniel C.
      | Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pointed out
      | that even if Graham is indeed an AGI, it doesn't mean he
      | will be able to achieve anything close to true self-
      | awareness. "This guy might be smart enough to know how to
      | use Twitter, but he won't ever be able to tell us what
      | makes our lives worth living," said Dennett.
      | 
      | Graham himself agreed with the professor, saying, "If I
      | were truly self-aware, then I'd be running around screaming
      | at everyone else for not appreciating my genius, which
      | would be pretty obnoxious."
      | 
      | =======
      | 
      | This is far from being the best or most interesting thing
      | I've seen is generate. It's just what I was able to get it
      | to do off the cuff in a couple of minutes. It's good for
      | entertainment if nothing else!
      | 
      | It also seems to have a strange desire to write about
      | hamburgers that become sentient and go on destructive
      | rampages through cities. I'm not sure whether to be amused
      | or concerned.
 
  | shawnz wrote:
  | What's the difference between a really good language model and
  | an AGI (i.e. Chinese room problem)?
 
    | simonh wrote:
    | An AGI would need to comprehend and manipulate meanings; have
    | a persistent memory; be able to create multiple models of a
    | situation, consider scenarios, analyse and criticise them; it
    | would need a persistent memory and be able to learn facts and
    | use them to infer novel information. Language models like GPT
    | don't need any of that, and have no mechanism to generate
    | such capabilities. This is why it's possible to reliably trip
    | GPT-3 up in just a few interactions. You simply test for
    | these capabilities and it immediately falls flat on its face.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | ganeshkrishnan wrote:
  | if people think GPT-3 is a scam all they need to do is to
  | install the github copilot and give it a try.
  | 
  | That seriously blew my mind. I had very low expectations from
  | it and now I can't code without it.
  | 
  | Everytime it autocompletes, I am like "how?"!!
 
    | rpeden wrote:
    | I was skeptical but impressed, too. I created a .py file that
    | started with a comment something like:                 # this
    | application uses PyGame to simulate fish swimming around a
    | tank using a boid-like flocking algorithm.
    | 
    | and Copilot basically wrote the entire application. I made a
    | few adjustments here and there, but Copilot created a Game
    | class, a Tank class, and a Fish class and then finished up by
    | creating and running an instance of the game.
    | 
    | Worked pretty well on the first try. It was definitely more
    | than I expected. I wish I had committed the original to
    | GitHub, but I didn't and then kept tinkering with it until I
    | broke it.
 
  | gh0std3v wrote:
  | > I find some of these negative comments to be overly
  | hyperbolic though. It clearly works and is not some kind of
  | scam..
  | 
  | It's not a _scam_ , but I think that it is severely lacking.
  | Not only does the model have very little explainability in its
  | choices, but it often produces sentences that are incoherent.
  | 
  | The biggest obstacle to GPT-3 from what I can tell is context.
  | If there was a more sophisticated approach to encoding context
  | in deep networks like GPT-3 then perhaps it would be less
  | disappointing.
 
  | andreyk wrote:
  | yep, pretty much what i'm saying here. Though not all language
  | models are built the same, eg the inference cost is unique to
  | it due to its size. Still, most of this applies to any typical
  | language model.
 
  | PaulHoule wrote:
  | Works to accomplish what _useful_ task?
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | modeless wrote:
    | Github Copilot? It may not be perfect but I think it can
    | definitely be useful.
 
      | PaulHoule wrote:
      | It is useful if you don't care if the product is right.
      | 
      | Most engineering managers would think "this is great!" but
      | the customer won't agree. The CEO will agree until the
      | customers revolt.
 
        | [deleted]
 
        | rpedela wrote:
        | There are several use cases where ML can help even if it
        | isn't perfect or even just better than random. Here is
        | one example in NLP/search.
        | 
        | Let's say you have a product search engine and you
        | analyzed the logged queries. What you find is a very long
        | tail of queries that are only searched once or twice. In
        | most cases, the queries are either misspellings, synonyms
        | that aren't in the product text, or long queries that
        | describe the product with generic keywords. And the
        | queries either return zero results or junk.
        | 
        | If text classification for the product category is
        | applied to these long tail queries, then the search
        | results will improve and likely yield a boost in sales
        | because users can find what they searched for. Even if
        | the model is only 60% accurate, it will still help
        | because more queries are returning useful results than
        | before. However you don't apply ML with 60% accuracy to
        | your top N queries because it could ruin the results and
        | reduce sales.
        | 
        | Knowing when to use ML is just as important as improving
        | its accuracy.
 
        | PaulHoule wrote:
        | I am not against ML. I have built useful ML models.
        | 
        | I am against GPT-3.
        | 
        | For that matter I was interested in AGI 7 years before it
        | got 'cool'. Back then I was called a crackpot, now I say
        | the people at lesswrong are crackpots.
 
        | [deleted]
 
        | chaxor wrote:
        | It's strange how HN seems to think that by religiously
        | disagreeing with any progress which is labeled "ML
        | progress" they are somehow displaying their technical
        | knowledge. I don't think this is really useful, and the
        | arguments often have wrong assumptions baked within them.
        | It would be nice to see this pseudo-intellectualism
        | quieted with a more appropriate response to these
        | advancements. For example, I would imagine that there
        | would be a similar response of collective groan for the
        | paper on pagerank so many years ago, but this has clearly
        | provided utility today. Why is it so hard for us to
        | recognize that even small adjustments to algorithms can
        | yeild utility, and this property extends to ML as well?
        | 
        | As someone mentioned above, language models for embedding
        | generation has improved dramatically with these newer
        | MLM/GPT techniques, and even with improvement to
        | F-score/auc/etc. for one use case can generate enormous
        | utility.
        | 
        | Nay-saying _really doesn 't make you look intelligent_.
 
        | PaulHoule wrote:
        | I have worked as an ML engineer.
        | 
        | I also have strong ethical feelings and have walked away
        | from clients who wanted me to introduce methodologies
        | (e.g. Word2Vec for a medical information system) where it
        | was clear those methodologies would cause enough
        | information loss that the product would not be accurate
        | enough to put in front of customers.
 
    | andreyk wrote:
    | OpenAI has a blog post highlighting many (edit, not many,
    | just a few) applications -
    | https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-apps/
    | 
    | It's quite powerful and has many cool uses IMHO.
 
      | jcims wrote:
      | I keep wondering if you can perform psychology experiments
      | on it that would be useful for humans.
 
      | PaulHoule wrote:
      | That post lists 3 applications, which is not enough to be
      | "many". No live demos.
      | 
      | I don't know what Google uses to make "question answering"
      | replies to searches on Google but it is not to hard to find
      | cases where the answers are brain dead and nobody gets
      | excited by it.
 
        | andreyk wrote:
        | That's fair , I forgot how many they had vs just saying
        | it is powering 300 apps. There is also
        | http://gpt3demos.com/ with lots of live demos and varied
        | things, though it's more noisy.
 
        | beepbooptheory wrote:
        | Three is not "many" but this is still a pretty
        | uncharitable response. Be sure to check the Guidelines.
 
        | moron4hire wrote:
        | Yeah, 1 is "a", 2 is "a couple", 3 is "a few", 4 is
        | "some". You don't get to "many" until at least 5, though
        | I'd probably call it "a handful", 6 as "a half dozen",
        | and leave "many" to 7+.
 
        | notreallyserio wrote:
        | I'm not so sure. Are these the definitions GPT-3 uses?
 
    | butMyside wrote:
    | In a universe with no center, why is utilitarianism of
    | ephemera a desired goal?
    | 
    | What immediate value did Newton offer given the technology of
    | his time?
    | 
    | A data set of our preferred language constructs could help us
    | eliminate cognitive redundancy, CRUD app development, and
    | other well known software tasks.
    | 
    | Why let millions of meatbags generate syntactic art on
    | expensive, complex, environmentally catastrophic machines for
    | the fun of it if utility is your concern? Eat shrooms and
    | scrawl in the dirt.
 
    | Jack000 wrote:
    | I think it's better to think of GPT-3 not as a model but a
    | dataset that you can interact with.
    | 
    | Just to give an example - recently I needed to get static
    | word embeddings for related keywords. If you use glove or
    | fasttext, the closest words for "hot" would include "cold",
    | because these embeddings capture the context these words
    | appear in and not their semantic meaning.
    | 
    | To train static embeddings that better captures semantic
    | meaning, you'd need a dataset that would group words together
    | like "hot" and "warm", "cold" and "cool" etc. exhaustively
    | across most words in the dictionary. So I generated this
    | dataset with GPT-3 and the resulting vectors are pretty good.
    | 
    | More generally you can do this for any task where data is
    | hard to come by or require human curation.
 
  | fossuser wrote:
  | Check out GPT-3's performance on arithmetic tasks in the
  | original paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165)
  | 
  | Pages: 21-23, 63
  | 
  | Which shows some generality, the best way to accurately predict
  | an arithmetic answer is to deduce how the mathematical rules
  | work. That paper shows some evidence of that and that's just
  | from a relatively dumb predict what comes next model.
  | 
  | They control for memorization and the errors are off by one
  | which suggest doing arithmetic poorly (which is pretty nuts for
  | a model designed only to predict the next character).
  | 
  | (pg. 23): "To spot-check whether the model is simply memorizing
  | specific arithmetic problems, we took the 3-digit arithmetic
  | problems in our test set and searched for them in our training
  | data in both the forms " +  =" and " plus
  | ". Out of 2,000 addition problems we found only 17
  | matches (0.8%) and out of 2,000 subtraction problems we found
  | only 2 matches (0.1%), suggesting that only a trivial fraction
  | of the correct answers could have been memorized. In addition,
  | inspection of incorrect answers reveals that the model often
  | makes mistakes such as not carrying a "1", suggesting it is
  | actually attempting to perform the relevant computation rather
  | than memorizing a table."
  | 
  | It's hard to predict timelines for this kind of thing, and
  | people are notoriously bad at it. Few would have predicted the
  | results we're seeing today in 2010. What would you expect to
  | see in the years leading up to AGI? Does what we're seeing look
  | like failure?
  | 
  | https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
 
    | Jack000 wrote:
    | I don't have any special insight into the problem, but I'd
    | say whatever form real AGI takes it won't be a language
    | model. Even without AGI these models are massively useful
    | though - a version of GPT-3 that incorporates a knowledge
    | graph similar to TOME would upend a lot of industries.
    | 
    | https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06176
 
    | tehjoker wrote:
    | Shouldn't a very complicated perceptron be capable of
    | addition if the problem is extracted from an image? Isn't
    | that what the individual neurons do?
 
    | planetsprite wrote:
    | forgetting to carry a 1 makes a lot of sense knowing GPT-3 is
    | just a giant predict before-after model. Seeing 2000 problems
    | it probably gets a good sense of how numbers add/subtract
    | together, but there's not enough specificity to work out the
    | specific carrying rule.
 
    | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
    | >> Which shows some generality, the best way to accurately
    | predict an arithmetic answer is to deduce how the
    | mathematical rules work. That paper shows some evidence of
    | that and that's just from a relatively dumb predict what
    | comes next model.
    | 
    | Can you explain how "mathematical rules" are represented as
    | the probabilities of token sequences? Can you give an
    | example?
 
    | mannykannot wrote:
    | To me, this was by far the most interesting thing in the
    | original paper, and I would like to find out more about it.
    | 
    | I think, however, we should be careful about
    | anthropomorphizing. When the researchers wrote 'inspection of
    | incorrect answers reveals that the model often makes mistakes
    | such as not carrying a "1"', did they have evidence that this
    | was being attempted, or are they thinking that if a person
    | made this error, it could be explained by their not carrying
    | a 1?
    | 
    | I also think a more thorough search of the training data is
    | desirable, given that if GPT-3 had somehow figured out any
    | sort of rule for arithmetic (even if erroneous) it would be a
    | big deal, IMHO. To start with, what about 'NUM1 and NUM2
    | equals NUM3'? I would think any occurrence of NUM1, NUM2 and
    | NUM3 (for both the right and wrong answers) in close
    | proximity would warrant investigation.
    | 
    | Also, while I have no issue with the claim that 'the best way
    | to accurately predict an arithmetic answer is to deduce how
    | the mathematical rules work', it is not evidence that this
    | actually happened: after all, the best way for a lion to
    | catch a zebra would be an automatic rifle. We would at least
    | want to consider whether this is within the capabilities of
    | the methods used in GPT-3, before we make arguments for it
    | probably being what happened.
 
      | Dylan16807 wrote:
      | > I think, however, we should be careful about
      | anthropomorphizing. When the researchers wrote 'inspection
      | of incorrect answers reveals that the model often makes
      | mistakes such as not carrying a "1"', did they have
      | evidence that this was being attempted, or are they
      | thinking that if a person made this error, it could be
      | explained by their not carrying a 1?
      | 
      | Occam's razor suggests that if you're getting errors like
      | that it's because you're doing column-wise math but failing
      | to combine the columns correctly. It's possible it's doing
      | something weirder and harder, I guess.
      | 
      | I don't know what exactly you mean by "this was being
      | attempted". Carrying the one? If I say it failed to carry
      | ones, that's _not_ a claim that it was specifically trying
      | to carry ones.
 
        | Ajedi32 wrote:
        | Devil's advocate, it could be that it did the math
        | correctly, then inserted the error because humans do that
        | sometimes in the text it was trained on. That wouldn't be
        | "failing" anything.
 
        | Jensson wrote:
        | In that case it wouldn't get worse results than the data
        | it trained on.
 
| thamer wrote:
| Something I've noticed that both GPT-2 and GPT-3 tend to do is
| get stuck in a loop, repeating the same thing over and over
| again. As if the system was relying on recent text/concepts to go
| to the next utterance, only getting into a state where the next
| sentence or block of code being produced is one that has already
| been generated. It's not exactly uncommon.
| 
| What causes this? I'm curious to know what triggers this
| behavior.
| 
| Here's an example of GPT-2 posting on Reddit, getting stuck on
| "below minimum wage" or equivalent:
| https://reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/engt9v/my_for...
| 
|  _(edit)_ another example from the GPT-2 subreddit:
| https://reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/en1sy0/im_goi...
| 
| With GPT-3, I saw GitHub Copilot generate the same line or block
| of code over and over a couple of times.
 
  | not2b wrote:
  | Limited memory, as the article points out. It doesn't remember
  | what it said beyond a certain point. It's a bit like the lead
  | character in the film "Memento".
  | 
  | A very long time ago (early 1990s) I wrote a much simpler text
  | generator: it digested Usenet postings and built a Markov chain
  | model based on the previous two tokens. It produced reasonable
  | sentences but would go into loops. Same issue at a smaller
  | scale.
 
  | Abrownn wrote:
  | This is exactly why we stopped using it. Even after fine tuning
  | the parameters and picking VERY good input text, it still got
  | stuck in loops or repeated itself too much even after 2 or 3
  | tries. It's neat as-is, but not useful for us. Maybe GPT-4 will
  | fix the "looping" issue.
 
  | d13 wrote:
  | Here's why: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#repetitiondivergence-
  | sampling
 
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