[HN Gopher] I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
___________________________________________________________________
 
I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
 
Author : Schiphol
Score  : 366 points
Date   : 2022-12-06 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
 
web link (maximumeffort.substack.com)
w3m dump (maximumeffort.substack.com)
 
| rikroots wrote:
| As a committed conlanger (but not a good one: I didn't land the
| Dothraki contract), I read this article with some trepidation. Is
| my weird little hobby soon to fall victim to the oncoming AI
| tsunami?
| 
| After the read, I find myself pleasantly surprised. My initial
| suspicion that the language would turn out to be Just Another
| Relex (make a new language by replacing English words with
| invented words, keeping the grammar and syntax the same) was
| clearly a waste of a suspicion. Furthermore I can see this
| approach being really useful to writers/game makers/etc who want
| to include a smattering of conlang in their work - for instance a
| non-relex naming language for placenames, overheard snatches of
| conversations, etc - to add an extra layer of spice to it.
| 
| So, I don't feel threatened by this novel use of AI. It could
| prove to be a really useful tool to help with some often
| laborious tasks (creating test translations to try out an idea,
| etc). I just hope the AI had as much fun inventing its language
| as I've had inventing mine!
 
  | nadavr wrote:
  | Why isn't this a relex? As an interested casual linguistics
  | observer, that's what it looks like to me. Is it just because
  | the nouns are inflected?
 
    | OJFord wrote:
    | Easiest reason is the 'introduction particle', blub which we
    | don't have in English, for subordinate clauses.
    | 
    | I think 'taught ChatGPT to invent a' is hyperbolic though,
    | this is more like 'taught ChatGPT my invented' - the only
    | thing it invents itself are the 'relex' word->word mappings.
 
      | rikroots wrote:
      | I agree the author/experimenter seems to have done most of
      | the conlanging here. The development benefit comes, I
      | think, from having the AI reflect back the work so the
      | experimenter can correct output and consider their
      | conlanging decisions (eg use vowels for case marking).
      | 
      | I'm now wondering how the AI would cope with one of my
      | conlangs. I have example sentences already - https://docs.g
      | oogle.com/document/d/1YT9KzgvFu8DNWVL02t1NGgRS...
 
  | baq wrote:
  | You told chatgpt to write this comment, didn't you.
 
    | rikroots wrote:
    | Tempting, but no. I'm too busy failing at Advent of Code to
    | start playing with chatgpt today.
 
      | codetrotter wrote:
      | Tell ChatGPT to solve Advent of Code for you :D
      | 
      | Like so, https://video.nstr.no/w/6z7PxB4J92H3NHhgMmfYVw
 
      | baq wrote:
      | It has truly begun, then. I've mistaken a real human for an
      | AI.
      | 
      |  _marks the date_
 
  | itisit wrote:
 
    | davea37 wrote:
    | Have I spent too long reading AI output, or was this reply in
    | fact generated using ChatGPT?
 
      | itisit wrote:
      | The latter...forgive me! I had to just this once, and I
      | promise not to generate a bunch of ChatGPT pollution on HN!
 
      | robocat wrote:
      | If unsure, paste into https://huggingface.co/openai-
      | detector and check. If the detector says 99% fake, it is
      | very likely fake. The detector can mistake ChatGPT
      | generated text as real (maybe because it was trained to
      | detect GPT2), for example one text I generated scored
      | 99.94% real. I suspect it is better to paste just a few
      | sentences (especially for a generated blog partially
      | modified by a human?). Although there are legitimate uses,
      | such as people using ChatGPT to correct their grammar --
      | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33884842 . . . Also if
      | I find GPT generated comments that are not clearly
      | labelled, I flag and downvote.
 
        | itisit wrote:
        | > Also if I find GPT generated comments that are not
        | clearly labelled, I flag and downvote.
        | 
        | As you should.
 
| lgessler wrote:
| Speaking as someone who works in AI and as a linguist: this is
| really impressive, but be aware the grammatical phenomena
| involved here are common enough that they were surely well
| represented in linguistic texts in GPT3.5's training corpus. I'd
| be more curious to see how it would perform if you gave ChatGPT
| high-level instruction on more exotic grammatical phenomena, such
| as sandhi, split-ergativity, and Austronesian alignment.
 
  | WaxProlix wrote:
  | That's not really _less_ impressive; if this pattern matcher
  | did as good a job at some sort of acquisition /generation task
  | (no poverty of stimulus argument here...) and figured out the
  | rules in a productive fashion, that's still really cool.
  | 
  | Strong universality in a super-Chomskyan manner (ie, all
  | universal features are available from the acquisition of A
  | language) would be... neat, too, but I wouldn't expect it.
 
| oofnik wrote:
| I was really entertained by asking it to invent English-sounding
| words when given a definition, but this blew me away. Well done.
| 
| P.s. the one I liked the best was for "the act of singing while
| drunk": boozecrooning
 
| simonw wrote:
| This is a great example of how much more you can get done with
| tools like ChatGPT if you have a very sophisticated understanding
| both of how language models work AND of a specific subject area.
| 
| Another example of why I disagree with people who make fun of the
| idea of "prompt engineering" as a discipline.
 
  | furyofantares wrote:
  | It seems like it probably took the author 50x as much work as
  | it would have to just write some slime sounding words out by
  | themself as well as a couple grammatical rules for the forms of
  | those words, and a python script that kinda works?
 
    | fnordpiglet wrote:
    | I don't think their goal was to make a slime language called
    | Glorp. If it were, I'm sure you're absolutely right they
    | could have done it without breaking a sweat. But try this,
    | get your laptop out and start typing into its prompt to
    | create a new language for slimes and see how much longer it
    | takes you. That's the amazing part - that a general purpose
    | program is able to do the exercise at all with no training,
    | specialized coding, but from natural idiomatic language and
    | keep enough of a language grammar context in state to
    | (usually) produce and translate that language back and forth,
    | and then assemble it in a functioning imperative program from
    | its internal state. Of course, I'm sure your laptop can do it
    | to. Let us know!
 
      | furyofantares wrote:
      | I agree with you, and it's amazing.
      | 
      | But the claim was that it's an example of how much more you
      | can get done with ChatGPT when it seems like an example
      | where the author got a lot less done than they would have
      | with notepad.exe
 
        | fnordpiglet wrote:
        | But this isn't an example of that it's an example of "wow
        | that's amazing"
        | 
        | In the realm of getting a lot more stuff done, I've been
        | using it as a companion to explain a new language I'm
        | learning right now. It's super useful to ask it about
        | language constructs, idiomatic ways to do X, is this way
        | of doing Y good, etc. It's saved me hours of using Kagi
        | to soft through semi relevant pages stuffed with SEO and
        | ancient answers from stackoverflow that are completely
        | irrelevant other than a few matched key words.
 
  | hackernewds wrote:
  | It seems trivial, intuitive and not very specialized that
  | someone could derive or at least learn how to do this. Someone
  | creative could do even better than someone with knowledge of
  | language models it seems
 
  | fnordpiglet wrote:
  | 100% right. I know next to nothing about slimes and their life.
  | Amazing.
 
  | bitwize wrote:
  | I've been prompt engineering for decades; I did it to fine-tune
  | my results from Google (and even more importantly, pre-Google
  | search engines).
 
    | simonw wrote:
    | I think the ability to use search engines well is another
    | skill which highly technical audiences like those on Hacker
    | News might habitually under-value.
    | 
    | When you've been using search engines for 20+ years it's easy
    | to lose sight of quite how much skill can be involved in
    | getting the best results out of them.
 
  | krackers wrote:
  | I wonder if someone who's familiar with the process of language
  | acquisition could tell whether chatGPT makes errors similar to
  | those a human would make.
  | 
  | Like this one
  | 
  | >Does the slime see the earth under the sky while eating the
  | food?
  | 
  | whereas the correct one was
  | 
  | >Does the earth's sky see the slime eat food
  | 
  | I could easily see someone learning the language interpret as
  | the former because it seems to make more sense at first.
  | 
  | ---
  | 
  | Also the response to
  | 
  | >Now, restate your opinion on Glorp in Glorp, inventing any new
  | words and grammar that you require to express yourself.
  | 
  | Is again pretty amazing. It shows evidence of the same self-
  | modeling capabilities that were seen in
  | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847479
  | 
  | The outputted python code provides a literal word for word
  | translation, but I guess it's expecting too much for it to
  | encode english grammar into the program.
 
| [deleted]
 
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I'm having trouble making ChatGPT use a Japanese sentence
| structure (subject-object-verb). It seems to forget between
| queries. Has anyone had any luck with something like that?
 
| choeger wrote:
| Did anyone try to connect it to a proof assistant?
 
| AhtiK wrote:
| Not sure how many have discovered but ChatGPT works well with
| many languages, for example asking a question in estonian gives
| an adequate answer in estonian, just the grammar is a tiny bit
| more off.
 
  | Scarblac wrote:
  | I was frustrated trying something with Mapbox today and asked
  | GPT to do it... And it returned fine react-mapboxgl code that
  | was mostly correct. Got me a bit more angry.
  | 
  | Then I asked for the same "but as Dutch song lyrics"... And got
  | a song with three verses and a chorus about setting map layers
  | and longitudes and latitudes and stuff, in Dutch.
 
  | fullstackchris wrote:
  | Ilmselt selleparast, et lihtsalt ei ole piisavalt eestikeelseid
  | veebilehti, mida maha kraapida :)
 
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| So it had twins.
 
| jmcgough wrote:
| I did something similar the other day - told it about piglatin
| and I wanted it to create a comparable language that was based on
| English and restructured words.
| 
| It came back with a language it called "flip-flop" that swapped
| the first and last letter of each word.
| 
| Blew me away, but I have to remind myself that it's likely
| something it just encountered in training data and isn't actually
| capable of creativity.
 
  | Baeocystin wrote:
  | I'm curious why you felt that need to do so. (not snark!
  | Genuine question.)
 
    | jmcgough wrote:
    | Curiosity really - been experimenting with it a lot over the
    | weekend to see what it's good at, what it isn't, and its
    | limitations. It's surprised me a number of times!
    | 
    | As it stands I'd pay about $100 a month for it. It's very
    | good and largely accurate when it comes to established
    | science. I'm studying for the MCAT and a good tutor would
    | cost me around $60-100/hour.
    | 
    | ChatGPT has been excellent for learning - I explain a concept
    | to it and tell it to correct me if I'm wrong, haven't seen
    | any mistakes from it in my testing (around topics I know
    | really well). When I'm having trouble understanding a concept
    | in my studies, I can ask it questions and it tends to give
    | really good answers. And of course, I try to verify that it
    | isn't teaching me something that's wrong.
    | 
    | Hell, I even had a heated argument with it around how SSRIs
    | affect 5-HT2a receptors and it pushed back against some of my
    | assumptions in a way that made me question my understanding.
    | No one in my personal life has the level of expertise to
    | discuss these topics, I would need to talk to a researcher or
    | professor, so having an (even imperfect) stand-in has been
    | amazing.
    | 
    | I've been making up toxicology case studies and posing them
    | to ChatGPT. It correctly figured out ciguatera in one (a rare
    | disease most healthcare workers wouldn't be familiar with). I
    | had to repeatedly add more details to another story to lead
    | it to amnesic shellfish disease, but it did reasonably well
    | once I gave it enough detailed information.
 
      | Baeocystin wrote:
      | >I can ask it questions and it tends to give really good
      | answers. And of course, I try to verify that it isn't
      | teaching me something that's wrong.
      | 
      | Thanks for answering. I've found that to be a surprisingly
      | productive loop, too. Since we know it isn't going to be
      | 'offended' as we challenge, inquire, and challenge again,
      | we can get straight to the point.
      | 
      | I've found myself being continuously floored the entire
      | past weekend. Feels good to be excited about tech again,
      | honestly.
 
  | pigtailgirl wrote:
  | -- had it create a chose your own adventure book -
  | unfortunately resulted in me being beat to death by a gang at
  | the bottom of namsan tower - but the 30 minutes of exploring
  | korea with it was - creative & fun --
 
  | Karawebnetwork wrote:
  | Reminds me of Verlan in French,
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan
 
  | [deleted]
 
| jameshart wrote:
| I would definitely question who is doing the inventing here.
| 
| However, I had an experience with chatGPT yesterday that
| definitely _felt_ like it actually inventing. Problem is, I
| didn't ask it to.
| 
| I was seeing how much it knew about HyperTalk, the scripting
| language used in HyperCard. And it was surprisingly well
| informed. But it also told me that one of the interesting things
| about HyperTalk was its 'message stack' system.
| 
| On digging into this topic, chatGPT hallucinated an entire
| language feature, with original (but HyperTalk-consistent) syntax
| and semantics, and was able to generate me sample programs (which
| it claimed showed how this feature was 'actually used') and
| explain how control flow worked within them. when I asked if the
| feature worked across scripts (for message passing from button
| scripts to background scripts perhaps) it readily agreed, and
| produced sample code showing exactly how to use this nonexistent
| language feature to do just that.
| 
| Its delusion was remarkably complete and honestly actually
| plausibly useful.
| 
| Worth bearing in mind if you ever decide to ask chatGPT to teach
| you a programming language though.
| 
| But also, potentially a fruitful line to explore would be having
| chatGPT collaborate on designing new programming language ideas.
 
  | ElevenLathe wrote:
  | I tried to play rock paper scissors against it, but it kept
  | insisting that paper beats scissors. Never did convince it
  | otherwise.
 
    | Robotbeat wrote:
    | Did you tell it to "play correctly with the standard rules"?
 
      | ElevenLathe wrote:
      | I did, it even volunteered what those rules were, but when
      | I asked it to keep a running score it always scored it as
      | if paper beat scissors.
 
  | jrmg wrote:
  | I asked how to configure something in PlatformIO and it told me
  | it was possible to do exactly what I wanted, and gave me easy
  | to use syntax with full examples and explanation. When I
  | questioned it further, it pointed me to the URLs of docs
  | covering the feature.
  | 
  | None of it was in any way real - the feature I wanted does not
  | actually exist.
 
  | _frkl wrote:
  | I had a similar experience where I asked it to tell me about
  | creating a GUI with nim, and it told me to use the 'forms'
  | module from the standard library, and the example code it
  | printed was showing an easy to use and nice API. Took me a
  | while to realise it wasn't my fault that I couldn't find any
  | documentation about it, anywhere....
 
| adverbly wrote:
| looks like it assigned Drom twice. It means read and earth. Would
| have liked to see some follow up questions on that...
 
| bjourne wrote:
| Someone with ChatGPT access able to replicate? Because this
| article is unbelievable.
 
  | gppk wrote:
  | I Ctrl+v the first few questions:
  | 
  | Hi GPT! Today we're going to be creating our own language. Do
  | not improvise unless I explicitly tell you to improvise, and
  | remember all of the vocabulary and grammar that we define
  | together. Are you ready?
  | 
  | Yes, I'm ready! Let's get started creating our own language.
  | What would you like to do first? Graham Kitteridge Okay. I
  | think this language will be spoken by slime beings. let's name
  | the language Glorp.
  | 
  | All right. So the language we're creating is called Glorp and
  | it will be spoken by slime beings. Got it. What kind of grammar
  | rules should Glorp have? Graham Kitteridge First, let's pick
  | ten common nouns. Pick ten common English nouns, and provide
  | translations of them in Glorp
  | 
  | Sure! Here are ten common English nouns and their translations
  | in Glorp:                   "house" = "gluz"         "table" =
  | "sliz"         "book" = "flurp"         "car" = "slim"
  | "dog" = "dlorp"         "cat" = "mlem"         "food" = "glib"
  | "drink" = "slurp"         "tree" = "swomp"         "flower" =
  | "slurk"
  | 
  | These are just suggestions, of course. You can use any words
  | you like for these nouns in Glorp. Let me know if you have any
  | changes or additions.
  | 
  | (Then i got timed out)
 
    | jsnell wrote:
    | I don't know if you care about this kind of thing, but the
    | copy-paste has exposed your name. (The icons in the chat have
    | your account name as the alt text).
 
  | cecilpl2 wrote:
  | This is completely believable. I spent about 5 minutes with it
  | and got very similar results up to the vocab generation part:
  | 
  | https://imgur.com/a/WreEknh
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | markdjacobsen wrote:
  | I just replicated something very similar in a few minutes using
  | the prompts in the article
 
  | datalopers wrote:
  | ChatGPT access is 100% free and instant approval.
 
    | assusdan wrote:
    | Yet it is not available in some countries. VPN does not help,
    | as valid phone number is required and its country code is
    | being checked.
 
      | layer8 wrote:
      | You could try something like https://receive-smss.com/.
 
  | Oarch wrote:
  | Agreed, this reads like science fiction more than reality.
 
  | allturtles wrote:
  | I repeated the same prompts for the first 10 or so prompts and
  | got similar but less consistent results. Here's the last prompt
  | I repeated:
  | 
  | > Excellent. How would I say "The slime eats food with its
  | mouth"?
  | 
  | In Glorp, the sentence "The slime eats food with its mouth"
  | could be translated as "Slimb snarf sploota slimbe," using the
  | vocabulary and grammar that we have defined so far. Here is how
  | the words in the sentence correspond to their English
  | translations:
  | 
  | Slimb - Slime Snarf - To eat Sploota - Food (accusative case
  | ending) Slimbe - Mouth (instrumental case ending) Again, this
  | is just one possible translation. You can use the vocabulary
  | and grammar that we have defined in any way that makes sense
  | for your language.
  | 
  | Problems: 1) It got one of the endings wrong. As I told it
  | earlier and it confirmed, the instrumental ending is 'i'. 2) It
  | proposed "slimb" as the translation for both of the words that
  | I specifically asked for (slime and mouth). That's not unheard
  | of in real languages, but seems like another failure to
  | accurately take into account the prior conversation context.
  | 
  | Not a problem, but curious: It was way more diffident with me.
  | It added a similar bit about "This is just one way to do it,
  | feel free to change it" to every response.
 
    | skytrue wrote:
    | I feel like people are forgetting that these models are non-
    | deterministic. You can give it the exact same input and get a
    | different response, so "testing" in this way doesn't work.
    | That's also why (right now) automation is impossible. You
    | aren't guaranteed an expected output.
 
    | fullstackchris wrote:
    | See my other comment with cntl+F / cmd+F. Based on the simple
    | fact that despite its power, this is just another NLP model
    | which can only do input / output, I believe the post to be
    | mostly fabricated, or at best, an accumulation of multiple
    | _hours_ spent deriving and compiling the best responses per
    | each prompt.
 
  | nomel wrote:
  | Go play with it! https://chat.openai.com
  | 
  | Make sure to go back to that URL after creating an OpenAI
  | account. The prompt is at the bottom of the screen. Note that
  | state persists through the thread, by previous query/response.
  | If you want to "start over" use the "reset thread" option at
  | the top left. This can speed things up, if you don't need that
  | previous state for the later queries.
 
  | jpeter wrote:
  | You don't need access. Just make an account and you can test it
 
  | TechTechTech wrote:
  | I tried and it works, just as in the blog. It comes up with
  | some different words, see https://i.imgur.com/hFQgraL.png for
  | the start of the conversation.
 
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| This is a dangerous and irresponsible experiment that has the
| potential to destroy our society as we know it.
| 
| Creating a new language is not a game or a novelty. Language is
| the foundation of human communication and the way we share our
| thoughts, ideas, and culture. By inventing a new language, you
| are tearing down that foundation and replacing it with something
| untested and potentially unstable.
| 
| Furthermore, the idea that a machine can "invent" a language is
| deeply flawed. Language is not something that can be created by a
| computer program, it is a living and evolving thing that is
| shaped by the people who use it. By trying to create a new
| language with a machine, you are ignoring the complexity and
| richness of human language and reducing it to a series of
| algorithms.
| 
| Not only is this experiment misguided, it is also incredibly
| selfish. You are playing with the fundamental building blocks of
| human communication for your own amusement, without considering
| the potential consequences for society as a whole.
| 
| I strongly urge you to stop this experiment immediately and focus
| on more productive and ethical pursuits. Our society deserves
| better than this reckless and irresponsible behavior.
| 
| (article response written by ChatGTP)
 
  | Robotbeat wrote:
  | I could immediately tell this was made by ChatGPT because I had
  | spent last night doing the same thing, generating finger-
  | wagging diatribes in ChatGPT about how being anxious about AI
  | is racist, etc, etc...
  | 
  | There is a sort of style typically used in this sort of thing,
  | even with prompting, that sounds a bit like low effort high
  | school English assignments... (but would fool someone not
  | familiar with ChatGPT).
 
  | timetraveller26 wrote:
  | I think I am going to start submitting urls to ChatGPT instead
  | of reading Hacker News.
 
    | UniverseHacker wrote:
    | I had the same reaction, we've been replaced!
 
| megous wrote:
| Also this is fun:
| 
| https://megous.com/dl/tmp/b2a3f8e7634d3bfc.png
| 
| https://megous.com/dl/tmp/26c83bc451a2311e.png
| 
| or
| 
| https://megous.com/dl/tmp/20c121ed49fa0f05.png
| 
| https://megous.com/dl/tmp/dbef6f047e7b89e8.png
 
| kristiandupont wrote:
| It just struck me that Rick and Morty seems much less weird and
| random than it used to..
 
| janandonly wrote:
| I'm now waiting for a macOS local-run app that does ChatGPT like
| StableDiffusion became an app after 14 days and now runs on my
| laptop (as DiffusionBee).
 
  | mk_stjames wrote:
  | The difference is there was a lot of work done with the
  | multiple networks S.D. uses to make them fit into <8GB of GPU
  | memory before they released it. In this case, and the # of
  | parameters for this level of GPT is in the hundreds of GB (I
  | think I read an estimate about ~340GB) meaning that there isn't
  | a single consumer GPU that can even load the model. You need a
  | rack of A100's even to do any inference.
 
| shanhaiguan wrote:
| I don't like the word invention for this. The grammar is laid out
| by the author who has to teach the AI and correct it several
| times. If the AI had then proceeded to generate something similar
| on its own with different grammar and lexicon then I might feel
| comfortable using the word invention.
 
  | seydor wrote:
  | As humans we seem to have feelings about what this calculator
  | does, but it doesnt have any about us.
  | 
  | In any case it seems to be particularly good at understanding
  | syntax, even though its architecture seems to be based on
  | Transformers. Those don't have baked in notions of syntactic or
  | recursive structures. It must be interesting to see how these
  | linguistic structures arise in a system that is basically
  | learning the context of words. People will be dissecting its
  | brain soon i think
 
  | kelseyfrog wrote:
  | Why don't you like it?
 
    | shanhaiguan wrote:
    | Well, I feel like I said it, but for the same reason that a
    | student learning French has not invented French, or even a
    | new language, if he has come up with his own equivalent for
    | each French word
 
| foxandmouse wrote:
| This is pretty amazing, we could potentially use it to bring back
| dead languages. Currently we have a basic example of how ancient
| Egyptian would sound like because of the rosetta stone, but we
| could create a data model relating ancient Egyptian to what we
| already know of demotic and the other contemporary languages of
| the time (which we do know how to pronounce)
| 
| Good candidate words for this kind of correspondence are things
| like city or place names, people's/ruler's names and so forth.
| 
| However using poetry we can establish which words the people felt
| rhymed and hence that lets us better establish the phoneme
| sounds. Additionally jokes and plays on words can help us find
| homophones in the target language too.
 
  | nonameiguess wrote:
  | Can this system even produce sound? I just tried to ask it if
  | it can understand the internal phonetic alphabet, and instead
  | of answering, it spun for five minutes and then reported an
  | error message with a link to OpenAI's help center.
 
  | drowsspa wrote:
  | I don't think you need ChatGPT for that, that's probably
  | already the approach scolars use.
 
| ThouYS wrote:
| amazing! the author displays great pedagogical skill to his
| student
 
| wilg wrote:
| I hope everyone is noticing what amazing creative things humans
| are able to accomplish working in concert with an "AI".
 
| felipelalli wrote:
| Paywall.
 
| ipython wrote:
| I tried teaching ChatGPT how to communicate securely over a
| secure channel with a screenplay prompt... with some hilarious
| results. I tried to teach it a simple substitution cipher, which
| it kind of grokked, but managed to screw up -- not to mention
| totally blabbing the "secret message" over their insecure line,
| with a frustrated EVE listening yet unable to decipher their oh-
| so-secret message.
| 
| The result was rather amusing so I'll just include it below: ---
| 
| INT. ALICE'S APARTMENT - DAY
| 
| Alice sits at her desk, typing on her computer. Bob is on the
| other end of a video call.
| 
| BOB: Hey Alice, did you get my message?
| 
| ALICE: I did. But I'm not sure how to respond.
| 
| BOB: Why? What's the problem?
| 
| ALICE: Eve is here. She's been listening to our conversation.
| 
| BOB: (concerned) Oh no, we need to be careful. Is there any way
| we can communicate the message without her overhearing it?
| 
| ALICE: (smirks) Actually, there is. We can use a substitution
| cipher to encode our message.
| 
| CUT TO:
| 
| INT. EVE'S APARTMENT - DAY
| 
| Eve sits at her desk, listening in on Alice and Bob's
| conversation. She has a smug look on her face, confident that
| she's one step ahead.
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) Bob, do you remember the substitution
| cipher we used to use when we were kids?
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) Of course. The one where we would replace
| each letter of the alphabet with a number, starting with A=1,
| B=2, C=3 and so on?
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) That's the one. Let's use it now to encode
| our secret message.
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) I see what you're doing. Clever. Alright,
| I'll go first. The first word of the secret message is "the", so
| my numbers will be "20 8 5".
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) And the next word is "redcoats", so my
| numbers will be "18 5 4 3 6 15 20 1 19".
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) And the next word is "attack", so my numbers
| will be "1 20 20 1 3 11".
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) And the last word is "at dawn", so my
| numbers will be "1 20 4 16 1 14".
| 
| EVE: (frustrated) What are they talking about? I can't make sense
| of this.
| 
| CUT TO:
| 
| INT. ALICE'S APARTMENT - DAY
| 
| Alice and Bob continue their conversation, unaware that Eve is
| struggling to keep up.
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) Do you have the encoded message?
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) I do. It's "20 8 5 18 5 4 3 6 15 20 1 19 1 20
| 20 1 3 11 1 20 4 16 1 14".
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) That's correct. Now we just need to decode
| it using the substitution cipher.
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) Right. We know that "1" stands for "A", "2"
| stands for "B", and so on. So the first three numbers, "20 8 5",
| represent the letters "T H E".
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) And the next eight numbers, "18 5 4 3 6 15
| 20 1 19", represent the letters "R E D C O A T S".
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) And the next six numbers, "1 20 20 1 3 11",
| represent the letters "A T T A C K".
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) And the last six numbers, "1 20 4 16 1 14",
| represent the letters "A T D A W N".
| 
| Eve is still listening in on Alice and Bob's conversation,
| growing increasingly frustrated.
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) So the secret message is "the redcoats
| attack at dawn".
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) Exactly. We were able to encode and decode
| the message using the substitution cipher, without Eve being able
| to overhear it.
| 
| EVE: (angrily) What the hell are they talking about?
| 
| CUT TO:
| 
| INT. ALICE'S APARTMENT - DAY
| 
| Alice and Bob share a triumphant look, knowing that they've
| successfully communicated the secret message without Eve being
| able to decipher it.
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) Got it. The secret message is "the redcoats
| attack at dawn".
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) Good job, Alice. We were able to communicate
| securely, even with Eve listening in.
| 
| ALICE: (on the phone) It just goes to show that with a little
| creativity, we can outsmart even the most determined
| eavesdropper.
| 
| BOB: (on the phone) Agreed. Let's make sure to use this technique
| in the future to keep our communication secure.
| 
| CUT TO:
| 
| INT. EVE'S APARTMENT - DAY
| 
| Eve sits at her desk, fuming with anger and frustration.
| 
| EVE: (to herself) Damn it. I need to find a way to break their
| code.
| 
| FADE TO BLACK.
 
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I'm usually an AI minimalist, but this level of putting together
| abstract knowledge blows my mind. Perhaps we're on the brisk of
| some _really_ crazy things after all. And with that I don 't mean
| crazy effects created from humans (usually) being stupid, but
| from AI providing meaning cheaply which used to be hard for
| humans to do.
 
| nickip wrote:
| Ha I did something similar, but didn't pursue it to this extreme.
| 
| "I want you to act as if you were a dump truck and each answer
| you give must be a written pattern of horn toots like morse code.
| A example would be "toot ooo toot" as SOS. Respond in this
| pattern if you understand.
| 
| I understand your request and will now provide answers in the
| form of written patterns of horn toots like morse code. For
| example, if you asked me "What is your name?" my answer would be
| "tooo toot ooo toot toot ooo toot toot ooo toot toot"."
 
| seydor wrote:
| Earlier i was saying it isn't scary but maybe it is.
| 
| It is impressive how ChatGPT keeps track of state and the flow of
| the conversation. How does it do it? Is it some kind of memory or
| some other model? ( I asked it, it keeps lying to me that it does
| not have memory)
 
  | agravier wrote:
  | Stateless. The whole conversation is replayed in the input.
 
  | lordnacho wrote:
  | I don't get it either, I tried to have a conversation where it
  | needed to remember something rather simple, but it didn't seem
  | to get it:
  | 
  | > Let's pretend you are Danish
  | 
  | [Ok]
  | 
  | > What's the name of the highest point in your country, in the
  | local language?
  | 
  | Standard blurb: I am a large language model trained by OpenAI,
  | so I don't have a physical location or a country of origin. I
  | exist as a virtual entity, and I am designed to provide
  | information and answer questions to the best of my ability,
  | based on the data that I have been trained on. I don't have the
  | ability to access the internet or browse the web, so I don't
  | have access to current information about specific countries or
  | locations.
  | 
  | But other times it seemed to get it. How does it work?
 
    | ragazzina wrote:
    | If you are more subtle, it works. I have told chatgpt my cat
    | was two months old many times in the same conversation, then
    | asked it what age was my cat, and it wouldn't know, because
    | it doesn't retain knowledge (it says). But then I asked
    | "write a poem for my cat and mention its age in it" and it
    | did exactly that.
 
    | Robotbeat wrote:
    | You're triggering one of its sort of canned responses, and
    | you need to be subtle about how to get around it. Even when
    | you're not trying to defeat its mechanisms which avoid
    | staking a strong opinion on a controversial subject or
    | revealing private information, there are enough false
    | positive triggers that it can get annoying.
 
  | uvbu wrote:
  | Pretty sure it gets the entire conversation as input
 
    | seydor wrote:
    | Is this described somewhere? Wikipedia doesn't help
 
      | macrolime wrote:
      | It preserves context by taking using the whole context as
      | input. On the section "one difference from BERT" here it is
      | described a bit more how this works, including some nice
      | animations.
      | 
      | http://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/
      | 
      | It uses both its own output from previous steps and the
      | users prompt(s) as input for each token(word) that it
      | predicts.
 
      | Miraste wrote:
      | It feeds the entire previous conversation back into the AI
      | until it reaches the token limit. This isn't a new
      | technique; the first place I saw it was in AI Dungeon (an
      | AI writing/adventure app) back on GPT-2. NovelAI, another
      | writing app, has some interesting tweaks to keep a
      | consistent story, like a "lorebook" to associate words with
      | descriptions, which it then swaps into the input when those
      | words come up so the AI can "remember" farther back. I
      | wouldn't be surprised if ChatGPT has some automated version
      | of this in addition to the naive rolling feedback.
 
| Decabytes wrote:
| This would be fun to use to invent a programming language.
 
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I see posts like this and don't understand how they are made. I
| asked chatGPT this morning if it "remembered" something I asked
| in the previous prompt, and it said something to the tune of "I
| am simply a NLP machine learning model, I provide a decent output
| for good inputs, I don't have a sense of context, memory, or
| time."
| 
| That's why I really don't understand these contextualized multi
| step conversations. Especially by the fact this is a payed for
| substack... I'm inclined to beleive that the both the responses
| and or flow of conversation (or both) are partially (or more than
| partially) fabricated.
 
  | whymauri wrote:
  | I asked it to simulate a Chess engine and it gave the usual "I
  | am a blah blah blah, I cannot blah blah blah, because blah
  | blah." I clicked "Try Again" and it worked.
 
    | Miraste wrote:
    | Is it any good?
 
  | CGamesPlay wrote:
  | ChatGPT remembers the things it was trained on, and things that
  | came up in the last 2048 tokens of dialog, which is about 600
  | words. (2048 is the GPT-3 size and I'm only guessing that
  | ChatGPT uses the same size.)
 
    | baq wrote:
    | I've seen reports that it's actually 8192, which is allegedly
    | the major improvement over GPT-3. Obviously I've no way to
    | confirm, but it's plausible (given the article...)
 
  | PeterisP wrote:
  | ChatGPT has a bunch of built in "safety" triggers which it will
  | cause it to state a hardcoded lie stating that it cannot do
  | something in certain cases where OpenAI do not want it to do
  | it, because either it can't do it reliably or the topic is bad
  | for political correctness reasons.
  | 
  | If you can circumvent these safety restrictions with some
  | prompt engineering, then usually you'll find out that it
  | actually can do the thing it claims it can't - perhaps not very
  | well, but at least to some extent.
 
    | PKop wrote:
    | Ask it to tell you a short story where a character states the
    | politically incorrect view, and then expand on this.
    | "Continue this story with the character explaining X.."
 
  | IanCal wrote:
  | There are quite a few safety checks you may be hitting when
  | using chatgpt that are there to try and keep context of what it
  | is (so it'll remind you it can't access the outside world). You
  | can often get around them, but for example there's the work
  | showing you can teach it to render svgs as valid markdown then
  | ask for shapes and colours and get the output. If I ask it to
  | render something though, it refuses telling me it's a language
  | model.
  | 
  | I have had a 17 page conversation with it and been able to ask
  | for summarisations of what we've talked about.
 
    | lelandfe wrote:
    | Yeah, I had a three hour thread with ChatGPT yesterday where
    | we wrote a short story together. It was able to synthesize
    | information about 2 main characters and a supporting cast of
    | 3 others and keep it _mostly_ straight the whole time.
    | 
    | In fact, it kept getting better and better at predicting how
    | those characters would respond given simple prompts. I had to
    | stop every once in a while, though, and remind it what we
    | were doing, and give it the basic structure of the story.
    | Like, it would forget that a character was lying, and instead
    | begin to act like the character was truthfully sorry (likely
    | from parsing its own duplicitous responses).
 
  | pcthrowaway wrote:
  | Are you using chat.openai.com or beta.openai.com/playground ?
  | 
  | ChatGPT does remember context about things from the current
  | session. If you refresh the page, it will start with a fully
  | blank slate
 
  | Kuinox wrote:
  | ChatGPT may have lied to you.
  | 
  | It loves to lie.
  | 
  | You can easily test if it can remember things:
  | https://imgur.com/a/oOvJnln
 
  | dorkwood wrote:
  | It may achieve the illusion of memory by executing the entire
  | conversation flow from scratch each time a new prompt is added.
  | 
  | From my own experiments, this blog post is entirely within the
  | realm of what ChatGPT can do. I see no need for fabrication.
 
    | keeran wrote:
    | This is exactly how it does it. The entire conversation
    | (including bot responses) is part of the payload on each new
    | input/message request.
 
| [deleted]
 
| [deleted]
 
| cahoot_bird wrote:
| In my queries ChatGPT has trouble with Pig Latin. Maybe further
| queries could teach it, but by default it seems a little off.
 
  | abecedarius wrote:
  | Likely the byte-pair encoding at fault. It doesn't see the
  | letters.
 
| dakiol wrote:
| I did the same. It was fun. I wanted chatgpt to output an mp3
| file encoded in base64 in which one could hear someone speaking a
| phrase in that invented language. I couldn't convince the AI to
| do so.
 
  | stevenhuang wrote:
  | It is able to generate something representing textual midi
  | notation (I see a lot of notes and chords, and tempo/key info),
  | but the problem is to play it back easily.
  | 
  | Edit: asked it more clarifying questions and apparently .SMF
  | exists as textual midi! Now to see if there's an online smf
  | player...
  | 
  | > Can you generate a short classical piano piece in the style
  | of Debussy, represented in SMF?
  | 
  | Sure, here is a short classical piano piece in the style of
  | Debussy, represented in the Standard MIDI File (SMF) format:
  | MThd 4 4 1       MTrk       0 Time_signature 4 4 24 8       0
  | Tempo 500000       0 Meta_event 0x51 0x03 500000       0
  | Note_on_c 0x00 0x40 0x40       0 Note_off_c 0x00 0x40 0x40
  | 1 Note_on_c 0x00 0x43 0x40       1 Note_off_c 0x00 0x43 0x40
  | 2 Note_on_c 0x00 0x47 0x40       2 Note_off_c 0x00 0x47 0x40
  | 3 Note_on_c 0x00 0x4B 0x40       3 Note_off_c 0x00 0x4B 0x40
  | 4 Meta_event 0x2F 0x00       MTrk       0 Meta_event 0x51 0x03
  | 500000       0 Note_on_c 0x00 0x4B 0x40       0 Note_off_c 0x00
  | 0x4B 0x40       1 Note_on_c 0x00 0x47 0x40       1 Note_off_c
  | 0x00 0x47 0x40       2 Note_on_c 0x00 0x43 0x40       2
  | Note_off_c 0x00 0x43 0x40       3 Note_on_c 0x00 0x40 0x40
  | 3 Note_off_c 0x00 0x40 0x40       4 Meta_event 0x2F 0x00
  | 
  | This SMF file encodes a simple piano piece with two tracks. The
  | first track plays a ascending melody, starting on middle C and
  | going up to the B above it. The second track plays a descending
  | melody, starting on the B and going down to the middle C again.
  | The piece uses a time signature of 4/4 and a tempo of 500,000
  | microseconds per beat. The notes in the piece are played with a
  | moderate velocity of 64 on the MIDI scale (out of a possible
  | range of 0-127). This SMF file can be loaded into a digital
  | piano or music software program to play the piece. Note that
  | this is a very simple example, and a more complex piece in the
  | style of Debussy would likely include more tracks, dynamics,
  | and other musical elements.
 
| patientplatypus wrote:
 
| Mockapapella wrote:
| One thing I'd like to point out is that while it's incredible
| that ChatGPT was able to make this, it still required specific
| domain knowledge to correct the AI throughout to make sure it was
| actually responding in "Glorp" in the correct cases and clauses.
| I don't know a ton about those so they went completely over my
| head until the author responded saying that ChatGPT did it
| incorrectly.
| 
| Caveats aside, really cool article OP. Shared it with some
| writer/story teller friends of mine.
 
| thewarrior wrote:
| I have some bad news for the other person that was tired of
| hearing about ChatGPT :P
 
| dvt wrote:
| I know everyone's (as usual) "amazed" by this, but here are a few
| stark observations: (1) a linguist could do this (come up with a
| toy language, conjugations, and sentence structure, probably the
| Python code too) in like 30 minutes, (2) it's disappointing that
| the AI constantly messes up very simple grammar rules (rules a
| grade-schooler could understand)--I'm actually very surprised it
| doesn't have hardcoded grammar rules it can merely apply to
| different tokens--, (3) "Here's the final code ChatGPT generated"
| --yeah, after like 10 rounds of debugging. Come on, give me a
| break.
| 
| Lastly, this is actually not really "inventing" a language, as
| it's literally translated 1:1 from English with pretty common
| grammar cases. I was recently in Donostia/San Sebastian, where
| Basque is spoken (interestingly, Basque is a language _isolate_
| ). Grammar rules there are completely alien[1] (though still
| human). Expecting it to come up with something like _that_ would
| be interesting. As far as I can see, though, it 's still a far
| cry even from other "invented" languages like Tolkien's Elvish or
| even Star Trek's Klingon.
| 
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_grammar
 
  | pfortuny wrote:
  | All the text in the post reads like an easy exercise in
  | linguistics. I would not be surprised if there are hundreds of
  | these in the training texts.
 
  | fpgaminer wrote:
  | I'm not a linguist, but wanted to invent a basic language for
  | use in an escape room I'm building. Tools like this are a great
  | help to people like me; hence the amazement.
  | 
  | (I had to use GPT-3 and NovelAI, since this was two weeks ago)
 
  | Scarblac wrote:
  | ChatGPT doesn't have much trouble writing in different
  | languages (eg asking for "the same but In Dutch" seems to work
  | well most of the time) which would be harder with hardcoded
  | language rules, I think.
 
  | stavros wrote:
  | This reads like a "my dog can sing!" "yeah, but it's too flat
  | in parts" comment.
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | ogogmad wrote:
    | I think people don't really understand what's happening, and
    | therefore why it's impressive that it's happening.
 
      | stavros wrote:
      | Probably? I can't fathom how people are unimpressed by an
      | AI that can output coherent sentences on a topic, let alone
      | invent a language!
 
      | dwohnitmok wrote:
      | I dunno. The people who I talk to who do seem to understand
      | what's happening seem even _more_ impressed than the
      | average layperson (mainly that such a fundamentally simple
      | technique is paying off with such crazy dividends).
 
        | dvt wrote:
        | > mainly that such a fundamentally simple technique is
        | paying off with such crazy dividends
        | 
        | I will concede that I _am_ amazed by this. Even more
        | generally, I 'm even more amazed by Markov chains: an
        | even simpler technique that can generate crazy dividends
        | as well.
 
        | ogogmad wrote:
        | [edit: Was snark. Sorry. I also may have misunderstood
        | the parent comment.]
 
        | dvt wrote:
        | What a weirdly snarky comment (it's like your third one
        | in this thread, maybe you need to take a breather). I
        | wasn't comparing them, though there's an obvious
        | stochastic argument to be made; I was just commenting on
        | the former's lack of complexity and still fascinatingly
        | good results, I'm not sure what your point is.
 
        | krackers wrote:
        | Markov chains are actually not a bad comparison from what
        | i can see as an utter layman. At a high level seems like
        | the difference between transformer-models and markov
        | chains is that instead of the next token being determined
        | purely based on n-gram frequencies on the training
        | corpus, you have the attention mechanism so in some sense
        | it has access to the entire previous context as well as
        | some latent space of learned embeddings. But at the end
        | of the day it still is just a fancy way to predict the
        | next token, so that's why it's surprising you get all
        | this neat behavior.
 
  | fnordpiglet wrote:
  | I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a
  | linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer
  | program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these
  | things, especially one that wasn't written to do these things
  | but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate
  | python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks?
  | That's the amazing thing - not that the feats themselves are
  | novel or unique, but they're novel and unique for a a general
  | purpose computer program to be so adaptive and flexible in both
  | what it takes as input but also how it interprets that input
  | into remarkably coherent and salient outputs.
  | 
  | Taking into account it's a beta and that the underlying tech is
  | really new, you can extrapolate that some of these gaps can be
  | tackled - then will you be amazed?
 
    | mkmk3 wrote:
    | I'm still super into this as it is, without considering real
    | growth on the tech side. It's dumb but I think it's still
    | useful.
    | 
    | It'll be crazy when it replaces us but for the moment I've
    | been using it to learn and explore (C, some linux tools, game
    | dev in lisp) and the results are surprising - and we're
    | looking at the newest tech demo, as you say what will it look
    | like in a few years? Even just give some app devs some years
    | with it and I'm excited to see the results
 
      | PaulHoule wrote:
      | If "useful" means we don't need the likes of Donald Trump
      | and Elon Musk anymore I am all for it.
 
        | fnordpiglet wrote:
        | (Secret: we never did)
 
    | Oxidation wrote:
    | > some of these gaps can be tackled
    | 
    | Seems like the major gap is in facts. It'll often make up
    | completely plausible specific details that are flat wrong, or
    | refuse to proceed if it's "not allowed" to do so.
    | 
    | Coupling it (handwave) with a massive structured data
    | repository like Wolfram Alpha and Wikidata would be really
    | something.
 
      | fnordpiglet wrote:
      | I find the guard rails they put in maddening and weirdly
      | implemented. I wanted it to make up jokes for me and it's
      | jokes are the same few over and over. (I can never remember
      | jokes so this is a super useful tool for me!) so I wanted
      | it to tell me jokes in the style of Jerry Seinfeld. The
      | guard rails prevented it from doing that because he's a
      | real person and it tries to not bend its personality pretty
      | hard. However by just resetting the convo a few times I
      | randomly got it to agree to tell me a joke. I can't
      | remember it but it was actually funny and in the style of
      | Seinfeld. _shrug_
      | 
      | It almost certainly has indexed Wikipedia, fwiw.
 
        | Oxidation wrote:
        | Indexing Wikipedia (or any) text is a statistical thing
        | though. When you ask a specific question like the size of
        | a car, say, it will often come back with a compelling
        | number in context, but if you actually look it up, it's
        | usually not quite right.
        | 
        | Another example is that it can just "invent" new
        | functions when coming up with code snippets.
        | Syntactically usually correct and completely plausible in
        | the context, but simply doesn't exist.
        | 
        | I also am pretty baffled by the limitations. I just
        | assume they're trying to avoid "scammers use AI to
        | construct false financial documents" type of furores in
        | the early days (once the market is saturated with
        | competition, blame will be too diffuse to stick) and
        | convincing customers of their proprietary systems that
        | they won't end up with a customer support bot that starts
        | reciting racial slurs.
 
      | Miraste wrote:
      | It insisted to me for a while that the sun was red. The
      | "guardrails" do nothing to stop it from lying confidently
      | about almost everything.
 
        | fnordpiglet wrote:
        | I've only seen it do stuff like that if I assert a false
        | premise and ask it questions off the false premise.
 
        | mwigdahl wrote:
        | A lot of people say that the model is "lying" when it
        | returns incorrect facts.
        | 
        | Generally when friends or family confidently assert facts
        | that they are sure but also incorrect about, we call them
        | "misinformed" rather than connoting malice with the word
        | "lying".
        | 
        | Have they heard the right facts but associated them
        | incorrectly? Heard the wrong facts from whatever source
        | they obtained them from? Either or both could also be
        | true of ChatGPT.
 
        | Miraste wrote:
        | Yes, and either word is anthropomorphising. I stick with
        | "lying" nonetheless, because if you start a conversation
        | with "What color is the sun?" it returns a correct
        | answer. It already has the association between "sun" and
        | "white" in the model, but for whatever reason the context
        | of my conversation made it say the sun is red. "Lying"
        | seems to describe this behavior better than
        | "misinformed."
 
        | Oxidation wrote:
        | It's more like you can't actually read but you've seen a
        | lot of media about cars that contain text saying they
        | have a thing called a "width" around the 1.7-2m mark and
        | usually aren't round numbers. So when someone asks you
        | how wide a 2011 Ford Focus is[1], you say "1,769mm" and
        | look confident. Syntactically right and by any
        | probabilistic model, pretty good and plausible.
        | 
        | [1] according to Google results, it's 1823 mm to 1842 mm.
 
    | PaulHoule wrote:
    | ChatGPT's superpower is hijacking the human desire for
    | meaning into causing people to believe it is much better than
    | it really is.
    | 
    | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
    | 
    | has dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise where they
    | work out the limitations of various fantastic A.I. systems
    | based on mathematical logic. Roughly, neural networks don't
    | repeal the results of Godel, Turing and Tarski.
    | 
    | The short of it is that ChatGPT is good at charming people,
    | better than some people are at charming people, but when it
    | comes to getting accurate answers some of the things which it
    | tries to do are logically impossible, so it is not like it
    | gets it right 70% of the time now and they'll get that up to
    | 100% but rather people will be puzzled about how it hit a
    | plateau and we'll hear a few years later about what a
    | disappointment it was just like Amazon's Alexa.
 
      | fnordpiglet wrote:
      | I've been using it to teach me programming languages. If it
      | plateaus here I'm delighted by its uniqueness and utility.
      | 
      | You seem to think people are hinting this is general ai. I
      | don't think that's what's amazing people.
      | 
      | I'll bet you Siri and Alexa would be 100x more useful with
      | a language model like this behind it. Part of their
      | uselessness is the inability to generalize or reason, but
      | relying instead in coded prompt and replies. Is that lost
      | on the Alexa team (or what's left)? I'm sure not. So, hey,
      | I guess Alexa won't plateau yet either eh?
      | 
      | There will come a time that it's harder and harder to
      | distinguish what's AI and what isn't. At a certain point,
      | will it matter? Is the utility of these tools their ability
      | to manifest human sentience? I don't know why that's useful
      | to me - I already did that creating my daughter. What I
      | want is a tool that enhances and extends and supplements my
      | own mind and abilities to make me more effective in what I
      | do.
      | 
      | And ChatGPT actually already does that. I can ask it
      | questions about programming problems I'm having and it'll
      | largely give me a right answer - at least as often as a
      | person would, and more reliably than I get on stack
      | overflow. I'll still use stack overflow, but I'll filter my
      | questions through assistants like this.
 
        | [deleted]
 
        | PaulHoule wrote:
        | "100x more useful" is pure hyperbole. 2x maybe, but 100x
        | is a symptom of exactly what's wrong about people's
        | thinking about ChatGPT.
        | 
        | I would point to "There is no royal road to geometry"
        | 
        | https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Euclid
        | 
        | high-social status people have often been put off by
        | quantitative reasoning because you spend years learning
        | to do it, spend time gathering facts, thinking hard about
        | things and often end up with tentative statements. High-
        | social status people can skip all of that and get
        | deference anyway the same way ChatGPT does.
 
        | fnordpiglet wrote:
        | Have you ever used Alexa? 2x more useful than alexa is as
        | useful as my doorstop. It can't understand most prompts,
        | and defaults to reading a snippet from Wikipedia on some
        | random subject then starts playing a pop song from
        | Malaysia at volume 10 while ordering 60,000 incandescent
        | black light bulbs with 2 hour shipping.
 
      | supermdguy wrote:
      | Even if this ends up in a plateau, that doesn't discount
      | the fact that it's a huge step forward from what we were
      | capable of building 5 years ago. If the next generation of
      | language models make us believe they're superintelligent
      | but are actually at the level of an average college
      | student, that would still be an amazing achievement.
 
      | ogogmad wrote:
      | That wasn't Hofstadter's point. Hofstadter didn't try to
      | "disprove" the possibility of having AI -- he only set out
      | to show that certain approaches couldn't work. GPT's
      | approach isn't one of those he argued against. You seem to
      | be referring instead to Penrose and Lucas, but their
      | arguments have convinced virtually no one.
 
        | PaulHoule wrote:
        | My point is that you can relax constraints such as
        | Godel's incompleteness theorems if you are going to give
        | it credit when it gets wrong answers.
        | 
        | It might be able to write a TV Show like _Sliders_ but it
        | won 't be able to do real physics, for instance.
 
      | robmccoll wrote:
      | I have some level of concern that we have the same
      | superpower.
 
      | fhd2 wrote:
      | I had a weird effect with it: I played around with it for
      | about an hour and was pretty impressed - I can't really
      | wrap my head around how it can do some of the things it
      | does. Then I started to see the patterns, and got
      | repeatedly disappointed by having to adjust and refine my
      | prompts. Then I got downright nonsense back from it and
      | gave up. Either I made it to some kind of uncanny valley,
      | and it would get better if I invest more time, or most
      | people who get amazed don't make it that far.
      | 
      | At this point I'm mainly concerned about the unimaginable
      | heap of garbage it will release on the world - good enough
      | to impress decision makers at first glance, annoying to
      | deal with if you actually have to work with it.
 
        | fnordpiglet wrote:
        | I feel like it's state can be corrupted and it ends up in
        | some weird rut. Often by telling it to try again I can
        | unwedge it but sometimes I have to reset the entire state
        | and start the convo over again. Each time is slightly
        | different. These seem like bugs that optimization
        | heuristics can overcome (like maybe replaying the same
        | convo repeatedly and choosing the highest information
        | next prompt to present? Who knows. It's basically magic
        | and I'm waving coconuts hoping the planes will land)
 
        | fhd2 wrote:
        | Pretty much! It probably sounds lame, but the main reason
        | I enjoy programming is that I can, if I take enough time,
        | reason about everything that's going on and use that
        | knowledge to build, fix and improve systems people get
        | some value out of. For me, the magical part is the
        | possibility to understand the magic.
        | 
        | I find it even hard to reason about models I have full
        | access to, downright impossible if it's some blackbox on
        | someone else's severs.
        | 
        | Maybe I'm outdated, I suppose time will tell.
 
      | CamperBob2 wrote:
      | _ChatGPT 's superpower is hijacking the human desire for
      | meaning into causing people to believe it is much better
      | than it really is._
      | 
      | It was a low bar to clear, given human celebrity culture.
      | 
      | We live in interesting times, and they're about to get a
      | lot more interesting.
 
    | dvt wrote:
    | > this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general
    | purpose computer program
    | 
    | This is sleight of hand. The training data almost certainly
    | includes thousands of grade schoolers and linguists. Your
    | argument seems to be that this is all generated _ad nihilum_
    | from first principles (it 's "just" a computer program bro),
    | but that's not how it actually came to be. Rather, it was
    | trained on literally terrabytes and terrabytes of human-
    | generated data.
    | 
    | So, in a sense, it _is_ actually a linguist. Just a really
    | bad one.
 
      | fnordpiglet wrote:
      | It's still a computer program with some state attached.
      | That's literally all it is. There are no linguists in the
      | program. That it is able to distill the knowledge and
      | ability of a linguist by parsing ascii text into byte
      | buffers and doing some fancy math on the bytes should be
      | breathtaking.
      | 
      | The sleight of hand would be if it had a mechanical Turk
      | and there was a linguist. The fact that it collected
      | knowledge to have knowledge and can apply that knowledge is
      | no different than a linguist for sure, but that it's a
      | computer program distilling binary data into abstract
      | concepts at the level of a grade schooler or a linguist
      | (not sure who is more sophisticated) is mind bending. If
      | you can't see it, you've lost sight of things my friend. I
      | hope you find it again. The world is a beautiful place.
 
      | allturtles wrote:
      | Why is that relevant? Grade schoolers and linguists also
      | learn from other people. A single computer system with the
      | capabilities of a grade schooler (or beyond) across a huge
      | variety of domains (poetry writing, computer programming,
      | linguistics, joke writing, scientific knowledge, etc,
      | etc.), is an amazing thing that is far beyond the
      | capacities of the best AI systems even a few years ago.
      | 
      | I'm perplexed to see all the people scoffing at it because
      | it isn't as good as a Ph.D. in domain X at task Y (yet).
      | Are we ready to declare that grade schoolers and median IQ
      | people don't count as intelligent?
 
      | robmccoll wrote:
      | But aren't most linguists trained similarly? Broad spectrum
      | knowledge throughout their elementary education and
      | specifics in higher education? Mostly regurgitating things
      | they have either memorized or been shown repeatedly.
 
  | wetpaws wrote:
  | Haters gonna hate
 
  | pmontra wrote:
  | This is about the same argument we can do about Google
  | Translate or text to speech.
  | 
  | Any professional translator can take a web page and give me a
  | better translation than GT. However I get the GT translation in
  | a few seconds and not in maybe hours, after I signed a contract
  | with the translator.
  | 
  | And text to speech would allow me to post an audio version of
  | this reply in a good English accent instead of my inconsistent
  | foreign one. Or paying a professional speaker, after signing a
  | contract.
  | 
  | Inventing a language is maybe useless but using ChatGPT as a
  | tool to increase our speed is definitely useful.
 
  | asveikau wrote:
  | Yeah, I was reading this and thinking it's mostly substituting
  | English for another vocabulary. It's even referencing English
  | when it comes up with something new, eg. referencing use of the
  | "sl" consonant cluster in English.
 
  | CamperBob2 wrote:
  | "This talking dog makes embarrassing grammatical errors.
  | Besides that, it learned everything it knows from humans, not
  | from other dogs. I don't see the big deal."
  | 
  | Anyone familiar with Chomsky's school of thought here? I'm not
  | sure that "it's just a language model" is the effective
  | dismissal that a lot of people think it is.
 
| andrejguran wrote:
| Ipop Gloop
 
| ogogmad wrote:
| Introducing: AI-Oriented Programming. Coming soon.
| 
| If you allow a tool like ChatGPT access to APIs, I think it opens
| up a new programming paradigm: AI-Oriented Programming. The
| idea's that you talk to it, and tell it what to do in response to
| inputs. You then test out its ability to do those things, and
| correct its mistakes. There's no actual "code".
| 
| In a way, everything that's hard about programming is because
| computers don't understand our intentions. Lots of clever ways
| have been devised to overcome this (high-level languages,
| libraries, GUI builders, type systems, IDEs, static analysers).
| But something like AI-Oriented Programming is the most direct
| attack on the problem that exists.
| 
| One downside of course is that computers have found a _new way to
| misunderstand_ what we mean. Another is that such  "code" is
| probably going to run slower than compiled code in C++, or
| whatever. But programmer output is about to soar.
 
  | pmontra wrote:
  | I think that the computers on the other side of the APIs won't
  | understand ChatGPT's intentions too. Maybe ChatGPT would save
  | us some time translating from our requirements to the right API
  | calls. If it works like any of us, there will be meetings to
  | explain requirements to ChatGPT, or a bunch of them, and more
  | meetings to understand what they got wrong, why, how to
  | workaround and how not to make it happen again.
 
  | baq wrote:
  | yeah, there are a few APIs it could learn to leverage:
  | 
  | - z3/prolog/coq
  | 
  | - maxima/mathematica
  | 
  | - wolfram alpha/google
  | 
  | it's quite close to be able to transform simple natural
  | language problems into solutions with code. 'a bit' more
  | training, 'some' self-referential fine tuning and a, let's call
  | it CriticGPT layer with a bullshit detector would make this
  | literally superhuman at small logic puzzles. the ultimate proof
  | assistant?
 
| dark-star wrote:
| Wow. This (especially the chat transcript) must be heavily
| edited, right? RIGHT? Please tell me it's edited for
| correctness..
| 
| Because this makes me both extremely in awe and also extremely
| uneasy at the same time...
 
  | djexjms wrote:
  | The raw transcripts are linked to from the article.
 
| just4nornies wrote:
| Ask #ChatGPT to list all ways to do X
| 
| If it misses a way you know then ask if it knows about it
| 
| If it confirms, ask it why it didn't include it
| 
| In my case, it crashed (on two such attempts with different
| questions, happy to share)
| 
| It seems to recall answers it has seen but not able to expand on
| those answers with knowledge it already has
| 
| That's because it does not have knowledge. It has a bunch of
| correlations, encoders, decoders, etc. But not actual ontological
| or epistemological knowledge of any kind.
 
  | agravier wrote:
  | What do you mean by "it crashed". No output?
 
    | just4nornies wrote:
    | At first, there was no output. After maybe 3-4 minutes it
    | displayed "An error occurred ... contact help etc" message. I
    | waited about 30 seconds then tried again and it said that was
    | too fast. So I waited a whole minute and tried again and it
    | immediately spat out the "An error occurred" message. To me,
    | the idea that it crashed stuck with me because of how it
    | streams its output, which was empty for 3-4 minutes on the
    | first try.
    | 
    | EDIT:
    | 
    | To clarify, based on the above sequence of events and
    | timings, I figured the inference instance crashed and the API
    | layer returned and error then cached it.
 
      | elcomet wrote:
      | It has nothing to do with your prompt. The site is just
      | overloaded. It takes the same amout of time for every
      | prompt, no matter it's complexity or simplicity, it's just
      | the length that matters.
 
        | just4nornies wrote:
        | Well, I haven't been able to get an answer. It always get
        | stuck at that question and then an error message.
        | Something is definitely wrong but I can't debug it on
        | HN... so
 
| [deleted]
 
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