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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Gpt-4 has been released!. Looks like the cat is finally out of the bag. The CW implications of large language models are obvious and have been discussed here, so I figured I would drop a few fun facts.

Also, here's a peek at LessWrong freaking out.

The full technical report gives some fascinating information. Here are some highlights:

  • GPT-4 can pass a bar exam and score a 5 on several AP exams.

  • GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.

  • GPT-4 can accept images as inputs and generate captions, classifications, and analyses.

  • GPT-4 is capable of handling over 25,000 words of text, allowing for use cases like long form content creation, extended conversations, and document search and analysis.

Of all of these, passing the bar exam is the one that sticks out. We'll have to see how much it still hallucinates, but this is clearly a water mark, at least for the legal profession.

I'll go ahead and stake a perhaps dramatic but I believe warranted claim - the culture war is about to get ugly. Creating ads, propaganda, and bots to argue politics has never been easier. Whichever side moves first on scaling and implementing these language models to persuade humans to their camp will own the future.

A related tidbit: Khan Academy is rolling out personal tutors powered by GPT-4. I'm wondering how effective this will be: although personal tutors are probably the ideal way to learn, if kids don't believe they're interacting with a conscious human being whose approval they seek, will it be effective? A lot of what teachers actually provide is just baby sitting and a human adult for kids to look at as an authority, and I'm not sure kids will react in the same way with GPT-4. Though it's certainly a huge boon to self-motivated kids who want to learn.

ETA: The paper itself is available here: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf . See page 32 and onwards for some examples of GPT-4 reasoning around visual inputs (charts, papers, memes).

Some tech professional working from home wrote that he needs a security guard with a club to watch him and hit him if he looks at his phone during work hours. That would greatly improve his productivity.

Idea: TaskmasterGPT. A multimodal model that watches everything you do, identifies questionable websites and activities, and issues command sequences to a robotic arm to start lashing you if you browse The Motte while you should be working.