This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
…after a bunch of lawyers rewrite the questions and have it repeat the test multiple times with different settings and questions.
That's what you'll find if you read the paper this claim is based on, and this significantly diminishes the impressiveness of the results. A model that only gets results when led around carefully by a skilled human is more like a fancy search engine than the rosy picture of an near-human independent operator that the press releases paint.
Having questions rewritten by another person is almost certainly not allowed in the bar exam - the idea that someone who can understand legal principles and jargon can't comprehend a three-part question is laughable. And taking multiple tries at the same exam to get a better score is definitely out.
In my opinion, a reasonable claim that GPT can pass a bar exam would require demonstration that their chosen parameters generalize to other bar exams and the model would need to be able to answer exams without needing questions to be re-formatted.
Right now this claim looks like false advertising.
P.S. Did you know that the bar exam results were marked by the study authors? Or that all four authors of the study work in one of two companies planning to deliver products applying GPT to law?
On one hand it's important to put it into perspective. On the other... I seem to remember similar arguments being made when Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.
I guess we have another 20 years before lawyers consider it unfair to use an AI assist when arguing a case.
While I do lean towards the skeptical side about how far AI capabilities are going to get long-term, the main goal was to deflate a bit the exaggerated OpenAI claim about current performance that seems to have been cautiously taken at face value so far. Like some others in this thread I found the claim a bit unbelievable, and I had some time to dig into where it came from.
GPT might get good enough to compete with lawyers in the future, but the study doesn't prove that it's there now. In fact, things like needing the exam adjusted to provide each question separately strongly indicate the opposite.
I'm not familiar with them, maybe you could give some examples?
Yes, hold on a second, just let me get out my collection of dead-tree computer magazines from 1996.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link