Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Yeah, the part that really got to me was that it can be conversant on literally any topic, even if it might be outdated in knowledge or eventually refuse to answer about certain topics. And generally speaking it knows much more than I do on any of said topics.
So the pedantic philosophical question that comes to mind, for me, is whether you can really be said to be having a 'conversation' with an entity that already knows anything important you might tell it, and can answer any of your questions easily, whilst having no need to learn anything from or about you?
It becomes a wholly one-sided 'discussion' because the AI will never ask you questions about things it needs to know, and the chances of you having information it might find useful to add to it's corpus is vanishingly small. Can you have a 'dialogue' with an entity that understands any topic you might pick more comprehensively than you do?
So I end up feeling like a toddler talking to his parents and asking various questions about the world, and having absolutely nothing to offer them in return.
You can think of it as a really talented polymath with some damage to their short-term memory to longterm memory consolidation process. Would talking to such a human count as a conversation? I don't see why not!
As it stands, this is a limitation of current architecture, I'm sure we'll eventually end up with systems that learn/train on the fly, or have access to so much memory that it effectively remembers all your conversations.
(GPT 4 has asked me questions, usually to clarify insufficiently specific orders, unless I'm having it quiz me on something. There would be little point in having it ask you things unprompted, which is why it was never trainee to do so!)
But that's an element of 'human' conversations, I think! "Prompting" the conversation party with a tangentially related topic which they wish to discuss further even if the other side hasn't expressed direct interest in it. The so called 'picking your brain' aspect.
To narrow my point a bit, at least one objective of conversation is for each party to have some greater understanding of a given topic out of it. If a professor and student have a conversation, for instance, the professor at least wants to gain a better understanding of the Student's grasp of the subject of the course and maybe adapt their own approach to teaching it, even if the student has nothing to add to their knowledge of the subject.
That is NOT what it feels like is happening when you interact with the GPTs.
Hence, my comparison to feeling like a toddler. "What are clouds made of? How do trees grow?" even though my questions are comparatively sophisticated, it still feels like I'm not able to hold up "my end" of the conversation with the other party.
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