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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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I gotta say, I feel like my earlier posts on AI in general and GPT in particular have been aging pretty-well.

It's too premature to conclude that. No one is expecting it to be perfect, and future iterations likely improve on it. It reminds me of those headlines from 2013-2014 about Tesla accidents, or in 2010-2012 about problems with Uber accidents or deregulation. Any large company that is the hot, trendy thing will get considerable media scrutiny, especially when it errors. Likewise, any technology that is a success can easily overcome short-term problems. AOL in the early 90s was plagued by outages, for example.

But I think Open AI risks becoming like Wolfram Alpha -- a program/app with a lot of hype and promise initially, but then slowly abandoned and degraded, with much of functionality behind a paywall.

It's too premature to conclude that.

No it's not. The scenario that you, Freepingcreature, and others insisted would never happen and/or be trivially easy to avoid, has now happened.

What this tells me is that my model of GPT's behavior was more much more accurate than yours.

It’s trivial to attach LLMs to a database of known information (eg. Wikipedia combined with case law data, government data, Google books’ library, whatever) and have them ‘verify’ factual claims. The lawyers in this case could have asked ChatGPT if it made up what it just said and there’s a 99% chance it would have replied “I’m sorry, it appears I can find no evidence of those cases” even without access to that data. GPT-4 already hallucinates less. As Dase said, it is literally just a matter of attaching retrieval and search capability to the model to mimic our own discrete memory pool, which LLMs by themselves do not possess.

People latching onto this with the notion that it “proves” LLMs aren’t that smart are like an artisan weaver pointing to a fault with an early version of the Spinning Jenny or whatever and claiming that it proves the technology is garbage and will never work. We already know how to solve these errors.

Saw on twitter that the lawyer did ask ChatGPT if it was made up and it said it was real

None of those prompts ask explicitly if the previous output was fictional, which is what generally triggers a higher-quality evaluation.

If these sorts of issues really are as trivially easy to fix as you claim, why haven't they been fixed?

One the core points of my post on the Minsky Paradox was that a lot of the issues that those who are "bullish" on GPT have been dismissing as easy to fix and/or irrelevant really aren't, and I feel like we are currently watching that claim be borne out.