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Despite being based on GPT-4 Bing is apparently well-known for performing dramatically worse. There have been some complaints of GPT-4's performance degrading too, presumably due to some combination of OpenAI trying to make it cheaper to run (with model quantization?) and adding more fine-tuning trying to stop people from getting it to say offensive things, but hopefully not to the extent that it would consistently fail that sort of world-modeling. (If anyone with a subscription wants to also test older versions of GPT-4 it sounds like they're still accessible in Playground?)
I don't think it's plausible that all the examples of GPT-4 doing that sort of thing are faked, not when anyone shelling out the $20 can try it themselves. And people use it for things like programming, you can't do that without reasoning, just a less familiar form of reasoning than the example I gave.
You don't even need $20, if you're willing to hunt down discord bots that largely use leaked API keys (some are ad-supported).
The ChatGPT subreddit's official discord server has one or two, and while I know better ones that are less legit, I don't broadcast their existence more than I have to because that only increased the likelihood of losing free access to something I really enjoy.
Bing Chat, even in Creative mode, is only a poor man's GPT-4.
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My problem is, while I'm sure that not all the examples of GPT-4 seeming to get complex reasoning tasks are fake, if they cannot be replicated, what good are they? If GPT-4's ability to "reason" is ephemeral and seemingly random, is it really reasoning, or is it just occasionally getting lucky at ordering abstract tokens for it's monkey overlords?
You know, it's funny, I went through the linked whitepaper. Skimmed mostly. It made few positive, objective claims about GPT4's ability to reason. It mostly said it could reason "better" than previous iterations, and had been trained on a dataset to encourage mathematical reasoning. Notably they say:
I saw some the prompts where they asked GPT-4 to explain it's reasoning, and was underwhelmed. They were extremely rudimentary mathematical tasks of the 5th grade word problem sort, and it's purporting "reasoning" could have easily been imitating training. When I saw that, I took a closer look at how it performed in assorted test, and saw it comprehensively failed the AP English Language and Composition and AP English Language and Literature tests. Which makes sense to me, because a lot of those tests involve more generalized and flexible reasoning than the sorts of formalized mathematical logic examples it might plausibly be trained to imitate.
Come on, most of the UK parliament can't even give the probability of two coins both coming up heads: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19801666
Most people can't even imitate intelligence, by your logic.
GPT-4 has vastly superhuman knowledge, superhuman language knowledge, superhuman speed. Its reasoning skills are well above most of humanity. Most people can't program at all, let alone in all the languages, know how to use so much software like it can. These niggling flaws in AP English and Composition probably have more to do with the arcane and arbitrary scoring mechanism in those tests. It can write just fine. Its prose is not amazing and tends to be rather cliche and predictable, yet that has a lot to do with the RLHF.
That is astonishing.
I wonder how well the average EU parliamentarian or US congressman etc. would do. I can’t imagine that the average Politburo member in China would be this bad.
Well, Britain has been in decline for the last century... I think we could learn a great deal by watching what they've done, what they do and committing to the opposite. They deliberately crushed Birmingham for instance - 'too much development in this rich industrial region, stop!' https://unherd.com/2020/09/the-plot-against-mercia/
And apparently NHS maternity incompetence costs twice as much as NHS maternities themselves: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
The Chinese politburo has a fair few with a basis in science and engineering, I made a post about it a while ago which was contested. Xi at least has an engineering background, other Politburo members have tiny wikipedia pages. https://www.themotte.org/post/238/what-if-your-entire-worldview-was/44213?context=8#context
My understanding was that politburo members were, at one point, mostly or completely of an engineering or science background, but this has relaxed recently. Regardless, the point stands.
I think this holds for the other East Asian countries though, even with a pretty low estimation of the Diet or the National Assembly of Korea.
Wonder what it’s like in other countries.
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The only field where GPT-4 outright disappoints me is in writing fiction. Better than the average human maybe, because they're absolutely shit, just look at the majority of posts on /r/WritingPrompts, but still not good.
I've tried to lean on it in my own writing, because I'm lazy, but other than some help with brainstorming, this is not a strength.
It's good at sparking ideas, indeed.
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I am saying they can be replicated, just by someone who unlike you or me has paid the $20. I suppose it is possible that the supposed degradation in its capabilities has messed up these sorts of questions as well, but probably not.
There is a big difference between random guessing and having a capability that sometimes doesn't work. In particular, if the chance of randomly getting the right result without understanding is low enough. Text generators based on Markov chains could output something that looked like programming, but they did not output working programs, because such an outcome is unlikely enough that creating a novel program is not something you can just randomly stumble upon without some idea of what you're doing. In any case, as far as I know GPT-4 is not that unreliable, especially once you find the prompts that work for the task you want.
How well it reasons is a different question from whether it reasons at all. It is by human standards very imbalanced in how much it knows vs. how well it reasons, so yes people who think it is human-level are generally being fooled by its greater knowledge. But the reasoning is there and it's what makes a lot of the rest possible. Give it a programming task and most of what it does might be copying common methods of doing things that it came across in training, but without the capability to reason it would have no idea of how to determine what methods to use and fit them together without memorizing the exact same task from elsewhere. So practical use is generally going to involve a lot of memorized material, but anyone with a subscription can come up with novel questions to test its reasoning capabilities alone.
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I think the issue is that a human's ability to "reason" is also ephemeral and seemingly random as well. Just less random, with a lower failure rate, but still fairly random and certainly ephemeral for even the most reasonable and logical of people. Given that, the difference in ability to reason is one of degree, not of kind. The question remains if the random failures of reasoning in LLMs can get small/rare enough to the point that it's similar to that of a somewhat competent human.
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