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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Well. I tried Bing Chat just now and got this.

It is worth noting that the settings besides "Creative" tend to have worse performance for these sorts of tasks. You may want to rerun it on that. Personally I don't have any difficulty believing LLMs can perform some semblance of "reasoning" -- even GPT-3 can perform transformations like refactoring a function into multiple smaller functions with descriptive names and explanatory comments (on a codebase it's never seen before, calling an API that didn't exist when its training data was scraped). It is obviously modeling something more general there, whether you want to call it "reasoning" or not.

From following a rather discreet Twitter account belonging to one of the lead devs for Bing Chat, I've learned that Creative mode is the one that most consistently uses GPT-4. All the others use older models, at least most of the time.

Even Creative apparently can relegate what another model seems as low complexity answers to a simpler LLM.

(Running GPT-4 as a practically free public service is expensive)