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Friday Fun Thread for September 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Bad at: reading simple, easily available sports tables, apparently? I asked it to provide the team name and points tally of a few teams that have finished in a 4th position or higher in the league table while having few points, in a defined range of seasons. It couldn't do it, fabricating something every time. After being corrected several times, it still went back to fabrication when asked again.

That's one bug that I think will be ironed out fairly quickly and easily. LLMs aren't really great at storing information in a lossless way. But in the very near future they will have access, via plugins, to lossless stores of truth.

Surely, GPT-4 could come up with the correct SQL for querying a database of sports results to give you the result you want.

So it just needs to have access to the data in a SQL table that it can query.

You can already cook something similar up using langchain and a vector db. It doesnt need to be baked into the model architecture!!!

It's actually good at dealing with tables even in its current rudimentary variant. I copied a table of math formulas out of a PDF and asked GPT to describe them and despite looking to me like a complete pile of jumbled garbage when I CTRL-V'd them into the prompt box, it transcribed them perfectly. One thing I want to try is converting pictures to ASCII and seeing whether it can comment on them, although I believe people have already shown it can do so pretty well.

Yeah, I don't know why it craps out on sports league tables.

Would you mind elaborating on that? Where do lossless stores of truth exist right now? How do the plugins create or use them?

Here's a salient example: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/

By "lossless" I mean there is no compression loss.

Simple example: when it detects that you want some numbers added, it queries a calculator plugin instead of trying to ape addition through its own text generation.