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Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

I tried GPT-3 and it generated code examples that just ~made up~ some library that didn't exist at all. It had code that in theory would have ran, if that library ever existed at all, but it didn't, and it consistently came up with code examples using this imaginary library. I thought that wasn't very impressive.

What I'm finding it's extremely great for is writing drivel. I'm talking ecommerce product descriptions, product names, copy... it's really awesome for making one of my side gigs less of a chore.

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I asked it to write some GPT-related code and it used a gpt3 library (which does not exist) instead of the openai library. I was amused by the self-blindness.

(Forgot to actually look it up... seems like it does exist but shouldn't, as it's an empty placeholder: https://pypi.org/project/gpt3/)

It's important to realize it's just writing out the next thing that seems most likely given the input.

I was pretty surprised playing around with github copilot that it could understand the context of a CSV file and filled in all the headers and stuff when I asked it to, then I realized it could probably just arbitrarily read anything on my computer and promptly uninstalled it.

It only reads your source code

It doesn't get out of your project. And copilot is a trustworthy entity.

It trips me out that people still try to get GPT3 to do deterministic things (math, cite a source, recite dates, etc). Not sure if its a lack of creativity or just a stubborn view of what is valueable.

I tried because I didn’t know better but eventually figured it out and just asked “can you even do inference” the answer being no

I hope you didn't ask ChatGPT itself, because it will quite happily lie about things that it doesn't or cannot do.

It would be neat if it COULD do those things, though, maybe by hitting something closer to wolfram alpha when it determ... wait

Yeah you have a point. It does boldly claim that it's good at code, though I find a lot more utility just searching github and gists.

> it generated code examples that just ~made up~ some library that didn't exist at all

Just ask GPT-3 for the code in the library, what's the problem?

Or dependency injection.

—> do it without external libraries —> do it this specific way —> damn it I’ll code it myself

No, really. This is how I use it. Get it to emulate a Linux terminal. Seed the history with ls / -lah, lscpu, lsb_release -a etc. Then at that point {use git to install a Python project that is a Slackbot template}.

Boom, it clones the fake library. cd slack-bot-template, cat main.py and away you go.

{Modify the project to do X and commit}

Etc etc.

Yes! I've been calling this Hallucinated Scripts. More examples here: https://twitter.com/jamesjyu/status/1600959843669377025

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