GPT Overpromise?
I was playing with Bing. While it manages to write proper text which is amazing the actual answers so far are highly unimpressive. So far nothing that can replace simple search. My opinion of course
Truth, however, is the most problematic idea in philosophy, and simply introducing the concept of ‘truth’ erodes the truth. (E.g. makes possible the statement “I am lying now” for the logical and for the X Files to assert “the truth is out there”)
The most interesting question though is how people have reacted to ChatGPT. I mean, Wolfram Alpha is a great question answering system but it didn’t cause a panic for Google and Bing. In our strange times people might rather have a bullshit engine than a search engine, and under the sign of “the innovators dilemma”, search engines might rush to disrupt them own business as a result.
Where its not a replacement for search is up to date information, or finding specific domains when I forget the exact url. For the former I usually have to add "hacker news" or "reddit" or "forum" to get quality info anyway.
Honestly I think its overdelivered, its shocking how useful it is. And crazy to think of what you could do with it right now, let alone as it grows and training options expand.
Around a week or two ago I would have said the google-search-competition thing was bull, not now. Not that google is in a bad place, but I dont think search will stay the same for long.
P.S. Ok I finally managed to try it indirectly, frankly it is even worse. It was insanely over patronizing with little actual substance. But I admit it makes one hell of a clueless manager who knows nothing but buzzwords. In this case it achieves human like quality
Ask it to present you options, ask it to put the data in a table, ask it to ask you questions before answering, ask it to take on a certain persona etc.
>"ask it to put data in a table" - this might be useful.
I’ve not used bing yet, but chatgpt is all about feeding it the right data first before telling it what you want else your answers will be generic and awful, I found this article about the bing chat bot that might help:
https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/power-and-weirdness-ho...
The issue is actually deep understanding of what's read.
One thing that human is always "better" is ability to create metaphore.
Try to get the bot to create metaphore itself to explain things. No way.
Q: Which kitchen metaphor does the large scale structure of our universe resemble?
> ...some scientists have suggested that the large scale structure of the universe resembles a sponge...
Q: What's an example of a recursive analogy with a layer of irony to it?
> An example of a recursive analogy with a layer of irony to it could be the statement "the world is a stage, and we are all just actors playing our parts." This analogy uses the concept of the world being a stage to describe the world itself, and then applies the same concept to individuals within the world, suggesting that their actions and experiences are just part of a larger performance. The ironic layer comes from the fact that, while the analogy may be true in some ways, it also implies that individuals do not have agency or control over their own actions and experiences, which is not necessarily the case.
So A is the same as B just as much as A is the same as C, because A, B, and C are just words with no meaning to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT seems like the endpoint of certain lines of poststructuralist philosophy. There is no meaning to the text, only words. Words relate to other words, and that is all.
That's basically the conclusion Wolfram made in this excessively long article [0] he wrote (which is nonetheless worth a read):
> The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is “merely” pulling out some “coherent thread of text” from the “statistics of conventional wisdom” that it’s accumulated. But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more “law like” in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc.
[0] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...