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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

> It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who like to downplay its every achievement

It's not really "its" achievement. There are many open source repositories of Flappy Bird that it was trained on and there are many brilliant engineers at Google and OpenAI who have worked on LLM technology. It is their achievement if anything. It is a product. A product of others' achievement. You don't say Excel had an achievement when it calculates a good formula for you? Do you say a neural network that produces great speech to text had an achievement? Or do say the people who developed it did.

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We have exactly the same argument on a regular basis about whether or not we should say Musk is responsible for the success of Tesla; likewise with attributing the achievements of the USA[0] (or even just the government of the USA[0]) to the specific president of the time rather than to the nation as a whole.

And before Musk was born, similar debates about describing Armstrong as the first man on the moon, given how even saying that inherently brushes aside the contributions of all those who worked on the mission without going to space.

[0] In the UK it seems to be half on the Prime Minister and half the party of the age; I don't pay enough attention to the local opinion of politics elsewhere, though I will say the British press seems to blame everything Germany does on the German Chancellor personally…

>Do you say a neural network that produces great speech to text had an achievement? Or do say the people who developed it did.

Sure Why not? The engineers at google and open ai or wherever else trained the models but they didn't teach it how to do anything it does because they don't know how to teach it to do anything it does. So yeah the achievement is on the neural network.

Many people gave the likes of alpha go achievement on super human Go play.

> So yeah the achievement is on the neural network.

It is? OK, tell them to completely clear the model of any angry bird original and clone code, data and assets that it scarfed from the Internet.

It can retain scarfed definitions of angry and bird as well as scarfed information on making a 2D video game.

Then tell the model to create the game and see what if anything it comes up with.

In terms of the code, I don't think it would be hard to create an Angry Bird clone of this quality using a GPT-4 scale model that had somehow had all knowledge of Angry Birds excluded from it.

Most of the Angry Birds mechanics in this demo come from the underlying Matter 2D library. Relevant demo here: https://brm.io/matter-js/demo/#slingshot

Honestly, that's most of the code part accounted for.

The bigger question is the graphical assets. The developer shared their prompts for those here: https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363587351740711

Some of them make no mention of Angry Birds - "Wooden box. Large skeleton bone. Item assets sprites. White background. In-game sprites" - but others do: "Item assets sprites. Wooden planks. White background. In-game sprites. Similar to Angry Birds style"

My hunch is that a skilled image prompter could still get to results that were right for this particular demo even with a model that had not seen Angry Birds assets before.

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