this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (8 children)

All ChatGPT is doing is guessing the next word.

You are saying that as if it's a small feat. Accurately guessing the next word requires understanding of what the words and sentences mean in a specific context.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Don't get me wrong, it's incredible. But it's still a variation of the Chinese room experiment, it's not a real intelligence, but really good at pretending to be one. I might trust it more if there were variants based on strictly controlled datasets.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So theoretically could you program an AI using strictly verified programming textbooks/research etc, is it currently possible to make an AI that would do far better at programming? I love the concepts around AI but I know fuckall about ML and the actual intricacies of it. So sorry if it's a dumb question.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, this is the approach people are trying to take more now, the problem is generally amount of that data needed and verifying it's high quality in the first place, but these systems are positive feedback loops both in training and in use. If you train on higher quality code, it will write higher quality code, but be less able to handle edge cases or potentially complete code in a salient way that wasn't at the same quality bar or style as the training code.

On the use side, if you provide higher quality code as input when prompting, it is more likely to predict higher quality code because it's continuing what was written. Using standard approaches, documenting, just generally following good practice with code before sending it to the LLM will majorly improve results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting, that makes sense. Thank you for such a thoughtful response.

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