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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

> So if you in your question give it all the information that is relevant (interspersed with irrelevant information if you want) then it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would.

I don't think that's actually true, as GPT-3 will tend to ignore any facts about the world that were part of its corpus just to fit a question better. For example, if you prompt it with "Who assassinated Queen Elizabeth II?", it will likely give you a name, instead of saying "Queen Elizabeth II is still alive", because "Who" questions are much more likely to receive a name as an answer than a refutation in its training corpus.

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Anyone who has ever spoken to a small child knows they often “think” in the same way. They are likely to answer a who question with a name, sometimes laughably made up, because this is what they think they’re supposed to do and they lack the higher order reasoning to think it through. They also will continually forget things they already know when it suits their purpose. But nobody would say a toddler is not sentient.

Sure, sentience doesn't require the inability to make mistakes. But a child will eventually learn that some questions are wrong and can be challenged. They are very likely to quickly learn this when it applies to themselves (if you ask "why did you break that toy?", I very much doubt they will answer with some reason, especially if they did not break the toy).

The fact that they can chose to omit facts when it suits their purpose is in fact something that LaMDA can't do (as its sole purpose is to generate the most likely series of tokens that continue the prompt).

I wonder how many examples it would need to respond with "hah, trick question!". I wonder how it would do if you managed to frame the question more neutrally. To be fair you might trick a 7 year old into responding with a fantasy answer as well.

I tried to get GPT-3 to tell me the most popular forums on some topics, and I noticed it would never include subreddits. So I prefaced my question with "given that subreddits are also a type of forum.." and it would give me a list that would include subreddits. I have to admit that in that new list it would then fail to mention some forum that was in the previous list, so it didn't have a super reliable ability reorganize information.

Google gives a reasonable answer to that question.

Yes, but Google (search) is not LaMDA, and it is built with many hand-programmed heuristics.

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