This as an assistant/teacher could be incredibly empowering for people learning to program.
I'm sceptical of AI writing programs for people, but I can easily imagine such AI guiding/unblocking non-programmers enough for them to actually program.
I'm sceptical of AI writing programs for people, but I can easily imagine such AI guiding/unblocking non-programmers enough for them to actually program.
GPT-3 doesn’t actually know anything about anything at all. It’s a huge pattern generator. You can’t trust anything it says, because all it does is group words together into convincing looking shapes based on text that it’s seen before.
Once again, I’m reminded that tools like GPT-3 should be classified in the “bicycles for the mind” category. You still have to know how to pedal!
They’re fantastic tools for thinking, but to actually use their output effectively requires VERY deep knowledge—both of the subject matter in question, and of the way that the AI tools themselves work.
Otherwise it's just a variant of Russell's teapot.
GPT-3 has more textual training data than any human could read in a thousand lifetimes, but we base our judgment on much more than that.
That's a bit much to ask of a fiction generator, though. It doesn't know it's not okay to make things up. All its training is about making things up whether it knows the answer or not.
Sounds very human to me.
Imagine if we gave it more power and funding. Maybe redirect all of Congress's salary to it?
Either way, it's not just scaling up, it's changing the algorithm.
Intent: We can have a goal which directs our thinking. This changes what we come up with much more flexibly than experience, even if experience is often needed for good results.
Temperment: We can be angry, tired, excited, relaxed, etc. while thinking. This isn't always good, but it is a way we differ.
Self-awareness: A very difficult term to define, but we can (hopefully) take a step back and discard our current thought if we realize we are falling into one of our usual bad patterns of thinking.
The goals we want to achieve are tied to what has been going on throughout our lives thus far. We don't invent our own values out of a vacuum, we tend to adopt them from other people, and rank them depending on how our nervous system works.
Self-awareness is the ability to reason about the process of reasoning, plus, in your example, a recollection of past examples of incorrect reasoning that disrupted the process of achieving our goals.
So basically current models need a memory and the ability to change their own weights in response to new data to even start approximating humans, but that looks like a doable task, in principle.
That may be the cornerstone of "intelligence", but that's only one part of it. I think another one is making or finding relations between the parts of the whole.
Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations [1]
Once you have internalized relations of the real world, you can start to hack them in your head, run simulations of the results and take action.
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/famous-education-quotations-herber...
Maybe a confidence level for a given explanation, along with some sort of "here's where you can go to learn more" would be useful? No idea if language models would be good at that kind of meta reasoning.