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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

I just don't trust it, I've worked with GPT-3 before and it sure does a real good job of sounding convincing, but if you don't understand the code there's no way to know if what it's saying is accurate, or whether it's just regurgitating random nonsense that sounds plausible.

It knows how to create sentences that sound like something a human would write, and it's even good at understanding context. But that's it, it has no actual intelligence, it doesn't actually understand the code, and most importantly, it's not able to say "Sorry chief, I don't actually know what this doing, look it up yourself."

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The underhanded C contest is a great practical demonstration even "biological intelligences" have a difficult time reading and summarizing code. I wouldn't trust this thing further than I do comments, but I could see it being equally as useful.

There's an example in this example. The line it translates as "we're getting the raw request body" doesn't work on multipart/form-data.

I can easily imagine the reason you're looking at an unfamiliar function in an unfamiliar language (hence needing such a line-by-line translation) is that there's some sort of bug and that edge case is exactly why. The tool would mislead you into thinking it's one of the other lines, because of how simple its translation is.

> and it sure does a real good job of sounding convincing, but if you don't understand the code there's no way to know if what it's saying is accurate

This is also the story of the past decade of "progress" in machine translation between natural languages.

This is also the story of the past several millenia of "progress" in human translation between natural languages.

You trust a human translator because their ability has been partially verified by an authority (language certificate) and many people have employed their services with few complaints. Similarly, you trust a translation program because it was partially verified (hidden test cases) and many people use it with an acceptable amount of complaints (given its convenience).

False equivalence. It may not be any easier for you to verify a human translator's output, but that's a far cry from being structurally incentivized to produce output which appears fluent in the target language at the expense of presenting confidently wrong.

> it has no actual intelligence

This is a prime example of the moving goalpost of what intelligence "actually" is - in previous eras, we would undoubtedly consider understanding context, putting together syntactically correct sentences and extracting the essence from texts as "intelligent"

Whether this thing is worthy of the label of "intelligent" or not is fairly uninteresting. What matters for something like this is its accuracy and if it can be trusted - that is what I think OP is getting at.

I mean, I feel then OP shouldn't say something contentious like that.

Does it do all that, or does it just pretend to understand context and extract the essence from texts? It looks as if it does because it follows the form you'd expect an answer to have if the person is intelligent. But when you look more closely, it often falls apart.

It reminds me of people who use "big words" without actually understanding them. If they don't overdo it or really miss the meaning of a term, they can seem much more educated than they are.

Have you ever read "A Canticle for Leibowitz"? A peripheral bit in the story has a monk develop a mathematical system to determine what word would come next in a manuscript whose edge has been lost. Walter M. Miller, writing that story in 1959, does not portray such a system as having or being perceived to have "actual intelligence", because he can easily imagine that a complex system could appear to work in that way without intelligence.

The goalpost was never in that spot.

> understanding context

You're asserting here that it understands context, but you haven't provided any argument in support of that assertion.

I think you'll also need to define what you mean by "understanding" (because that term is loaded with anthropocentric connotations) and clearly state what "context" you think the model has.

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