I am getting super tired of these responses.
Yes, I have tried it. Please converse in good faith.
GPT-4 has never, not once, in dozens of hours of use, asked me a clarifying question.
It cannot understand things.
Yes, I have tried it. Please converse in good faith.
GPT-4 has never, not once, in dozens of hours of use, asked me a clarifying question.
It cannot understand things.
In the original ReAct paper it falls apart almost immediately in ALFWorld (this is a classical test for AI systems - to be able to reason logically - and it still isn't generally solvable due to combinatorial explosion).
For now it requires human correction looped or not, or else it "diverges" (I like Yann Lecun explanation [0]).
In my own experiments (I haven't played with LangChain or ReAct yet) it diverges irrecoverably pretty quickly. I was trying to explain to it the elementary combinators theory, in the style of Raymond Smullyan and his birds [1] and it can't even prove the first theorem (despite being familiar with the book). A human can prove it knowing almost nothing about math whatsoever, maybe it will take a couple of days thinking, but the correct proof is not that hard - just two steps.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yann-lecun_i-have-claimed-tha...
It "diverges" while my human mind seemingly is different in some way - I can keep going at the math problem forever (for much longer?) and I won't hallucinate incorrect proofs (at least very unlikely, and I can keep re-checking them).
Of course this all in the area of feelings and faith - we just don't know much about cognition I guess.
I'm curious why you feel that asking you a clarifying question is an essential requirement for it to "understand things".
I have not gotten it to issue a question mark '?'. But it did suggest to me an option:
If you would like to define M(7) as equal to M(6), you can do so.
Not all that different from people TBH.
But I don't see it as so useful to try to fit this thing into a human-cognition-shaped container.
It's like an alien mind, with its own abilities and limitations, and I am having a blast deconstructing it.
It isn't a requirement, it's an example I used. You can come up with others, I'm sure! Like ask it to replace a word with another word. It kind of works! But also does random other things. Why? Because that's how these models function! But I asked GPT why these models often don't ask clarifying questions (try it yourself, new prompt! GPT-4!):
> I have found often that GPT models will just reply with answers, rather than ask clarifying questions about the text we're giving them. Why do these models do this?
The reason why GPT models may not ask clarifying questions about the text given to them is that they are trained to generate text based on the patterns and relationships they observe in large amounts of data. This means that they do not have a deep understanding of the content they are processing and are unable to determine whether or not they need additional information to better understand a particular text.
Additionally, GPT models are trained to optimize for the likelihood of generating coherent and grammatically correct text. In most cases, generating a response that directly answers the question or prompt given to them is a more effective way to achieve this goal than asking clarifying questions that may require additional context or information.
However, there are some techniques that can be used to encourage GPT models to ask clarifying questions. One approach is to include explicit cues or markers in the input text that signal to the model that additional information is needed. Another approach is to use training data that includes examples of the model asking clarifying questions, which can help the model learn to do so more consistently.
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It's very convenient for all of us to think that GPT is like a human, but somehow not like a human enough to cause any moral issues!
It's like winning, but you don't even have to play!
With the instruction tuning it feels like model really wants to single shot respond vs. do a back and forth. So like a junior engineer who does ask for help you have to give it a hand.