Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lolthishuman 1768 days ago
You make up things randomly as you go. You never thought ahead of any thought. Every thought you’ve ever had is essentially a procedurally generated prompt based on your biased models.
5 comments

> You make up things randomly as you go. You never thought ahead of any thought.

I don't think that's true.

Usually you need to think a lot about something before coming up with "the right" thought(s).

> Every thought you’ve ever had is essentially a procedurally generated prompt based on your biased models.

That may be. But the interesting part is that those models change as you use them just by using them.

> I don't think that's true.

How long did you have to think to produce that thought? Or did it just pop into your head instantly?

The point is, you cannot think of an upcoming thought, before you have it in your head. Otherwise you would be seeing into the future.

What you are talking about in your comment is reaching a conclusion based on previous thoughts. Yes, often we link our thoughts together into a narrative or a conclusion after we've had the thoughts, but the thoughts themselves? Those seem to come out of nowhere.

The mind does a lot of unconscious work before coming up with some conscious results.

That's true even for very simple things like motion. You can measure things in the brain before those things become conscious thoughts. (Those experiments caused by the way a lot of fuss whether we have free will or are completely predestined in all we do; but that's another topic).

The consciousness only observes a small portion of the thought process. So for it a lot of thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. But the unconscious parts of thinking are very important to the whole process and it's outcomes. I think nobody disputes this by this time.

I love The Darkness that Comes Before, where this observation is explored and exploited, in case you have not read it.
I have used GPT-3 and it works for most of the time. But it fails some of the time too. And thats the problem for use cases like programming or generating config files. Because if you cant trust the output 100% you are pretty much reading the output every time.

So, the only time save is that GPT-3 makes you type less.

In any case I don't type much anyway now a days. Its mostly copy paste from stack overflow update parameters etc.

GPT-3 will be useful, maybe a year from now.

I can't help but think of this scene in Westworld (spoiler S1) whenever GPT 3 (or earlier text prediction models) and this topic come up together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k
That's a pretty bold model for human cognition. It's not something you can just assume.
Sure, but we can think behind our thoughts. And we can sound things out before we say them. And we have mutable long-term memory.

There's not much between us and GPT, but there is some distance still.