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by marginalia_nu 1261 days ago
That's probably a much harder problem.
1 comments

Getting it to cite a source is easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016435

Getting it to cite one that actually exists, ah, now that's a hard problem. Given how slimmed down the tech currently is, even if one can hypothesize some mechanism for having the system keep track of where it got certain ideas (and it is not at all obvious to me how to encode into an otherwise notoriously opaque neural net where ideas came from, given that we can't even point at an "idea" or "concept" or "fact" in a neural net at all), it is hard to imagine it wouldn't take so many additional resources that we'd have to trim the model size down to tiny fractions of what it is now.

For all the people going "wow" at the current state of GPT, I wouldn't be surprised that in 20 years it's actually seen as a dead end. I'm also impressed, but at the same time, I'm seeing the limitations it has for practical use. The hypotheses about why pure neural net approaches are going to be too problematic to use are basically coming true. AI models that can't give human-comprehensible reasons for their conclusions, including attestation of sources, are too dangerous to use. They're just black boxes, and for all you know someone's got their finger on the scale of the black boxes. OpenAI is already doing that, quite visibly, and even if you are comfortable with their reasons for doing so today, you should conclude from the fact they basically immediately stuck their fingers on the scale that you aren't getting some super AI to answer your questions, but a manifestation of some particular group of human's answer to your questions. But... I can already get that! I don't need to pay OpenAI to AI-wash their answers.