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by thfuran 1206 days ago
That's so obviously false that I literally can't imagine how you could believe it. GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt. And even if it were, it would probably still be potentially useful for learning languages.
1 comments
vba616 1206 days ago
> GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt.

I think I understand the sense in which you claim it produces relevant facts not in the prompt.

It's not that we differ on easily observable behavior of the system.

It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant".

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thfuran 1206 days ago
>It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant".

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge? But that's totally irrelevant to the issue of whether it can transmit knowledge to a user, who presumably hasn't memorized the entire training set.

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vba616 1203 days ago
>That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge?

Hmm. Seems obvious to me that it's producing new output, but that output isn't knowledge and it can't be.

Sometimes ChatGPT tells me something that turns out to be correct and relevant. And I get excited, and then I Google it and what it told me is the first hit on Stack Overflow.

There's a subtle point here, that other people might say "well, ChatGPT is ok, but no better than Google" or something like that. But I differ on that. The key is that I don't know it's Stack Overflow until I check independently. So it's giving it too much credit to say it's as good as Google, and the amount of information it can output is not lower bounded by its training set, but is actually zero due to being adjacent to an infinite amount of BS that by its nature always requires external mechanisms to separate out.

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