[hospitalJail]

Its interesting to see what it thinks about some ideas, like I ask, what 5 companies are best at marketing. My goal here is to be hypercritical of the companies it says because they are masters at manipulation. GPT3.5 was awful and confused advertising and marketing. GPT4 was perfect (Apple, Nike, Coke, Amazon, P&G)

As much as chatgpt doesnt want to give you answers because the fuzziness, it has the ability to make judgements on things like "This is the best" or "This is the worst".

Ofc with bias.

[nathan_compton]

Does it have the ability or is it just generating text similar to what it has seen before? The two things are very different.

[hospitalJail]

In this examples, it likely took that those companies are often praised about their marketing in the same sentence marketing is mentioned.

LLMs don't repeat text its seen before, it links words/tokens/phrases that are related. Its prediction, but the prediction isnt just copypasting a previous webpage.

Have you use chatgpt yet? I wouldn't delay. Heck you are here on HN, you basically have a responsibility to test it.

[nathan_compton]

I've used it extensively. GPT4 is great, but it is not intelligent. I think its really weird and also totally understandable that people think it is.

[girvo]

It’s something so new and foreign that I’m deeply unsurprised that some feel it’s intelligent.

I personally don’t care one way or the other, whether it is or isn’t. What I care about is whether it’s useful.

[pixl97]

Eh, please comprehensively define intelligent... I have a feeling that this may explain a lot about your answer.

[nathan_compton]

Well, one clear thing about GPT4 that isn't intelligent is that it doesn't learn in situ. Knowledge has to be added to it via an external process. The prompt does allow it to condition further output based on "new" information but that isn't learning. Another thing GPT4 has trouble with is generalizing knowledge. While it is certainly able to generalize to a degree (more or less it is able to apply patterns in the training data from one domain to other domains) if you ask it to generalize to things not well represented in the training data but nevertheless obvious from the conceptual underpinnings thereof it fails. I see this frequently with complicated functional/function level programming. GPT4 gets hopelessly confused when you ask it about non-trivial functions which return or manipulate other functions, even though conceptually there is nothing confusing about it and, in fact, if you ask it about functions as first class objects, it can answer with reasonable text.

Thus, GPT4 can appear to have knowledge in the sense of generating text indicating such, but fail to use that knowledge. This is the most compelling indication to me of limited or total lack of intelligence. I believe that the vast majority of GPT4's "capabilities" amount to memorization and permutation, not the formulation of accurate models of things.