Comment by afturner

4 years ago

I am beyond astounded. I was able to run a Docker image, utilize the fs inside of the container, and exit the container. Docker system commands work as expected (`docker ps` shows no containers, `docker ps -a` shows the exited container)

A few little things are weird (I can exec into a stopped container for example) but I was able to start another container and persist files.

Wild. This is unbelievable. Can anyone please explain to me why this isn't as wildly groundbreaking as this seems?

What I struggle with in terms of how impressive to find something like this is: there's an awful lot of "here's the command" "and here's the output" examples and explanations for all this stuff out there, in man pages, in tutorials, in bug reports, in Stack Overflow questions and answers, that presumably went into the training data.

Obviously what's happening is much more complex, and impressive, than just spitting back the exact things it's seen, as it can include the specific context of the previous prompts in its responses, among other things, but I don't know that it's necessarily different in kind than the stuff people ask it to do in terms of "write X in the style of Y."

None of this is to say it's not impressive. I particularly have been struck by the amount of "instruction following" the model does, something exercised a lot by the prompts people are using in this thread and the article. I know OpenAI had an article out earlier this year about their efforts and results at that time specifically around training the models to follow instructions.

>Can anyone please explain to me why this isn't as wildly groundbreaking as this seems?

It is and people haven't realize it yet.

  • I've been playing with it since yesterday. I was able to ask it for output that literally had my crying with laughter (e.g. "Write a country song about Sansa Stark and Littlefinger" or "Write a sad song about McNuggets"). That scared me for a minute because it's giving me what I want, mentally anyway, beyond anything else I've seen recently. I'd be worried it's addictive. But it seems like it has an ability to enhance my own mind as well, because I can ask it things about what I'm thinking about, and it generates a certain amount of seemingly generic ideas but I can expand on it or get more specific. I can take the ideas I want from it into my actual life. I've come up with several insights, realized certain ways of thinking I've been stuck in, and even based on its examples realized things about generating creative ideas for myself. Maybe I'm over-reacting but it's really something new. I haven't cared that much about AI but now that I have access to it it's another matter. In comparison, I also played around with DALL-E just now but that's not really achieving anything special for me like that.

  • Without exaggeration, it is the most impressive tech demo that I have ever seen.

    It is literally years - possibly decades - ahead of my prior expectations.

    • I'm wholeheartedly confused why so many people are only just now learning of OpenAI/GPT-3 and its chat mode, I guess presentation truly is everything. Nothing here is particularly new, it's just a better model than before.

      Statements like "the people haven't realized it yet" confuse me because "the people" is two groups. People in the know, and people not in the know. Everyone in the know realizes where this is headed and what the potential is.

      Those not in the know simply lack the technical background to have followed the incremental developments up till now which have led to this moment, for them it's a parlor trick because even today they cannot grasp the potential of existing technology. I could similarly lament about how people treat the Internet.

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    • I feel very much at odds with this - it’s not going beyond a couple commands, this is exactly what I’d expect a language model to be able to do today based on the past three years progression. It’s not actually executing anything ofc, it’s finding the output quite literally a well formed amalgamation of all the learned examples online of which there’s be tons.

      It’s something like novelty * length * complexity with * accuracy that impressed me, of which it’s not far beyond simple tutorials or snippets you’d find online.

  • But isn't it just predicting text patterns? It doesn't really know about Docker, just that after running commands X,Y you usually get output Z (of course with the stateful AI magic to make things more stable/consistent).

    • I mean not to veer to far into the philosophical side of this, but what does it actually mean to know or understand something?

      Did you see the demo the other day that was posted here of using stylographic analysis to identify alt accounts? Most of the comments were some form of "holy shit this is unbelievable", and the OP explained that he had used a very simple type of analysis to generate the matches.

      We aren't quite as unique as we think was my takeaway from that. My takeawy from this, as well as the SD, DALL-E stuff is that we're all just basically taking what we heard from the past, modifying it a teeny bit, and spitting it back out.

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    • I think there is an element of it producing reasonable results because it is trained on largely seeing canned example output. In tutorials, the command that includes ‘hello world’ always outputs ‘hello world’, right? So it doesn’t take a genius to guess that <long blob of golfed code that includes the string ‘hello world’> should produce some output that includes ‘hello world’

      Similarly in my explorations of this ‘pretend Linux’, it often produces whatever would be the most helpful output, rather than the correct output.

> Can anyone please explain to me why this isn't as wildly groundbreaking as this seems?

It’s really hard to utilize if the results aren’t consistent.

  • Well humans are inconsistent and we seem to be utilized reasonably well.

    • Yeah, and everyone that wants to succeed makes an effort to utilize as few humans as possible. I don’t think that will be different for AI, even though they have the benefit you don’t have to pay them.

All i can say is i told you so. Over and over and over again. But no one listened - worse I was actively mocked. These language models will be GAI and indeed to a larger and larger extent already are.