Comment by sureIy
1 year ago
> an oxtail soup recipe
Sounds like the model just copy pasted one from the internet, hard to get that wrong. GP could have had a bespoke recipe and list of ingredients. This particular example of yours just reconfirmed what was being said: it's only able to copy-paste existing content, and it's lost otherwise.
In my case I have huge trouble making it create useful TypeScript code for example, simply because apparently there isn't sufficient advanced TS code that is described properly.
For completeness sake, my last prompt was to create a function that could infer one parameter type but not the other. After several prompts and loops, I learned that this is just not possible in TypeScript yet.
No, that example is not something that I would find very useful or a good example of its abilities- just one thing I generally expected it to be capable of doing. One can quickly confirm that it is doing the work and not copying and pasting the list by altering the recipe to include steps and ingredients not typical for such a recipe. I made a few such alterations just now, and reran it, and it adjusted correctly from a clean prompt.
I've found it able to come up with creative new ideas for solving scientific research problems, by finding similarities between concepts that I would not have thought of. I've also found it useful for suggesting local activities while I'm traveling based on my rather unusual interests that you wouldn't find recommended for travelers anywhere else. I've also found it can solve totally novel classical physics problems with correct qualitative answers that involve keeping track of the locations and interactions of a lot of objects.. I'm not sure how useful that is, but it proves real understanding and modeling - something people repeatedly say LLMs will never be capable of.
I have found that it can write okay code to solve totally novel problems, but not without a ton of iteration- which it can do, but is slower than me just doing it myself, and doesn't code in my style. I have not yet decided to use any code it writes, although it is interesting to test its abilities by presenting it with weird coding problems.
Overall, I would say it's actually not really very useful, but is actually exhibiting (very much alien and non-human like) real intelligence and understanding. It's just not an oracle- which is what people want and would find useful. I think we will find them more useful with having our own better understanding of what they actually are and can do, rather than what we wish they were.