GPT4 threads on HN

Here is the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154527

A few observations.

• We have a fundamental problem with textual information - it loses clarity, coherence and meaning, becoming just a “flow of expressing oneself” - written words, “generated” out of emotions, with lack of any understanding of the issue.
• This is a cultural issue. It seems that it is required by modern culture to “talk smart at length” about any current technological, social or political meme, to show that one is “not behind” the current narratives.
• The proper metaphor would be a verbal vomiting, or a textual diarrhea, indeed.
• Every single Chud is publicly cosplaying being an unique snowflake expert in technology, AI, sciences, and literally everything else.

While even the press-release said it explicitly (in a proper marketing-speak)

Despite its capabilities, GPT-4 has similar limitations as earlier GPT models. Most importantly, it still is not fully reliable (it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors). Great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts, with the exact protocol (such as human review, grounding with additional context, or avoiding high-stakes uses altogether) matching the needs of a specific use-case.

it does not stop the disgusting streams of pretensions bullshit.

Every single Chud is trying to post in an elite thread on an elite pseudo-intellectual platform, being proud of his “politeness” and being following the absurd “etiquette” rules of allowing to express anything, but strict conformity.

This is exactly how a religious convention behave - pretense, conformity and nothing but pretense and conformity.

Again. any model builds an abstract structure (Chuds would use the meaningless words like “multi-dimensional” or, “word-embeddings” etc.) and then an algorithm, which uses random numbers would traverse parts of this structure and put words into a sequence, based on some “shortest-distance” abstract heuristic.

This processes is neither knowledge nor understanding. it is, literally, a process of generating (or vomiting) of look-alike sequences of words from a vastly complex abstact structure.

While there is definitely “something” which has been captured by this abstract structure, it is not the source of any kind of “knowledge”, leave alone “reasoning”. This is a complex information-processing which looks like (to an ignorant observer) “reasoning”.

We are entering the age of a textual diarrhea. Congratulations on this, really. Actually, we are already in due to overflowing social media. Try to read what they write on any reasonable subject on major social media platforms, including 4chan (which has the highest quality single posts time and again) - this is just a diarrhea.

The only good thing is that this will trigger some “reaction” some day. Some new “opposition” which would value clarity, careful wording, precise meaning, logical reasoning - all the Classic values.

Here is a quote from the top comment:

edit (addition): What % of people can hold 25,000 words worth of information in their heads, while effectively reasoning with and manipulating it? I’m guessing maybe 10% at most, probably fewer.

What does this even mean? We do not, hopefully, reason depending on number of words. We, as humans, store the relevant “facts” of abstracted from the observed recurring patterns “knowledge” in what we call shared culture, using some written form, mostly books. Concrete mathematics and pre-quantum physics would serve as canonical examples and “success stories”.

Which facts are relevant to a given context, and whether the context has been defined accurately and captures a non-imaginary aspect of actual reality - these are the fundamental question any programmer of non-bullshit modeller have to confider, not how many words are used and how they can be “manipulated”, lmao. Meaning, semantics, “distance” from reality, is what is behind “reasoning” not how many words are there or even how they are arranged in particular.

Clarity is an evidence, the old maxim goes. This implicitly imply non-verbosity.

The formulation in the quote is just absurd bullshit. Each world has its meaning, but the whole sentence is an utter nonsense, but they proceed to pile up more and more.