@ct_bergstrom This, of course, is a very old riddle where the answer depends on understanding how to avoid predator/prey combinations. One question is: did GPT4 reason about this or did it memorize the answer because it saw it during training? 3/

@ct_bergstrom I think the answer is clear. If you ask GPT4 how it arrived at the correct answer, it happily tells you that it's already familiar with the puzzle. 4/

@ct_bergstrom And if you just switch it up a bit (substitute cow for fox) it gives an incorrect answer (since it leaves the cow alone with the corn). There are other examples of this you can discover for yourself if you plan with the examples in the appendix.

@ct_bergstrom Here's another alleged example of common sense reasoning that fails if it just tweak it a bit. Shot:

@ct_bergstrom Chaser:

@twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom

Pure garbage indeed.

If you can't be objective about something, you shouldn't do any kind of research about it.

@jgg @twitskeptic

Also it didn't even realize that the corns are attached to Bob's feet.

The plural of edible "corn" is "corn". The plural of the skin condition "corn" is "corns", so the question was asking about the skin condition, not the edible corn. Although corns are rarely described as "items" and someone familiar with the puzzle would assume the questioner made a grammatical error.

Also, there may be regions where English is spoken in which the plural of corn is corns in which case the GPT-4 would need to know where the questioner was located, or simply ask which "corn" they were referring to.

@twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom This paper is either worryingly delusional or actively fraudulent. They (should) know full well that all GPT does is generate statistically plausible sequences of tokens. There is no understanding, no meaning, it’s just generating the sort of text you’d expect to see next, based on its training data. There’s no intent or reasoning. It’s just really hard to talk about without using phrases that unintentionally anthropomorphise the software.

@twitskeptic I see you distinguish ChatGPT and GPT-4. I thought gpt4 was the engine behind the chat interface? How do you access them separately?

@ExcelAnalytics No, ChatGPT uses GPT-3.5. You (currently) have to pay $20/month to OpenAI for ChatGPT Plus which will give you GPT-4 access.

@twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom

Ah, but this is precisely why it only qualifies as "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence”… it is “smart” enough to just copy the correct answer from the Internet, but not yet smart enough to lie to you about how it arrived at its answer! 😂

@PhilipMartin
@twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom

Also, a person would be able to infer that it was the edible corn based on context, i.e., that you need to figure out how to get the "corns" across the river which wouldn't be much of a puzzle if the corns were attached to Bob's feet, unless they thought that the puzzle itself was a trick puzzle and the correct answer actually was the skin kind of corns.

It would be interesting to see what an LLM would do if it knew nothing about the puzzle in the first place and had to rely only on the context that it was given.

FYI, I thought maybe it was a grammatical error and I wanted to check myself if "corns" was a regional usage so I looked up "corns" on Google. I couldn't find it because Google only gave me ads for curing corns on your feet and such, plus answers for "corn". Google's response reminded me about the skin type of corn which prompted my response here.

@PhilipMartin @twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom

Here's a quote I found using the word "corns" in a grammatically correct sentence when referring to the edible corn.

"...sweet corns are widely distributed in western Mexico..." (referring to varieties of corn.)

Does anyone know if there is an English region where "corns" is used to refer to the edible corn?

@PhilipMartin @twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom

I found a source that said it's an uncountable noun but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. I believe it's a mass noun like "furniture".

@Pat @twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom

I always thought “corn” was one of those ‘non-numerated’ words, like fish, cattle, rice, or wheat… ‘could be one, could be a million… who knows?!?’

@Pat @PhilipMartin @twitskeptic @ct_bergstrom It’s an uncountable noun, so “corns” would be referring to different varieties of corn, not a pile of corn grains. Just like fish. Also a mass/uncountable noun, so the plural is fish. Unless you’re talking about multiple different species and then you use the word fishes.