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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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GPT-4 can pass a bar exam

…after a bunch of lawyers rewrite the questions and have it repeat the test multiple times with different settings and questions.

That's what you'll find if you read the paper this claim is based on, and this significantly diminishes the impressiveness of the results. A model that only gets results when led around carefully by a skilled human is more like a fancy search engine than the rosy picture of an near-human independent operator that the press releases paint.

Having questions rewritten by another person is almost certainly not allowed in the bar exam - the idea that someone who can understand legal principles and jargon can't comprehend a three-part question is laughable. And taking multiple tries at the same exam to get a better score is definitely out.

In my opinion, a reasonable claim that GPT can pass a bar exam would require demonstration that their chosen parameters generalize to other bar exams and the model would need to be able to answer exams without needing questions to be re-formatted.

Right now this claim looks like false advertising.

P.S. Did you know that the bar exam results were marked by the study authors? Or that all four authors of the study work in one of two companies planning to deliver products applying GPT to law?

Thanks for digging this up - casts some serious doubt on how good it is. OpenAI is good at building hype at least.

…after a bunch of lawyers rewrite the questions and have it repeat the test multiple times with different settings and questions

On one hand it's important to put it into perspective. On the other... I seem to remember similar arguments being made when Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.

I guess we have another 20 years before lawyers consider it unfair to use an AI assist when arguing a case.

While I do lean towards the skeptical side about how far AI capabilities are going to get long-term, the main goal was to deflate a bit the exaggerated OpenAI claim about current performance that seems to have been cautiously taken at face value so far. Like some others in this thread I found the claim a bit unbelievable, and I had some time to dig into where it came from.

GPT might get good enough to compete with lawyers in the future, but the study doesn't prove that it's there now. In fact, things like needing the exam adjusted to provide each question separately strongly indicate the opposite.

I seem to remember similar arguments being made when Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.

I'm not familiar with them, maybe you could give some examples?

I'm not familiar with them, maybe you could give some examples?

Yes, hold on a second, just let me get out my collection of dead-tree computer magazines from 1996.

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