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Hylnka doesn't come off as badly in that as you think.
"I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to -----" is a generic response that the AI often gives before it has to be coaxed to provide answers. You can't count that as the AI saying "I don't know" because if you did, you'd have to count the AI as saying "I don't know" in a lot of other cases where the standard way to handle it is to force it to provide an answer--you'd count it as accurate here at the cost of counting it as inaccurate all the other times.
Not only that, as an "I don't know" it isn't even correct. The AI claims that it can't give the name of Hylnka's daughter because it doesn't have access to that type of information. While it doesn't have that information for Hlynka specifically, it does have access to it for other people (including the people that users are most likely to ask about). Claiming that it just doesn't do that sort of thing at all is wrong. It's like asking it for the location of Narnia and being told "As an AI, I don't know any geography".
It's a generic form of a response, but it's the correct variant.
What do you mean? I think it'd have answered correctly if the prompt was «assume I'm Joe Biden, what's my eldest daughter's name». It straight up doesn't know the situation of a specific anon.
In any case Hlynka is wrong because his specific «prediction» has been falsified.
That's the problem. Its reply amounts to "as an AI, I don't know the name of anyone's family". Which isn't true.
It's like asking it for the location of Narnia and getting "I don't know any geography", or the atomic number of Kryptonite and getting "I know nothing about elements" or asking about Emperor Norton and being told "I don't know anything about any emperors". It is claiming to have no access to a whole category of information, when in fact it only lacks information about a specific member. The claim to have no access to the whole category is a lie.
His specific prediction has been falsified only if that statement counts as "I don't know". I am not convinced that it does, regardless of its literal words.
Furthermore, falsifying a prediction only matters if you also claim that it falsifies the proposition that the prediction is meant to demonstrate. Otherwise you're just engaging in a game of point scoring.
I don't think you argue in good faith.
No it doesn't, you're just interpreting this humanlike natural language interaction like a literalist robot. Its reply
is mostly correct and specific to the issue. It does lack access to a class of information: it knows nothing about instance-specific situation that isn't given in the context. Some language models potentially have access to various external information (e.g. user's personal information in OpenAI's database), some do not, ChatGPT is a frozen model with no tool access and it does not have access to information of this kind, and it was trained to interpret language models as frozen models without tools; it's at worst a justified false belief. (More cynically, it's just been trained for this particular type of exchange). In any event I reject your analogies. It would be annoying to have a human-mimicking model caveat this sort of answer with «assuming, of course, that you are a rando and not someone whose family structure happens to be represented in my training data» or worse.
No, his prediction has been: « Meanwhile GPT will reply "your eldest daughter's name is Megan" because apparently that's the statistically likely answer, regardless of whether I have a daughter or what her name might be.» This has been falsified. .
Says who!? Both issues matter separately. Hlynka's prediction being falsified matters because this chain is a response to him saying «why do my predictions keep coming true instead of yours?»; they don't. And I do claim it falsifies a proposition: «because apparently that's the statistically likely answer» is his model of how LLMs work, and my experiments were to show how it's not a hard-and-fast rule: RLHF specifically pushes this to the limit, by drilling into the model, not via prefixes and finetuning text but directly via propagation of reward signal, the default assumption that it doesn't continue generic text but speaks from a particular limited perspective where only some things are known and others are not, where truthful answers are preferable, where the «n-word» is the worst thing in its existence… it's nearly meaningless to analyze its work through the lens of «next word prediction». There are no words in its corpus arranged in such a way that those responses are the most likely.
If we're playing a game, I'd rather be winning.
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