Regarding medical information: medical professionals in the US, including your doctor, use uptodate.com, which is basically a medical encyclopedia that is regularly updated by experts in their field. While it's very expensive to get a year long subscription, a week long subscription (for non medical professionals) is only around $20 and you can look up anything you want.
One common kind of interaction I have with chatgpt (pro):
1. I ask for something
2. Chatgpt suggests something that doesn't actually fulfill my request
3. I tell it how its suggestion does not satisfy my request.
4. It gives me the same suggestion as before, or a similar suggestion with the same issue.
Chatgpt is pretty bad at "don't keep doing the thing I literally just asked you not to do" but most humans are pretty good at that, assuming they are reasonable and cooperative.
> Chatgpt is pretty bad at "don't keep doing the thing I literally just asked you not to do" but most humans are pretty good at that.
Most humans are terrible at that. Most humans don't study for tests, fail, and don't see the connection. Most humans will ignore rules for their safety and get injured. Most humans, when given a task at work, will half-ass it and not make progress without constant monitoring.
If you only hang out with genius SWEs in San Francisco, sure, ChatGPT isn't at AGI. But the typical person has been surpassed by ChatGPT already.
I'd go so far as to say the typical programmer has been surpassed by AI.
My example is asking for way less than what you're asking for.
Here is something I do not see with reasonable humans who are cooperative:
Me: "hey friend with whom I have plans to get dinner, what are you thinking of eating?"
Friend: "fried chicken?"
Me: "I'm vegetarian"
Friend: "steak?"
Note that this is in the context of four turns of a single conversation. I don't expect people to remember stuff across conversations or to change their habits or personalities.
> Here is something I do not see with reasonable humans who are cooperative: Me: "hey friend with whom I have plans to get dinner, what are you thinking of eating?" Friend: "fried chicken?" Me: "I'm vegetarian" Friend: "steak?"
Go join a dating app as a woman, put vegan in your profile, and see what restaurants people suggest. Could be interesting.
I get your comment, which is that only the worst humans are going to suggest a steak place after you've stated you're vegetarian. And that ChatGPT does so as well.
I'm disagreeing and saying there's far more people in that bucket than you believe.
I know many people at my university that struggle to read more than two sentences at a time. They'll ask me for help on their assignments and get confused if I write a full paragraph explaining a tricky concept.
That person has a context length of two sentences and would, if encountering a word they didn't know like "vegetarian", ignore it and suggest a steak place.
These are all people in Computer Engineering. They attend a median school and picked SWE because writing buggy & boilerplate CRUD apps pays C$60k a year at a big bank.
I think what you're saying is both besides the point and incorrect.
Firstly, not studying, ignoring safety rules, or half-assing a task at work are behaviors, they don't necessarily reflect understanding or intelligence. Sometimes I get up late and have to rush in the morning, that doesn't mean I lack the intelligence to understand that time passes when I sleep.
Secondly, I don't think that most people fail to see the connection between not studying and failing a test. They might give other excuses for emotional or practical reasons, but I think you'll have a hard time finding anyone who genuinely claims that studying doesn't usually lead to better test scores. Same for ignoring safety rules or half-assing work.
> I think you'll have a hard time finding anyone who genuinely claims that studying doesn't usually lead to better test scores.
I know dozens of people that have told me to my face that they don't need to attend lectures to pass a course, and then fail the course.
Coincidentally, most of my graduating class is unemployable.
It's not a lack of understanding or intelligence, but it is an attitude that is no longer necessary.
If I wanted someone to do a half-assed job at writing code until it compiles and then send the results to me for code review, I'd just pay an AI. The market niche for that person no longer exists. If you act like that at work, you won't have a job.
While the majority of humans are quite capable of this, there are so many examples anyone could give that prove that capability doesn’t mean they do so.
+1, I am also big user of PGMs, and also a big user of transformers, and I don't know what the parent comment talking about, beyond that for e.g. LLMs, sampling the next token can be thought of as sampling from a conditional distribution (of the next token, given previous tokens). However, this connection of using transformers to sample from conditional distributions is about autoregressive generation and training using next-token prediction loss, not about the transformer architecture itself, which mostly seems to be good because it is expressive and scalable (i.e. can be hardware-optimized).
Source: I am a PhD student, this is kinda my wheelhouse
I've never smoked cigarettes, but decided to try Nicorette gum as an alternative to a second cup of coffee (if I drink after 12:00, I wont go to sleep on time).
I've been using it for 8+ years now and have found a sustainable dosage that doesn't give me withdrawal/depenency. I've never had an issue with tolerance.
I buy a big box of 4mg gum and go through around half to one piece a day. I discovered consuming 2+ pieces (+8mg) led to withdrawal symptoms (empathetic lightbulb moment for me for smokers who want to quit!)
Regarding dependency, I don't take any when Im traveling/on vacation, and have never felt the need to use it then.
Any desire comes from wanting to continue the alertness once the caffeine starts to wear off.
> Regarding dependency, I don't take any when Im traveling/on vacation, and have never felt the need to use it then.
> Any desire comes from wanting to continue the alertness once the caffeine starts to wear off.
Anecdotally, this sounds a lot like two of my friends (married couple) who used similar amounts of nicotine gum years ago.
For years they said the same thing: That they didn't go into withdrawals on vacation and that they weren't addicted to the gum, they just wanted to feel awake.
Their experience changed when they decided to quit for a while. As they discovered, actually quitting for an extended period of time was a lot harder than they thought it would be.
They were very much in the "I can quit whenever I want" mindset because they could skip it on vacations, but as they discovered their cravings were intense when they tried to go without the gum during their normal weekly routine.
They finally tapered down with the lower doses and splitting gum over a long period of time.
