Today, OpenAI announced it is adding a major upgrade to its signature web-based chatbot application, ChatGPT: persistent memory.

Rolling out slowly for selected users of ChatGPT’s free tier and paid subscription ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month) to start, the feature will allow users to ask ChatGPT to remember information they give it, which the app can then recall later, even across new, unrelated chat sessions.  – Read More

Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. But for all their talents, these bots still leave researchers wondering: Do such models actually understand what they are saying? “Clearly, some people believe they do,” said the AI pioneer Geoff Hinton in a recent conversation with Andrew Ng, “and some people believe they are just stochastic parrots.”

This evocative phrase comes from a 2021 paper co-authored by Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. It suggests that large language models (LLMs) — which form the basis of modern chatbots — generate text only by combining information they have already seen “without any reference to meaning,” the authors wrote, which makes an LLM “a stochastic parrot.”

These models power many of today’s biggest and best chatbots, so Hinton argued that it’s time to determine the extent of what they understand. The question, to him, is more than academic. “So long as we have those differences” of opinion, he said to Ng, “we are not going to be able to come to a consensus about dangers.”

New research may have intimations of an answer. A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data. – Read More

A Theory for Emergence of Complex Skills in Language Models

Skill-Mix: a Flexible and Expandable Family of Evaluations for AI models

OpenAI says it is investigating complaints about ChatGPT having become “lazy”.

In recent days, more and more users of the latest version of ChatGPT – built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model – have complained that the chatbot refuses to do as people ask, or that it does not seem interested in answering their queries.

If the person asks for a piece of code, for instance, it might just give a little information and then instruct users to fill in the rest. Some complained that it did so in a particularly sassy way, telling people that they are perfectly able to do the work themselves, for instance.  – Read More

Inflection AI, the startup behind the conversational chatbot Pi, has unveiled a new AI model that the company claims can outperform two popular alternatives developed by Google and Meta — and is hot on the heels of OpenAI’s larger, flagship model GPT-4.

Called Inflection-2, the model performed better than Google’s PaLM Large 2 model previously announced in May on a number of standard benchmarks, Inflection said, while beating the open-source LLaMA 2 model largely developed by Meta on different measures. Overall, Inflection’s model is the top-performing of its size, the startup said. It only trails GPT-4, the flagship released model from OpenAI, thought to be significantly larger. — Read More

The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots that other Plus subscribers can then talk to.

My initial impression of GPTs was that they’re not much more than ChatGPT in a trench coat—a fancy wrapper for standard GPT-4 with some pre-baked prompts.

Now that I’ve spent more time with them I’m beginning to see glimpses of something more than that. The combination of features they provide can add up to some very interesting results. — Read More

On a simulated day in July of a 2020 that didn’t happen, 500 chatbots read the news — real news, our news, from the real July 1, 2020. ABC News reported that Alabama students were throwing “COVID parties.” On CNN, President Donald Trump called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate.” The New York Times had a story about the baseball season being canceled because of the pandemic.

Then the 500 robots logged into something very much (but not totally) like Twitter, and discussed what they had read. Meanwhile, in our world, the not-simulated world, a bunch of scientists were watching. — Read More

Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!

Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!

A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems. — Read More

Humane’s first gadget, the AI Pin, is currently slated to launch on November 9th, but we just got our best look at it yet thanks to a somewhat unexpected source. Before it has even been announced, the AI Pin is one of Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2023,” along with everything from the Framework Laptop 16 to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 to the Bedtime Buddy alarm clock.

The write-up is brief and relatively light on details, but there are a couple of new details, along with the best photo we’ve seen yet of the device. It appears the AI Pin will attach magnetically to your clothing, and uses “a mix of proprietary software and OpenAI’s GPT-4” to power its many features. (If you remember, that includes everything from making calls to translating speech to understanding the nutritional information in a candy bar.) — Read More

OpenAI’s world-famous chatbot is free to rummage through the internet’s darkest corners. The company declared Tuesday that the “Browse with Bing” feature is ready for prime time for those ChatGPT users paying for Plus or Enterprise editions. This lets ChatGPT access up-to-date information, rather than being limited to the training data that was cut off before September 2021. — Read More

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