When science is beholden to capitalism
GPT4, after additional training, forgets about prime numbers
This happened because GPT is a hack. It's not artificial intelligence. It's nothing but brute force memorization of language corpora. It does nothing more than repeat what people have said. And people have said lots of stupid shit.
At one point (i.e., earlier this year), this approach seemed promising. Everyone was singing GPT's praises. Except for some of us.
At one point, it seemed that GPT even knew some impressive things, such as very large prime numbers. "Could it be that GPT is truly intelligent?," some intelligent and well-informed people asked.
"Could it be that it's just memorizing shit people have said?," other intelligent and well-informed people asked? "And could it be that its performance is simply a function of its training?," those same intelligent an informed people asked. "Could it be that GPT is nothing more than a very expensive look-up table," those people asked, "devoid of any actual intelligence?"
Those people, among whom I count myself, appear to be right:
FTA: When OpenAI released its latest text-generating artificial intelligence, the large language model GPT-4, in March, it was very good at identifying prime numbers. When the AI was given a series of 500 such numbers and asked whether they were primes, it correctly labeled them 97.6 percent of the time. But a few months later, in June, the same test yielded very different results. GPT-4 only correctly labeled 2.4 percent of the prime numbers AI researchers prompted it with—a complete reversal in apparent accuracy. The finding underscores the complexity of large artificial intelligence models: instead of AI uniformly improving at every task on a straight trajectory, the reality is much more like a winding road full of speed bumps and detours.
GPT isn't intelligent, folks.
It's nothing but an exercise in brute-force AI. How much can lots of money, computer power, energy, and greenhouse emissions accomplish without any intelligent thought behind it?
GPT is mindless capitalism meets mindless engineering.
It is worse than a waste of time because people in power take it seriously. It is a danger, not because it's actually smart, but because people in power trust it.
As a statistical engine, it is nothing more than a reinforcement of our existing biases. Don't trust a single lying motherfucker who tries to tell you otherwise.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-ai-models-can-get-worse-over-time/
