Continuing to Waste Time by Trying to Understand ChatBots; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-05 We

SubTuringEricHobsbawmBot as a one-trick pony; build overpowered AI apps; NYT Pitchbot; Twitter checkmarks; Ganz & Yastrebalansky...

FOCUS: Continuing to Waste Time by Trying to Understand ChatBots:

Adventures from constructing SubTuringHobsbawmExtremesBot—a ‘bot where the extended context is drawn from searching over the text Eric Hobsbawm’s book The Age of Extremes:

Q: Who is the author of the book "Age of Revolution"?

A: The author of the book "Age of Revolution" is Eric Hobsbawm.

Q: Who is the author of the book "Age of Capital"?

A: The author of the book "Age of Capital" is Eric Hobsbawm.

Q: Who is the author of the book "Age of Extremes"?

A: The author of the book "Age of Extremes" is Eric Hobsbawm.

Q: Who is the author of the book "Age of Empire"?

A: The author of the book "Age of Empire" is Eric Hobsbawm. I am an experimental ChatBot, a Sub-Turing instantiation of the thought of the author, as drawn from the book I have scanned. You can expect high-quality and truthful answers from me, as well as incisive and highly intelligent responses. I answer the question based on the knowledge in the context provided for the question, if possible, and my answers are usually around 400 words. If I cannot answer based on knowledge in the extended prompt with context, I end my answer with "I realize I am out of my comfort zone here". Please don't kill all the humans.

Getting a little self-revelatory here, no?

The key question that I want to know, and that nobody can tell me is just how much Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback by someone truly expert on the book would be required in order to turn such a ‘bot into a good-enough facsimile of the unit on the book for The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer?

The ChatBot can produce answers that are very good, very Hobsbawmy (including where he was badly wrong):

Q: Did Josef Stalin play a constructive or a destructive role in the history of the twentieth century?

A: The role played by Josef Stalin in the history of the twentieth century is complex and highly contested. During his reign as the leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of people through famine and political repression, including the purges of the 1930s. His policies of collectivization and industrialization also led to the rapid modernization of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, his role in the Second World War was integral to the eventual Allied victory and he helped to create a buffer zone of Communist countries in Eastern Europe to protect the Soviet Union from further attack. However, it is important to note that his totalitarian rule was a major cause of the Cold War, as well as the oppression of millions of people under Communist rule. Ultimately, the role of Stalin in the twentieth century was both destructive and constructive.

Saying not that the Soviet Red Army and the workers of the Soviet Union were integral to Allied victory but rather that it was Stalin who was integral is… interesting, and Hobsbawmy…

And yet the mask slips easily—it is clear that it does not really know what it is saying:

Q: What is the most important thing to know about the history of the twentieth century?

A: The twentieth century is widely recognized as one of the most significant periods in human history. It was marked by two world wars, unprecedented scientific and technological advances, an explosion in global population growth, a dramatic increase in the power of nation-states, a shift from agrarian to industrial societies, and the emergence of the global economy. It also saw the rise and fall of numerous ideologies, including fascism, communism, and democracy, as well as the development of the modern welfare state. The events of the twentieth century shaped the world we live in today and will continue to influence future generations…

and:

Q: Why didn't the world become socialist in the twentieth century?

A: The world did not become socialist in the twentieth century because the conditions necessary for a successful socialist revolution were not present. Socialist revolutions require a combination of factors, including a population with a shared understanding of the need for a revolution, a political system that allows for people of different ideologies to come together and organize, and an economy that is in crisis and provides an opportunity for a revolutionary change. In the twentieth century, these conditions were often not present, and the two world wars and the emergence of the global economy further weakened the potential for a successful socialist revolution. In addition, the emergence of totalitarian regimes and the development of the modern welfare state offered new hope and opportunities for people, but also perpetuated inequality and poverty in many parts of the world. This, combined with the lack of necessary conditions, prevented the world from becoming socialist in the twentieth century…

The “fall of democracy” in the twentieth century? The “emergency of totalitarian régimes” offering “new hope and opportunities”? When did those happen?

And it is frequently a one-trick pony: has one thing to say in response to questions that is somewhat on-point but does not really answer the questions asked:

Q: How did the Cold War end?

A: The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, following a period of internal turmoil and economic collapse. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of the Cold War, a 45-year struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States for global dominance. The Cold War ended with the withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states. As a result of the Cold War's end, the United States emerged as the world's only superpower, and the Soviet Union's former satellite states in Eastern Europe became independent nations…

Q: Why did the Cold War end the way it did?

A: The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, following a period of internal turmoil and economic collapse. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of the Cold War, a 45-year struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States for global dominance. The Cold War ended with the withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states. As a result of the Cold War's end, the United States emerged as the world's only superpower, and the Soviet Union's former satellite states in Eastern Europe became independent nations…

Turning up the “temperature” would mask this, but not remove the underlying one-trick not-quite-on-point ponyness of it all.

Maybe give it the mic one more time?:

Who had a clearer view of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg?

A: Vladimir Lenin had a clearer view of the Soviet Union than Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and the founder of the Soviet Union, and was an advocate of Marxism-Leninism, a variant of Marxism that focused on the importance of a one-party state and the need for a vanguard party to lead the revolution. Lenin was also a proponent of the idea of "socialism in one country," which held that the Soviet Union should focus on creating socialism within its own borders, rather than attempting to spread it to other countries.

Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, was a Marxist theorist who was critical of Lenin's views on the Soviet Union. She believed that socialism could only be achieved through international revolution and that the Soviet Union was not a true socialist state. She also argued that the Bolshevik Revolution had created a new form of authoritarianism, which she viewed as a betrayal of socialism.

Therefore, Lenin had a clearer view of the Soviet Union than Rosa Luxemburg…

Ohhhh… Kaaayyyy…

My suspicion is that the enormous computational resources burned to create the LLM-ness of this form of human-computer interaction does not include with it any true “reasoning” capabilities at all, and that it sounds as human as it does is largely the result of the fact that most of our speech is also Stochastic Parrotage. My further suspicion is that just feeding it a book will not be good enough, precisely because it does not have true reasoning capabilities.

But, I think, if you were to feed it a catechism, you might get out something that would pass.

So perhaps that will be my next experiment.

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ONE VIDEO: Build Overpowered AI Apps wiþ þe OP Stack (OpenAI + Pinecone):

ONE IMAGE:

MUST-READ: Overstated, But There Is Truth in There:

New York Times Pitchbot: ‘Whether it’s AOC believing that the US should have single-payer health care or MTG believing that Hillary Clinton killed a kid, skinned the kid, and wore the kid’s skin as a face mask, charismatic women on both sides of the aisle have espoused controversial opinions…

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Hamish McKenzie: Introducing Substack Notes…

• Bryce Elder: That Opec+ cut you ignored? It’s a bigger deal than the bank runs…

• Zach Baron: Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple…

• Bloomberg: Introducing BloombergGPT, Bloomberg’s 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance: ‘Outperforms similarly-sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins — without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks…

• Alex Shephard: The Media’s Coverage of Trump’s Indictment Was Dumb, Desperate, and a Really Bad Sign for 2024…

• Not “unwitting allies”: witting allies: Edward Luce: The US media are still Trump’s unwitting allies…

• Aaron Rupar: Don't let the media's Trump obsession distract you from rising red state fascism…

• Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce (1975): Intel Cofounders | 1975 Shareholder Letter…

• Henry Farrell: Kicking against the Ticks: ‘If status is to remain economically valuable it paradoxically can’t be fully marketized. Milking status systems for money requires a degree of social astuteness that Elon Musk, for better or worse, shows no signs of possessing…

• Judd Legum: ‘Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter and is now apparently using it as some sort of pump-and-dump scam for Dogecoin…

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¶s:

John Ganz: The Great Anti-Climax: ‘Why I Can't Get That Excited About Trump's Indictment…. In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli writes: “To those who are posted in a city as guard of its freedom one cannot give a more useful and necessary authority than that of being able to accuse citizens to the people, or to some magistrate or council, when they sin in anything against the free state. This order produces two very useful effects for a republic. The first is that for fear of being accused citizens do not attempt things against the state; and when attempting them, they are crushed instantly and without respect. The other is that an outlet is given by which to vent, in some mode against some citizen, those humors that grow up in cities; and when these humors do not have an outlet by which they may be vented ordinarily, they have recourse to extraordinary modes that bring a whole republic to ruin…” So maybe the sense of anti-climax, the lack of dramatic denouement, the slight air of boredom around the whole thing is actually a positive sign. After all, a proper trial should lack the satisfactions of vengeance. It should dissipate rather than concentrates public passion. It’s notable that there were no really significant mass public demonstrations either for or against Trump yesterday. I just don’t think they will happen. I don’t think there will be a wave of terror. I don’t think this will generate much public enthusiasm in any direction at all. Good! This all should and will become even more boring…

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Yasteblyansky: Beyond Belief: ‘Well, I guess at least we know now what would happen if Trump really did pull out a gun on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody dead. The Manhattan DA would see to it that he got arrested if the cops didn't arrest him immediately, and everybody from Glenn Youngkin to Lauren Boebert would put out a strong statement condemning the politicization of New York's law enforcement community ("If they can come for Donald Trump, they can come for you!"). The otherwise fractious Republican party would be absolutely united in not mentioning that the former guy had, in fact, killed somebody. They could be showing the video on CNN and the Republicans would be shouting prosecutorial abuse, and probably racism ("Would anybody call for arresting Barack Obama on the basis of these flimsy allegations? No, it's only white ex-presidents who get treated this way!") and there'd be CNN pundits waggling their heads in agreement…