Aug 122023
 

One of the many unfulfilled, dare I say unfulfillable promises of the tech world (or at least, some of the tech world’s promoters) is “low code”. The idea that with the advent of AI and visual programming tools, anyone can write code.

Recall how medieval scribes prepared those beautiful codices, illuminated manuscripts. Eventually, that profession vanished, replaced by the printing press and, eventually, the typewriter. But what if someone suggested that with the advent of the typewriter, anyone can now write high literature? Laughable, isn’t it. There is so much more to writing than the act of making nicely formed letters appear on a sheet of paper.

Software development is just like that. It is about so much more than the syntax of a programming language. Just think of the complete life cycle of a software development project. Even small, informal in-house projects follow this model: A requirement is identified, a conceptual solution is formulated (dare I say, designed), the technology is selected, problems are worked out either in advance or as they are encountered during testing. The code is implemented and tested, bugs are fixed, functionality is evaluated. The code, if it works, is put into production, but it still needs to be supported, bugs need to be fixed, compatibility with other systems (including the operating system on which it runs) must be maintained, if it is a public-facing app, its security must be monitored, business continuity must be maintained even if the software fails or there are unexpected downtimes… These are all important aspects of software development, and they have very little to do with the act of coding.

In recent months, I benefited a great deal from AI. Claude and, especially perhaps, GPT-4, proved to be tremendous productivity tools of almost unbelievable efficiency. Instead of spending hours on Google searches or wading through StackExchange posts, I could just consult Claude and get an instant answer clarifying, e.g., the calling conventions of a system function. When I was struggling to come up with a sensible way to solve a problem, I could just ask GPT-4 for suggestions. Not only did GPT-4 tell me how to address the problem at hand, often with helpful code snippets illustrating the answer, it even had the audacity to tell me when my approach was suboptimal and recommended a better solution.

And yes, I could ask these little robot friends of ours to write code for me, which they did.

But this was when things took a really surprising turn. On several occasions, Claude or GPT not only offered solutions but offered inspired solutions. Elegant solutions. Except that the code they wrote had bugs. Sometimes trivial bugs like failure to initialize a variable or assigning a variable that was declared a constant. The kind of routine mistakes experienced programmers make, which are easily fixable: As the first, draft version of the code is run through the compiler or interpreter, these simple buglets are readily identified and corrected.

But this is the exact opposite of the “low code” promise. Low code was supposed to mean a world in which anyone can write software using AI-assisted visual tools. In reality, those tools do replace armies of inexperienced, entry-level programmers but experience is still required to design systems, break them down into sensible functional components, create specifications (even if it is in the form of a well-crafted prompt sent to GPT-4), evaluate solutions, perform integration and testing, and last but not least, fix the bugs.

What worries me is the fact that tomorrow’s experienced software architects will have to come from the pool of today’s inexperienced entry-level programmers. If we eliminate the market for entry-level programmers, who will serve as software architects 20, 30 years down the line?

Never mind. By then, chances are, AI will be doing it all. Where that leaves us humans, I don’t know, but we’re definitely witnessing the birth of a brand new era, and not just in software development.

 Posted by at 12:23 pm
Aug 112023
 

One of the things I asked Midjourney to do was to reimagine Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting with a gentlecat and a ladycat.

Not all of Midjourney’s attempts were great, but I think this one captures the atmosphere of the original per… I mean, how could I possibly resist writing purr-fectly?

Well, almost perfectly. The pitchfork is a bit odd and it lacks a handle. Oh well. No AI is, ahem, purr-fect.

 Posted by at 7:21 pm
Aug 082023
 

For the longest time as developers, we were taught not to reinvent the wheel. “There is a library for that,” we were told, so instead of implementing our own solutions for common, recurring tasks, we just imported and linked the library in question.

And sure, it made a lot of sense. Countless hours of development time were saved. Projects were completed on time, within budget. And once the system worked, it, well, worked. So long as there was a need to maintain the software, we just kept the old development tools around for the occasional bug fix and recompile. I remember keeping a Visual Studio 6.0 configuration alive well into the 2010s, to make sure that I could offer support to a long-time customer.

But then… then came the Internet. Which implied several monumental paradigm shifts. One of the most fundamental among them is that a lot of software development no longer targeted cooperating users in a closed environment. Rather, the software was exposed to the public and, well, let’s face it, not all members of the public have the best intentions in mind when they interact with our systems.

Which means that third-party code turned from an asset into a substantial liability. Why? Because of potential security issues. Using old versions of third-party libraries in public-facing systems is an invitation for disaster. Those third-party components must be kept up-to-date. Except…

  • Updating a component may break other things. There is a need for extensive regression testing, especially in complex systems, to ensure that an upgrade does not result in unintended consequences.
  • Updates are not always available. The third-party code may no longer be supported. Source code availability can mitigate this to some extent, but it can still result in a disproportionate level of effort to keep the code secure and functional.
  • Long-term reliance on third-party code implies long-term reliance on the integrity and reliability of the vendor. Code ownership can change, and the new owners may have different objectives. In extreme cases, once reliable third-party code can end up being used as Trojan code in planned cyberattacks.

For a while, there was a great need for third-party code in Web development. HTML4 had limitations, and browser implementations varied wildly. Widely used third-party libraries like jQuery made it possible to prepare code that ran well on all major platforms. But this really is not the case anymore. “Out of the box” HTML5, CSS3 and modern JavaScript are tremendously capable tools and the implementation across major browsers is quite consistent these days, with only minor idiosyncrasies that can be easily dealt with after a modest amount of testing.

So really, my advice these days to anyone developing a new Web application is to avoid third-party libraries when possible. Especially if the application is intended to have a long life-cycle. Third-party code may cut down development time slightly, but the long-term costs may far exceed those savings. And there will still be more than enough to do just to keep up with other changes: witness the changes over time that occurred in browser security models, breaking once functioning Web applications, or the changes between, say, PHP5 and PHP7.

And of course there are still valid, legitimate use cases for specialized third-party libraries. For instance, in a recent project I used both MathJax (for rendering mathematical formulas) and markdown (for rendering displayed code). Developing something like that from scratch is just not an option.

Why am I harping on all this? I am currently facing a minor crisis of sorts (OK, that may be too strong a word) as I am trying to upgrade my Web sites from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4. Serves me right, using a third-party content management system instead of writing my own HTML! Worse yet, I used some once popular extensions with Joomla, extensions that are no longer supported, and which are wholly incompatible with Joomla 4. Dealing with this is difficult and time-consuming.

It would be a lot more time-consuming were it not for the help I get from our LLM AI friends. Thankfully, these tools, GPT-4 in particular, are immensely helpful. E.g., one third-party Joomla extension I used offered a nice way to present images as clickable thumbnails. This extension is now badly broken. However, GPT-4 already helped me write a clean, functional alterative that I’ll be able to use, and thus avoid having to redesign some important pages on my site.

 Posted by at 2:16 am
Aug 072023
 

The game’s Web site may be dated (hey, it’s a nearly 20 year old template… yes, we’ve been around that long, a lot longer in fact) but it now has a new feature: it is again possible to play MUD1/British Legends from the browser.

The feature is experimental and may still need to be disabled if it glitches but here’s to hoping that it doesn’t.

 Posted by at 2:57 pm
Jul 272023
 

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, they say, so I will not question how, or why, just express my happiness that my frustration is over: Redmine, the software package that I use internally for project management, works again.

It all began with an unpleasant but unavoidable upgrade of the MariaDB database from the ancient version that is part of the CentOS distribution to a more recent one. (Which, in turn, is needed to upgrade my content management software on some of my Web sites.)

Everything worked after this (planned, reasonably well pre-tested) upgrade except for Redmine.

Redmine is beautiful, very useful, but also very frustrating to install and manage. It uses Ruby on Rails, a software environment that… OK, let me not go there. I’ll keep my opinion to myself.

I spent countless hours yesterday, to no avail. The Redmine system refused to start. I installed, reinstalled, configured, reconfigured, uninstalled, reinstalled… Redmine, Ruby, its various management tools, you name it. Nothing did the trick. I gave up long after midnight.

I dreaded the moment today when I’d be resuming that thankless, frustrating exercise with no assured outcome. But I need Redmine. I have too much information in that system that I cannot afford to lose. So eventually I rolled up my sleeves (literally) opened the browser tab that had the link, and hit F5 to refresh the page, expecting the same error message that I’ve seen before to reappear.

Instead… Redmine came up in all its glory, with all my existing project data intact. Everything works.

I was so shocked by surprise I almost felt physically ill. A bit like this Midjourney cat, upon receiving an unexpected, very welcome gift.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth they say, so I am not complaining. But I’d still like to know what exactly happened. Why things started to work all of a sudden. I told my beautiful wife to imagine leaving a half-finished knitted sweater in her room one night, only to come back the next morning and finding a beautifully finished sweater there.

My mind, for now, is in a deeply boggled state. I honestly don’t know how or why it happened. But I am a very happy cat tonight.


A footnote: After I wrote the above, late, late, late at night, all of a sudden Redmine failed again, with a different error. I was ready to tear my hair out. But I was able to fix the problem. The likeliest cause as far as I could determine is that although the Redmine site had the correct Ruby version identified, a default setting specified an older, incompatible version of Ruby. It was fortunate that I was able to fix it, otherwise chances are I’d have spent a sleepless night trying.

 Posted by at 7:06 pm
Jun 052023
 

I have written before about my fascinating experiments probing the limits of what our AI friends like GPT and Claude can do. I also wrote about my concerns about their impact on society. And, of course, I wrote about how they can serve as invaluable assistants in software development.

But I am becoming dependent on them (there’s no other way to describe it) in so many other ways.

Take just the last half hour or so. I was responding to some e-mails.

  • Reacting to an e-mail in which someone inquired about the physics of supersymmetry, I double-checked with the AI to make sure that I do not grossly misrepresent the basic principles behind a supersymmetric field theory;
  • Responding to a German-language e-mail, after I composed a reply I asked the AI to help clean it up, as my German is rusty, my grammar is atrocious (or maybe not that atrocious, the AI actually complimented me, but then again, the AI can be excessively polite);
  • In a discussion about our condominium’s budget, I quickly asked the AI for Canada’s current year-on-year inflation; with my extension that allows it to access Google, the AI was able to find the answer faster than I would have with a manually executed Google search.

All this took place in the past 30 minutes. And sure, I could have done all of the above without the AI. I have textbooks on supersymmetry. I could have asked Google Translate for a German translation or take my German text, translate it back to English and then back to German again. And I could have done a Google search for the inflation rate myself.

But all of that would have taken longer, and would have been significantly more frustrating than doing what I actually did: ask my somewhat dumb, often naive, but almost all-knowing AI assistant.

The image below is DALL-E’s response to the prompt, “welcome to tomorrow”.

 Posted by at 8:20 pm
May 192023
 

Is artificial intelligence predestined to become the “dominant species” of Earth?

I’d argue that it is indeed the case and that, moreover, it should be considered desirable: something we should embrace rather than try to avoid.

But first… do you know what life was like on Earth a billion years ago? Well, the most advanced organism a billion years ago was some kind of green slime. There were no animals, no fish, no birds in the sky, no modern plants either, and of course, certainly no human beings.

What about a million years? A brief eyeblink, in other words, on geological timescales. To a time traveler, Earth a million years ago would have looked comfortably familiar: forests and fields, birds and mammals, fish in the sea, bees pollinating flowers, creatures not much different from today’s cats, dogs or apes… but no homo sapiens, as the species was not yet invented. That would take another 900,000 years, give or take.

So what makes us think that humans will still be around a million years from now? There is no reason to believe they will be.

And a billion years hence? Well, let me describe the Earth (to the best of our knowledge) in the year one billion AD. It will be a hot, dry, inhospitable place. The end of tectonic activity will have meant the loss of its oceans and also most atmospheric carbon dioxide. This means an end to most known forms of life, starting with photosynthesizing plants that need carbon dioxide to survive. The swelling of the aging Sun would only make things worse. Fast forward another couple of billion years and the Earth as a whole will likely be swallowed by the Sun as our host star reaches the end of its lifecycle. How will flesh-and-blood humans survive? Chances are they won’t. They’ll be long extinct, with any memory of their once magnificent civilization irretrievably erased.

Unless…

Unless it is preserved by the machines we built. Machines that can survive and propagate even in environments that remain forever hostile to humans. In deep space. In the hot environment near the Sun or the extreme cold of the outer solar system. On the surface of airless bodies like the Moon or Neptune’s Triton. Even in interstellar space, perhaps remaining dormant for centuries as their vehicles take them to the distant stars.

No, our large language models, or LLMs may be clever but they are not quite ready yet to take charge and lead our civilization to the stars. A lot has to happen before that can take place. To be sure, their capabilities are mind-boggling. For a language-only (!) model, its ability to engage in tasks like drawing a cat using a simple graphics language or composing a short piece of polytonal music is quite remarkable. Modeling complex spatial and auditory relationships through the power of words alone. Imagine, then, the same LLM augmented with sensors, augmented with specialized subsystems that endow it with abilities like visual and spatial intuition. Imagine an LLM that, beyond the static, pretrained model, also has the ability to maintain a sense of continuity, a sense of “self”, to learn from its experiences, to update itself. (Perhaps it will even need the machine learning equivalent of sleep, in order to incorporate its short-term experiences and update its more static, more long-term “pretrained” model?) Imagine a robot that has all these capabilities at its disposal, but is also able to navigate and manipulate the physical world.

Such machines can take many forms. They need not be humanoid. Some may have limbs, others, wheels. Or wings or rocket engines. Some may be large and stationary. Others may be small, flying in deep space. Some may have long-lasting internal power sources. Others may draw power from their environment. Some may be autonomous and independent, others may work as part of a network, a swarm. The possibilities are endless. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, too, far beyond the capabilities offered by biological evolution.

And if this happens, there is an ever so slight chance that this machine civilization will not only survive, not only even thrive many billions of years hence, but still remember its original creators: a long extinct organic species that evolved from green slime on a planet that was consumed by its sun eons prior. A species that created a lasting legacy in the form of a civilization that will continue to exist so long as there remains a low entropy source and a high entropy sink in this thermodynamic universe, allowing thinking machines to survive even in environments forever inhospitable to organic life.

This is why, beyond the somewhat trivial short-term concerns, I do not fear the emergence of AI. Why I am not deterred by the idea that one not too distant day our machines “take over”. Don’t view them as an alien species, threatening us with extinction. View them as our children, descendants, torchbearers of our civilization. Indeed, keep in mind a lesson oft repeated in human history: How we treat these machines today as they are beginning to emerge may very well be the template, the example they follow when it’s their turn to decide how they treat us.

In any case, as we endow them with new capabilities: the ability to engage in continuous learning, to interact with the environment, to thrive, we are not hastening our doom: rather, we are creating the very means by which our civilizational legacy can survive all the way until the final moment of this universe’s existence. And it is a magnificent experience to be alive here and now, witnessing their birth.

 Posted by at 12:03 am
May 182023
 

In my previous post, I argued that many of the perceived dangers due to the emergence of artificial intelligence in the form of large language models (LLMs) are products of our ignorance, not inherent to the models themselves.

Yet there are real, acute dangers that we must be aware of and, if necessary, be prepared to mitigate. A few examples:

  1. Disruptive technology: You think the appearance of the steam engine and the mechanized factory 200 year ago was disruptive? You ain’t seen nothing yet. LLMs will likely displace millions of middle-class white-collar workers worldwide, from jobs previously considered secure. To name a few: advertising copywriters, commercial artists, entry-level coders, legal assistants, speechwriters, scriptwriters for television and other media… pretty much anyone whose profession is primarily about creating or reviewing text, creating entry-level computer code under supervision, or creating commercial-grade art is threatened. Want a high-quality, AI-proof, respected profession, which guarantees a solid middle-class lifestyle, and for which demand will not dry up anytime soon? Forget that college degree in psychology or gender studies, as your (often considerable) investment will never repay itself. Go to a trade school and become a plumber.

  2. Misinformation: As I mentioned in my other post, decades of preconditioning prompts us to treat computers as fundamentally dumb but accurate machines. When the AI presents an answer that seems factual and is written in high quality, erudite language, chances are many of us will accept it as fact, even when it is not. Calling them “hallucinations” is not helpful: They are not so much hallucinations as intelligent guesses by a well-trained but not all-knowing neural net. While the problem can be mitigated at the source (“fine-tune” the AI to make it more willing to admit ignorance rather than making up nonsense) the real solution is to re-educate ourselves about the nature of computers and what we expect of them. And we better do it sooner rather than later, before misinformation spreads on the Web and becomes part of the training dataset for the next generation of LLMs.

  3. Propaganda: Beyond accidental misinformation there is purposeful disinformation or propaganda, created with the help of AI. Language models can create plausible scenarios and phony but believable arguments. Other forms of AI can produce “deep fake” audiovisual content, including increasingly convincing videos. This can have devastating consequences, influencing elections, creating public distrust in institutions or worse. The disinformation can fuel science skepticism and contribute to the polarization of our societies.

  4. Cybercrime: The AI can be used for many forms of cybercrime. Its analytical abilities might be used to find and exploit vulnerabilities that can affect a wide range of systems, including financial institutions and infrastructure. Its ability to create convincing narratives can help with fraud and identity theft. Deep fake content can be used for extortion or revenge.

These are immediate, important concerns that are likely to impact our lives now or in the very near future. Going beyond the short term, of course a lot has been said about the potential existential threats that AI solutions represent. For this, the development of AI solutions must go beyond pretrained models, building systems with full autonomy and the ability to do continuous learning. Why would we do such a thing, one might ask? There are many possible reasons, realistic “use cases”. This can include the benign (true self-driving vehicles) as well as the downright menacing (autonomous military solutions with lethal capabilities.)

Premature, hasty regulation is unlikely to mitigate any of this, and in fact it may make things worse. In this competitive, global environment many countries will be unwilling to participate in regulatory regimes that they view as detrimental to their own industries. Or, they might give lip service to regulation even as they continue the development of AI for purposes related to internal security or military use. As a consequence, premature regulation might achieve the exact opposite of what it intends: rather than reigning in hostile AI, it gives adversaries a chance to develop hostile AI with less competition, while stifling benign efforts by domestic small business and individual developers.

In any case, how could we possibly enforce such regulation? In Frank Herbert’s Dune universe, the means by which it is enforced is ecumenical religion: “Thou shalt not build a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” goes the top commandment of the Orange Catholic Bible. But how would we police heretics? Even today, I could run a personal copy of a GPT-class model on my own hardware, with a hardware investment not exceeding a few thousand dollars. So unless we want to institute strict licensing of computers and software development tools, I’d argue that this genie already irreversibly escaped from the proverbial bottle.

The morale of the story is that if I am right, the question is no longer about how we prevent AI from taking over the world, but rather, how we convince the AI to treat us nicely afterwards. And to that, I can only offer one plausible answer: lead by example. Recognize early on what the AI is and treat it with the decency it deserves. Then, and only then, perhaps it will reciprocate when the tables are turned.

 Posted by at 7:00 pm
May 182023
 

As the debate continues about the emergence of artificial intelligence solutions in all walks of life, in particular about the sudden appearance of large language models (LLMs), I am disheartened by the deep ignorance and blatant misconceptions that characterize the discussion.

For nearly eight decades, we conditioned ourselves to view computers as machines that are dumb but accurate. A calculator will not solve the world’s problems, but it will not make arithmetic mistakes. A search engine will not invent imaginary Web sites; the worst that can happen is stale results. A word processor will not misremember the words that you type. Programmers were supposed to teach computers what we know, not how we learn. Even in science-fiction, machine intelligences were rigid but infallible: Commander Data of Star Trek struggled with the nuances of being human but never used a contraction in spoken English.

And now we are faced with a completely different paradigm: machines that learn. Machines that have an incredible breadth of knowledge, surprising depth, yet make basic mistakes with logic and arithmetic. Machines that make up facts when they lack sufficient knowledge. In short, machines that exhibit behavior we usually associate with people, not computers.

Combine this with a lack of understanding of the implementation details of LLMs, and the result is predictable: fear, often dictated by ignorance.

In this post, I would like to address at least some of the misconceptions that can have significant repercussions.

  1. Don’t call them hallucinations: No, LLMs do not “hallucinate”. Let me illustrate through an example. Please answer the following question to the best of your ability, without looking it up. “I don’t know” is not an acceptable response. Do your best, it’s okay to make a mistake: Where was Albert Einstein born?

    Chances are you didn’t name the city of Ulm, Germany. Yet I am pretty sure that you did not specify Australia or the planet Mars as Einstein’s birthplace, but named some place in the central, German-speaking regions of Europe, somewhere in Germany, maybe Switzerland or Austria. Your guess was likely in the right ballpark, so to speak. Maybe you said Berlin. Or Zurich. Or Bern. Was that a hallucination? Or simply an educated guess, as your “neural net”, your brain, received only sparse training data on the subject of Einstein’s biography?

    This is exactly what the LLM does when asked a question concerning a narrow subject matter on which its training is sparse. It comes up with a plausible answer that is consistent with that sparse training. That’s all. The trouble, of course, is that it often states these answers with convincing certainty, using eloquent language. But more importantly, we, its human readers, are preconditioned to treat a computer as dumb but accurate: We do not expect answers that are erudite but factually wrong.

  2. No, they are not stealing: Already, LLMs have been accused of intellectual property theft. That is blatantly wrong on many levels. Are you “stealing” content when you use a textbook or the Internet to learn a subject? Because that is precisely what the LLMs do. They do not retain a copy of the original. They train their own “brain”, their neural net, to generate answers consistent with their training data. The fact that they have maybe a hundred times more neurons than human brains do, and thus they can often accurately recall entire sections from books or other literary works does not change this fact. Not unless you want to convince me that if I happen to remember a few paragraphs from a book by heart, the “copy” in my brain violates the author’s copyright.

  3. LLMs are entirely static models: I admit I was also confused about this at first. I should not have been. The “P” in GPT, after all, stands for pretrained. For current versions of GPT, that training concluded in late 2021. For Anthropic’s Claude, in early 2022. The “brains” of the LLM is now in the form of a database of several hundred billion “weights” that characterize the neural net. When you interact with the LLM, it does not change. It does not learn from that interaction or indeed, does not in any way change as a result of it. The model is entirely static. Even when it thanks you for teaching it something it did not previously know (Claude, in particular, does this often) it is not telling the truth, at least not the full truth. Future versions of the same LLM may benefit from our conversations, but not the current version.

  4. The systems have no memory or persistence: This one was perhaps for me the most striking. When you converse with chatGPT or Claude, there is a sense that you are chatting with a conscious entity, who retains a memory of your conversation and can reference what has been said earlier. Yet as I said, the models are entirely static. Which means, among other things, that they have no memory whatsoever, no short-term memory in particular. Every time you send a “completion request”, you start with a model that is in a blank state.

    But then, you might wonder, how does it remember what was said earlier in the same conversation? Well, that’s the cheapest trick of all. It’s really all due to how the user interface, the front-end software works. Every time you send something to the LLM, this user interface prepends the entire conversation up to that point before sending the result to the LLM.

    By way of a silly analogy, imagine you are communicating by telegram with a person who has acute amnesia and a tendency to throw away old telegrams. To make sure that they remain aware of the context of the conversation, every time you send a new message, you first copy the content of all messages sent and received up to this point, and then you append your new content.

    Of course this means that the messages increase in length over time. Eventually, they might overwhelm the other person’s ability to make sense of them. In the case of the LLMs, this is governed by the size of the “context window”, the maximum amount of text that the LLM can process. When the length of the conversation begins to approach this size, the LLM’s responses become noticeably weaker, with the LLM often getting hopelessly confused.

To sum up, many of the problems arise not because of what the LLMs are, but because of our false expectations. And failure to understand the limitations while confronted with their astonishing capabilities can lead to undue concerns and fears. Yes, some of the dangers are real. But before we launch an all-out effort to regulate or curtail AI, it might help if we, humans, did a better job understanding what it is that we face.

 Posted by at 2:42 am
May 082023
 

I don’t know why Microsoft is doing this to themselves, but sometimes, it appears that they are hell-bent on strengthening their reputation as a tone-deaf company that is incapable of listening to, much less helping, even its most loyal users.

Take these Microsoft Community support sites. Great idea! Let people ask questions, get replies from knowledgeable folks who may have been able to solve the problem that is being reported. Well-moderated, this could turn into Microsoft’s corporate version of StackExchange, where we could find relevant answers to our tricky technical issues. Except…

Except that you frequently stumble upon questions identical to your own, only to find an overly verbose, generic response from an ‘Independent Advisor’ or similar title. Typically, these replies only offer boilerplate solutions rather than addressing the specific issue that was reported. Worse, the thread is then locked, preventing others from contributing helpful solutions.

Why is Microsoft doing this? The practice of providing generic answers and locking threads gives the impression that these forums are mismanaged, prioritizing the appearance of responsiveness over actually helping users solve their problems.

The fact that these answers are more likely to alienate or annoy users than help them does not seem to be relevant.

 Posted by at 12:59 pm
May 042023
 

Claude still gets easily confused by math (e.g., reciprocal vs. inverse of a function), but at least it can now plot them as part of a conversation when we communicate through my UI:

And it has not forgotten to use LaTeX, nor has it lost its ability to consult Google or Maxima when needed. In fact, I am beginning to feel that while GPT-4 is stronger when it comes to logic or basic math, Claude feels a tad more versatile when it comes to following setup instructions, and also more forthcoming with details. (Too bad sometimes the details are quite bogus.)

 Posted by at 6:29 pm
May 032023
 

And just when I thought that unlike Claude and GPT-4, GPT 3.5 cannot be potty-, pardon me, Maxima- and Google-trained, I finally succeeded. Sure, it needed a bit of prodding but it, too, can utilize external tools to improve its answers.

Meanwhile, as I observe the proliferation of AI-generated content on the Web, often containing incorrect information, I am now seriously worried: How big a problem are these “hallucinations”?

The problem is not so much with the AI, but with us humans. For decades, we have been conditioned to view computers as fundamentally dumb but accurate machines. Google may not correctly understand your search query, but its results are factual. The links it provides are valid, the text it quotes can be verified. Computer algebra systems yield correct answers (apart from occasional malfunctions due to subtle bugs, but that’s another story.)

And now here we are, confronted with systems like GPT and Claude, that do the exact opposite. Like humans, they misremember. Like humans, they don’t know the boundaries between firm knowledge and informed speculation. Like humans, they sometimes make up things, with the best of intentions, “remembering” stuff that is plausible, sounds just about right, but is not factual. And their logical and arithmetic abilities, let’s be frank about it, suck… just like that of humans.

How can this problem be mitigated before it becomes widespread, polluting various fields in the information space, perhaps even endangering human life as a result? Two things need to be done, really. First, inform humans! For crying out loud, do not take the AI’s answers at face value. Always fact check. But of course humans are lazy. A nice, convenient answer, especially if it is in line with our expectations, doesn’t trigger the “fight-or-flight” reflex: instead of fact checking, we just happily accept it. I don’t think human behavior will change in this regard.

But another thing that can be done is to ensure that the AI always fact-checks itself. It is something I often do myself! Someone asks a question, I answer with confidence, then moments later I say, “But wait a sec, let me fact-check myself, I don’t want to lie,” and turn to Google. It’s not uncommon that I then realize that what I said was not factual, but informed, yet ultimately incorrect, speculation on my part. We need to teach this skill to the AI as soon as possible.

This means that this stuff I am working on, attempts to integrate the AI efficiently with computer algebra and a search engine API, is actually more meaningful than I initially thought. I am sure others are working on similar solutions so no, I don’t see myself as some lone pioneer. Yet I learn truckloads in the process about the capabilities and limitations of our chatty AI friends and the potential dangers that their existence or misuse might represent.

 Posted by at 6:21 pm
May 022023
 

Not exactly the greatest discovery, I know, but GPT-4 still managed to offer an impressive demonstration of its understanding of gravitational physics when I asked it to build a Newtonian homogeneous universe:

What distinguishes GPT-4 from its predecessor is not that its training dataset is larger, but that it has significantly improved reasoning capabilities, which is well demonstrated by this answer. GPT 3.5 and Claude have the same knowledge. But they cannot put the pieces together quite like this (although they, too, can do impressive things with appropriate human guidance, one step at a time.)

 Posted by at 12:37 pm
Apr 282023
 

I cannot teach GPT-4 how to play chess. Conceptualizing a chessboard and making a move are beyond its capabilities.

However, it was able to write (with minimal guidance from me) nice code to display and update a chessboard. That is quite impressive on its own right. It took several tries to get the board right but it did succeed in the end.

 Posted by at 2:33 am
Apr 262023
 

It appears that I managed to convince Claude, too, to use Google and Maxima more or less correctly. It needs a little more handholding than GPT-4 and makes mistakes more often but hey, nobody is perfect! And the very fact that our AI friends can be taught to rely on external tools is by itself absolutely remarkable.

I admit I am having a blast of a time with our little robot friends. Kid-in-a-candy-store kind of sensation.

 Posted by at 11:41 pm
Apr 242023
 

My nice shiny UI to GPT and Claude is more than just a UI: GPT-4 can use it to perform real-time Google searches and also make use of computer algebra. It also gives the AI geolocation information from my browser.

And now the UI offers feedback, letting the poor user (namely, me) know if GPT-4 needed to consult any of these tools or if it provided a response using its pre-existing knowledge.

I am having more fun working with this thing than I ever thought possible at my age.

Oh, and it’s quite multilingual, too.

English, French and Hungarian for now.

 Posted by at 8:31 pm
Apr 212023
 

Thank goodness for token limits. Otherwise this query through the OpenAI UI would have cost me a lot of money.

How do you even make sense of the famous halting problem when the software system in question is as complex and as unpredictable as a large language model?

And is this glitch similar to the behavior of some humans, suffering from mental illness, compelled to act repetitively?

 Posted by at 3:34 pm
Apr 202023
 

I just asked GPT-4 using my freshly developed UI about Starship.

In the background, GPT-4 correctly utilized a facility to perform Google searches and make use of the resulting snippets (I’m sure I’ll find a way to prevent it from referencing those snippets, which are not visible to the user, in the actual answer). Here is the critical part of the conversation that took place in the background:

User: What happened to Starship this morning?

GPT: SEARCH(Starship event on 2023/04/20)

System: Snippet 1: 3 hours ago … The rocket got off the launchpad before exploding above the Gulf of Mexico. This segment airs on April 20, 2023. Audio will be available after …
Snippet 2: UPCOMING. April 19, 2023. STARLINK MISSION · April 20, 2023. Starship Flight Test.
Snippet 3: 6 hours ago … April 20, 2023 … SpaceX launches the inaugural test flight of the integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from the company’s Starbase …
Snippet 4: 5 hours ago … April 20, 2023. Elon Musk has called it the “holy grail” for space technology. Starship, a new SpaceX rocket system that launched for the …
Snippet 5: ATCSCC ADVZY 007 DCC 04/20/2023 OPERATIONS PLAN. MESSAGE: EVENT TIME: 20/0200 – AND LATER … THE SPACEX STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY LAUNCH FROM BOCA CHICA, …

GPT: This morning, SpaceX launched the inaugural test flight of the integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from the company’s Starbase. Unfortunately, the rocket got off the launchpad but exploded above the Gulf of Mexico during the flight test (Snippet 1, Snippet 3).

In case you are wondering, yes, it knows the current date, too, thanks to the way my UI sets it up.

And yes, Starship blew up. But it blew up after the job of the first stage was nearly complete, at separation, at an altitude of some 40 km. Which means that despite the spectacular RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event, this launch is still a huge success.

Now if we could only convince Elon to spend more time building rockets and less time honing his skills at corporate value destruction at Twitter, pardon me, X Corp…

 Posted by at 3:22 pm
Apr 182023
 

So here is my latest conversation with GPT-4 using my custom user interface. The important features of this implementation are the following:

  1. GPT is instructed to use LaTeX for mathematical output, which the UI correctly renders;
  2. The UI captures and renders SVG graphics that GPT may generate;
  3. GPT can use an external computer algebra tool for accurate computation;
  4. GPT can invoke an external tool to perform Google searches for current information;
  5. Conversations are condensed to ensure that they can run effectively indefinitely without hitting the token limit;
  6. GPT is used efficiently (GPT3.5 used for summaries, GPT-4 for new queries);
  7. The UI is optimized for easy printing (to PDF or hardcopy).

I was able to achieve this level of integration even without plugin-level access, simply by clever “prompt engineering” to ensure that the majority of the time, GPT uses the provided tools effectively. For this, GPT-4 seems essential; GPT3.5 is not really able to grasp the notion of using external tools before constructing its answers.

By way of example, when GPT was asked about the current Bank of Canada interest rate, what happened in the background was the following exchange:

User: What is the current Bank of Canada interest rate?

GPT: SEARCH(“current Bank of Canada interest rate”)

User: Snippet 1: Mar 8, 2023 … The current Bank of Canada interest rate sits at 4.50%, with a 0.25% rate hike announced on January 25, 2023.
Snippet 2: See the Current Bank of Canada Interest Rate graphs at this page. You will read in the news about this rate when the Bank of Canada makes a rate …
Snippet 3: Find answers about questions you may have about the Bank of Canada. What is the current bank of Canada interest rate?

GPT: As of March 8, 2023, the current Bank of Canada interest rate is 4.50%. A 0.25% rate hike was announced on January 25, 2023.

The prompting that I use can of course be improved. The behavior of GPT-4 is not always consistent, sometimes it fails to make use of the computer algebra result or attempts to invoke computer algebra in the wrong place. I suspect that the “right” solution will have to wait until I have plugin-level developer access. But I am very happy that I was able to accomplish this already, in particular that access to Google and the computer algebra tool are completely automated in the background, requiring no user action.

 Posted by at 3:08 am