… Or not, according to what language is allowed. At the start of the year I mentioned that I am on a bad roll with AI just now, and the start of that roll began in late November when I … Continue reading
A couple months ago we talked about some extravagant claims made by Google engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who pointed toward the impressive behavior of a chatbot and argued that its activities “do amount to understanding, in any falsifiable sense.” … Continue reading
1. A quick ask for you, a reader who also works at Google Do you work at Google? Do you have access to the language model chatbot called LaMDA? If so, could you please run it in its default settings—no … Continue reading
Table of contents: Part 1: Chatbots produce human-like conversation. Part 2: Chatbot conversation is not at all human-like. Part 3: Whassup? Part 4: The chatbot challenge Part 1: Chatbots produce human-like conversation. From an article by Google engineer Blaise Agüera … Continue reading
Gary Smith writes: In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” Fifty-two years … Continue reading
Fri 26 Apr, 10am in Shriver Hall Boardroom and 5pm in Hodson Hall 213 (see also here): Storytelling and Scientific Understanding Andrew Gelman and Thomas Basbøll Storytelling is central to science, not just as a tool for broadcasting scientific findings … Continue reading
Before going on, let me emphasize that, yes, modern AI is absolutely amazing—self-driving cars, machines that can play ping-pong, chessbots, computer programs that write sonnets, the whole deal! Call it machine intelligence or whatever, it’s amazing. What I’m getting at … Continue reading
The above figures come from this article which is listed on this Orcid page (with further background here): Horrifying as all this is, at least from the standpoint of students and faculty at the University of Nevada, not to mention … Continue reading
Alexey Guzey asks: How much have you thought about AI and when will AI be able to do scientific research both cheaper and better than us, thus effectively obsoleting humans? My first reply: I guess that AI can already do … Continue reading
Storytelling and Scientific Understanding Andrew Gelman and Thomas Basbøll Storytelling is central to science, not just as a tool for broadcasting scientific findings to the outside world, but also as a way that we as scientists understand and evaluate theories. … Continue reading
Computer scientist and “godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton says this about chatbots: “People say, It’s just glorified autocomplete . . . Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want … Continue reading
We had a fun discussion the other day after my talk in London on statistics teaching. One question that arose was how our classes should change in reaction to the new chatbots that can write essays and answer homework questions. … Continue reading
I’m not the only one who thinks GPT-4 is awesome. I just got back from an intense week of meetings at the Large language models and transformers workshop at Berkeley’s Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Thanks to Umesh … Continue reading
Bob writes: GPT4 is even better at Stan than GPT3 and even better at C++. It’s sooo much better at longer chains of reasoning, writing style, and being able to maintain coherence. Check this two turn dialogue to get it … Continue reading
If those chatbots had existed back in 2006, they would’ve made Ed Wegman’s job a lot easier. Say what you want about Brian Wansink, he had to come with the ideas for those experiments, even if maybe he didn’t actually … Continue reading
Pedro Franco sends in two items. The first relates to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models in economics. Franco writes: Daniel McDonald and Cosma Shalizi take a standard DSGE (short-run, macro models) and subject them to some fairly simple and … Continue reading
I was invited by David Banks to give an introductory talk on large language models to the regional American Statistical Association meeting on large language models. Here are the slides: Bob Carpenter. 2023. Language models for statisticians: from n-grams to … Continue reading
Palko points to this post by historian Bret Devereaux: Generally when people want an essay, they don’t actually want the essay; the essay they are reading is instead a container for what they actually want which is the analysis and … Continue reading
Kevin Lewis points us to this recent paper, “Can invasive species lead to sedentary behavior? The time use and obesity impacts of a forest-attacking pest,” published in Elsevier’s Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, which has the following abstract: Invasive … Continue reading
In an article, “AI chatbots learned to write before they could learn to think,” Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith write: Gary recently wrote in Salon about the limitations and unwelcome consequences of GPT-3 and other large language models. After Jeffrey … Continue reading