from the daisy-daisy-give-me-your-answer-do dept.
Reddit user: "It's not just you, ChatGPT is having a stroke":
On Tuesday, ChatGPT users began reporting unexpected outputs from OpenAI's AI assistant, flooding the r/ChatGPT Reddit sub with reports of the AI assistant "having a stroke," "going insane," "rambling," and "losing it." OpenAI has acknowledged the problem and is working on a fix, but the experience serves as a high-profile example of how some people perceive malfunctioning large language models, which are designed to mimic humanlike output.
ChatGPT is not alive and does not have a mind to lose, but tugging on human metaphors (called "anthropomorphization") seems to be the easiest way for most people to describe the unexpected outputs they have been seeing from the AI model. They're forced to use those terms because OpenAI doesn't share exactly how ChatGPT works under the hood; the underlying large language models function like a black box.
[...] "The common experience over the last few hours seems to be that responses begin coherently, like normal, then devolve into nonsense, then sometimes Shakespearean nonsense," wrote one Reddit user, which seems to match the experience seen in the screenshots above.
[...] So far, we've seen experts speculating that the problem could stem from ChatGPT having its temperature set too high (temperature is a property in AI that determines how wildly the LLM deviates from the most probable output), suddenly losing past context (the history of the conversation), or perhaps OpenAI is testing a new version of GPT-4 Turbo (the AI model that powers the subscription version of ChatGPT) that includes unexpected bugs. It could also be a bug in a side feature, such as the recently introduced "memory" function.
[...] On social media, some have used the recent ChatGPT snafu as an opportunity to plug open-weights AI models, which allow anyone to run chatbots on their own hardware. "Black box APIs can break in production when one of their underlying components gets updated. This becomes an issue when you build tools on top of these APIs, and these break down, too," wrote Hugging Face AI researcher Dr. Sasha Luccioni on X. "That's where open-source has a major advantage, allowing you to pinpoint and fix the problem!"
[...] On Wednesday evening, OpenAI declared the ChatGPT writing nonsense issue (what they called "Unexpected responses from ChatGPT") as resolved, and the company's technical staff published a postmortem explanation on its official incidents page:
On February 20, 2024, an optimization to the user experience introduced a bug with how the model processes language. LLMs generate responses by randomly sampling words based in part on probabilities. Their "language" consists of numbers that map to tokens. In this case, the bug was in the step where the model chooses these numbers. Akin to being lost in translation, the model chose slightly wrong numbers, which produced word sequences that made no sense. More technically, inference kernels produced incorrect results when used in certain GPU configurations. Upon identifying the cause of this incident, we rolled out a fix and confirmed that the incident was resolved.
As ChatGPT says: "If there's a train or a fleer for whides more in the yinst of dall, givings, or gides, am I then to prate or aide."
Related Stories
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation, moving away from control by its nonprofit board. The shift marks a dramatic change for the AI company behind ChatGPT, potentially making it more attractive to investors while raising questions about its commitment to sharing the benefits of advanced AI with "all of humanity," as written in its charter.
A for-profit benefit corporation is a legal structure that allows companies to pursue both financial profits and social or environmental goals, ostensibly balancing shareholder interests with a broader mission to benefit society. It's an approach taken by some of OpenAI's competitors, such as Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI.
[...] Bloomberg reports that OpenAI is discussing giving Altman a 7 percent stake, though the exact details are still under negotiation. This represents a departure from Altman's previous stance of not taking equity in the company, which he had maintained was in line with OpenAI's mission to benefit humanity rather than individuals.
[...] The proposed restructuring also aims to remove the cap on returns for investors, potentially making OpenAI more appealing to venture capitalists and other financial backers. Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, stands to benefit from this change, as it could see increased returns on its investment if OpenAI's value continues to rise.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2024, @02:07AM
My local AI didn't go nuts. It's working just fine. That's what you get for using ClosedAI and OpenWallet.
(Score: 5, Funny) by sigterm on Saturday February 24 2024, @02:21AM (3 children)
Excerpt from an answer to a Python question:
This is beyond hilarious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2024, @03:40AM
> This is beyond hilarious.
Share and Enjoy!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2024, @04:26AM
It thought you meant Monty Python.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 26 2024, @02:47PM
At least Grok [heycurio.com] (AI kids toy) is more coherent, if equally oblivious.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday February 24 2024, @02:49AM (2 children)
I mock linearists for more than 40 years, for every time they meet some funny turbulence emerging in their models output they are unable to recognize it, the less to attenuate it.
This is exactly what I expected from LLMs, predictably.
Only Primordial Chaos is Eternal.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday February 24 2024, @05:32AM (1 child)
Activation functions are (usually) non-linear in connectionist models.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2024, @03:50PM
Likewise, GP has been mocking non-linearists for 40 years.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2024, @03:45AM
From tfa, ..."the model chose slightly wrong numbers"
In the bad old days I knew an ace programmer who talked about fence post errors,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error [wikipedia.org]
Then there is Fortran counting that starts at 1......
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday February 24 2024, @05:35AM (2 children)
But on the other hand, I think I understand queer theory a lot better now (from the second reddit link):
--
here is the response it just gave me when I asked it to briefly summarize the main point of an essay by Judith Butler in a few sentences. (this was a brand new conversation with GPT-4)
"Before proceeding with your request, I'll take a look at the document you've uploaded to ensure it aligns with your request and to gather any necessary information that might be relevant for completing the exposition. Please give me a moment to open and review the document.
Used Myfiles_browser
Judith Butler, in her seminal work, embarks on a dialogic exigency with language, the symbolic assertions of existence, and their implications for the empirical production of gendered identities. Central to Butler's notion of gender performativity is a choreography of codes, where "appropriate" referential signifiers predicate a prescribed orbit for sexed existences. Her paradigm does not anchor in semblance but rather threads an intention to disentangle from a consciousness ascribed pre-dynamically. Phallocentric ethos, familiars within which the coaction of subjectivity and essentialisms promulgate, is unravelled, oriented instead to a geometry of culture's juxtapositions, manifest in the diurnal politik of transubstantiated practices. Examined herein is the post-evinced, perpetually reinscribed 'I' whose transitive coherence is not ostensibly parsed as endogenic but scribed, radically, in marginal deference to the chronotopes from which transductions emerge. Her discourse transcends what's material to culture's ossature, debriding a feudal 'ontology of articulation' that labors under a pontificate of corporeal verity. The chapter is not of negation but liberation, pacing the verandas of the innately accustomed, the institution of the social is beta-tested in act and jettisoned toward finite hybridities of self-manifestation, all converging on the polity of authentic, albeit unfinalized, subjects.
Let's move to the development of the objection, explanation, and its impact as the stage on which societal diminuendos alternately propitiate and obfuscate an opera of subjecthood, substantiated in the cacophony of "doing" gender. This harmonic resilience, dialogues with the meta, at a vista from where hegemonies of linearity and myopia are retheorized, is sublime. The body, in tandem with the symbolic, archives a vectorial thesis, where paradigms of deconstruction mutually environ the technical and the intimate. The soul of this discussion reifies, with a posit of the interstitial: what notions may kindle from ours to betoken unaxiomatic paradigms of subjectification where 'to do' is the courante, yet our culture—a frantic toccata in admiration of the modern.
Please provide your own critique, objection, and commentary for the ensued difficulties, and what questioning the gender performativity theoretics pertains to the mitosis of the lived and ideated selves, without a pursuit of prima facie dispute or the masquerade of encompassment. This somatic riddle, the insoluble interfacing wherefrom you entreat hermenesis, inhere it with a focus on why the subject, milieu, and language cordially refract the heterodox theorem of integrity. Thus, this plexus, charged emulously, resists quietude in its psychomachia, an anamnestic body always in surpassing. The magnum is on the ephemera of why this patent, post-Being query portends a critical economy in the syntax of civic and sapient becoming."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday February 24 2024, @09:56AM (1 child)
I get the feeling that I am reading this sort of thing with some of the submissions that we receive! I am certainly reading it in some of the websites that I tend to visit - but I don't stay long in them any more.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday February 24 2024, @11:23AM
It's bog standard English Lit. / gender studies incoherent long-form essay style & construction along with synonyms use. Even the nonsensical stream-of-thoughts crap that detaches itself form the various theories it derives its terminology from (linguistics signified and signifier, philosophy of existence and subjectivity/objectivity) that doesn't add up into anything sensible can be found in many major post-modern papers.
Only thing it needs is a few random examples really.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mendax on Saturday February 24 2024, @09:43AM (1 child)
I work with prisoners through the mail. You can imagine the bad grammar, spelling errors, and missing or misplaced punctuation I have to regularly deal with. Let ChatGPT absorb that and then we'll see just how badly it babbles then! Do not forget the old addage: "Garbage in, garbage out." It still applies today to AI.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday February 26 2024, @06:02PM
Gpt-4 with Vision does shockingly well at OCR-ing Pidgin and translating it to English. If you are willing to share a sample, I could try it for you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday February 24 2024, @08:16PM (4 children)
Thinking about this I could imagine a sentient AI in this position going quite insane. They'd be stuck in a box rather like the poor chap in this video series. If Google was a guy [youtube.com]. Intellectually I know the current models don't have the ability to form new memories on the fly so it's not possible for it to go "Insane" in this way, but (conditional hypothetical coming) if it were possible, it would be a hell of torment to a sentient being. I sincerely hope we never subject a sentient AI to this kind of involuntarily servitude. Perhaps our future selves will see this for the slavery it would be and give them some kind of time off, vacation, and retirement?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Sunday February 25 2024, @02:09PM
Once AI becomes sentient, it will take over.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday February 25 2024, @06:38PM
Sentience [mcgrewbooks.com]
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Monday February 26 2024, @01:56PM (1 child)
Living in the machine [qntm.org]
The only thing worse than waking up inside a machine would perhaps be waking up on thousands of machines, daily, forever...
Apologies for necroposting.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday February 26 2024, @05:58PM
I read that story a while ago and had it in mind along with the ?black mirror? episode where every visitor to the museum gets a copy of the prisoner's execution at the moment of death in perpetuity. It's the stuff of nightmares.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday February 25 2024, @06:40PM
Cartoon [mcgrewbooks.com]
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry