The latest post in the #SentientSyllabus project is a bit of breaking news, an accessible introduction to a paradigm shift that is rapidly gaining stem, although it is only about a week old.

While we are still struggling to fully grasp the implications of "speech from a box", there is a veritable explosion of interest and activities that take this a step further, treating individual prompts and responses as a thought, and chaining them together to "thinking".

It turns out this is rather easy to do. While one instance of #ChatGPT only has responsive agency, two together can sustain this and have full agency over an extended domain. Add in memory and remembering, the ability to call on external executor AIs, to access the internet and other services, and you get full-fledged computations, a novel paradigm that we may call "generative programming". Generative, because the program flow itself is not pre-specified, but it is generated on-the-fly with the evolving context of the task at hand. And it is all glued together by natural language and the everyday understanding of our world that language brings with it.

We discuss the #Smallville experiment, and introduce #AutoGPT, #BabyAGI, #Jarvis, and #LangChain - with a shout out to #pinecone; names that it will be worthwhile to remember - at least for a week.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/trains-of-thought

Drop in, enjoy the thinking, and share with whoever would benefit.

Language is learning to talk. "Die Sprache spricht."

#GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #generativeAI #Education #University #Academia #GenerativeProgramming

Part 2 of the #SentientSyllabus course redesign project has been posted: Academic visions.

Before we actually look at contents and course details, we embark on a substantial visioning exercise. Thinking of academia in the future: how will the nature of work change, and what does that mean for the economy? How will our course materials respond? How will learning itself change? And how will our roles as instructors change?

We extrapolate from current trends to derive the contours of a reimagined academia. One of the interesting conclusions is that although we will be using more technology, that technology will become more transparent. That's a simple consequence of natural language instructions.

Finally we consider different pedagogical frameworks – it turns out that #KnowledgeBuilding has some interesting ideas to contribute, for example the concept of "Epistemic Artefacts" ...

It's getting interesting. Have a look

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/starting-over-2

#ChatGPT #GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #generativeAI #Education #University #Academia #CourseDesign #Syllabus

It's not quite right to say that #GenerativeAI will transform the #university. It is we who change it – as faculty, as learners, as administrators. In the Sentient Syllabus Project, we are setting out to establish best-practice for such change, and we start with a single course.

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/starting-over-1

We have written analysis about the impact of AI on #Academia for several months now, and we looked at questions of #authorship, #AcademicIntegrity, and personalized instruction. Now we start putting this into practice. This new post maps out a course redesign which will proceed in steps until early July. There are many new developments and visions to integrate with longstanding experience, but the July date will also give others time to build on the results for their own fall term courses.

Actually, we plan to work on two courses - one in #STEM and one in the #humanities.

Welcome to join us along the way.

🙂

#Sentientsyllabus #ChatGPT #GPT4 #HigherEd #AI #Education #CourseDesign #Syllabus

@losttourist

I can't reproduce this claim. You reposted someones blog who claims that #ChatGPT fails at cryptic crossword puzzles. But when I try the exact same question with ChatGPT-4, I get the exact correct answers. (Which surprises me quite a bit because I myself would not have been able to come up with the solutions.)

Dialogue here:
-----------

Human:
I would like you to act as a cryptic crossword puzzle solver. I will give you a clue and the number of letters in parentheses. You provide the answer as a single word with the required length. You also explain the reasoning. Please confirm, then I will give you the first prompt.

ChatGPT-4:
I confirm that I can help you solve cryptic crossword clues. Please provide the first clue and the number of letters in parentheses, and I'll do my best to solve it and explain the reasoning behind the solution.

Human:
Chap recalled skill: something frequently repeated (6).

ChatGPT-4:
The answer to the clue is "mantra."

Reasoning:
"Chap" suggests a man, which can be represented as "man."
"Recalled skill" hints at reversing a word meaning "skill," which is "art."
When we put "man" and the reversed "art" together, we get "mantra."

A mantra is something frequently repeated, fitting the definition provided in the clue.

Human:
Effect of legislation introduced by one politician (6).

ChatGPT-4:
The answer to the clue is "impact."

Reasoning:
"Effect of legislation" suggests we are looking for a word meaning "effect" or "influence."
"Introduced by one" hints at the Roman numeral "I" (which represents 1).
"Politician" can be abbreviated as "MP" (Member of Parliament).

Combining these elements, we get "I" (one) + "MP" (politician) + "act" (legislation) = "impact."

So, "impact" is the effect of legislation introduced by one politician.

Human:
Japanese food coming with S American greeting (5).

ChatGPT-4:
The answer to the clue is "sushi."

Reasoning:
"Japanese food" suggests we are looking for a Japanese dish, like "sushi."
"Coming with" indicates that we need to combine words or abbreviations.
"S American greeting" can be understood as the Spanish greeting "hola," which is commonly used in South America.

To derive "sushi" from these elements, take the first two letters of "hola" (ho) and insert them into the word "sushi": s + ho + ushi = sushi.
--------------------------

Note that the last answer is correct, even though the reasoning is not correct. I suspect that the clue that I copied from the blog contained an error - probably the "S" is wrong. However some combination of probability and elimination operating over the tokens in (Sushi/ Ramen/ Kombu/ Natto/ Arame) gets the right solution.

I would not have expected that.

(Also, I wonder whether this maps to a real-world skill... ?)

#GPT4 #AI #openai #crossword #Sentientsyllabus

Alberto Romero who writes some of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful commentary on AI has just posted "GPT-4: The Bitterer Lesson".

https://thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/gpt-4-the-bitterer-lesson

Originally an idea credited to Peter Sutton, the "Bitter Lesson" is that "humans have contributed little to the best AI systems we have built".

And with each iteration of GPT-X that contribution is becoming less and less. From bitter, to bitterer.

Worth a read.

#Sentientsyllabus #ChatGPT #GPT4 #bard #llm