Yeah but we train AIs on coding before we make that comparison. And we know that if you train an AI on a videogame it can often get superhuman performance. Here we’re trying to look at pure transfer learning, so I think it would be pretty fair to compare to someone who is generally competent but has never played videogames. Another interesting question is to what extent you can train an AI system on a variety of videogames and then have it take on a new one with no game-specific training. I don’t know if anyone has tried that with LLMs yet.
I am not a 100% convinced by the comparison, because technically LLMs are only “reading” a bunch of source code, they are never given access to a compiler/interpreter. IMO actually running the code one has written is a very important part of learning, and I think it would be a much more difficult task for a human to learn to code just by reading a bunch of books/code, but never actually trying to write & run their own code.[1]
Also, in the video linked earlier in the thread, the girlfriend playing Terraria is deliberately not given access to the wiki, and thus I believe is an unfair comparison. I expect to see much better human performance if you give them access to manuals & wikis about the game.
Another interesting question is to what extent you can train an AI system on a variety of videogames and then have it take on a new one with no game-specific training. I don’t know if anyone has tried that with LLMs yet.
Not sure either, but I agree that this would be an interesting experiment. (Human gamers are often much quicker at picking up new games and are much better at them than someone with no gaming background.)
I would expect the average human to stay very bad at coding, no matter how many books & code examples you give them. I would also expect some smaller class of humans to nevertheless be able to pull that feat off. (E.g. maybe a mathematician well versed in formal logic, who is used to doing complex symbolic manipulation correctly “only on paper”, could probably write non-trivial correct programs just by reading about the subject. In fact, a lot of stuff from computer science was worked out well before computers were built, e.g. Ada Lovelace is usually credited with writing the “first computer program”, well before the first digital computer existed.)
I kind of see your point about having all the game wikis, but I think I disagree about learning to code being necessarily interactive. Think about what feedback the compiler provides you: it tells you if you made a mistake, and sometimes what the mistake was. In cases where it runs but doesn’t do what you wanted, it might “show” you what the mistake was instead. You can learn programming just fine by reading and writing code but never running it, if you also have somebody knowledgeable checking what you wrote and explaining your mistakes. LLMs have tons of examples of that kind of thing in their training data.
Yeah but we train AIs on coding before we make that comparison. And we know that if you train an AI on a videogame it can often get superhuman performance. Here we’re trying to look at pure transfer learning, so I think it would be pretty fair to compare to someone who is generally competent but has never played videogames. Another interesting question is to what extent you can train an AI system on a variety of videogames and then have it take on a new one with no game-specific training. I don’t know if anyone has tried that with LLMs yet.
I am not a 100% convinced by the comparison, because technically LLMs are only “reading” a bunch of source code, they are never given access to a compiler/interpreter. IMO actually running the code one has written is a very important part of learning, and I think it would be a much more difficult task for a human to learn to code just by reading a bunch of books/code, but never actually trying to write & run their own code.[1]
Also, in the video linked earlier in the thread, the girlfriend playing Terraria is deliberately not given access to the wiki, and thus I believe is an unfair comparison. I expect to see much better human performance if you give them access to manuals & wikis about the game.
Not sure either, but I agree that this would be an interesting experiment. (Human gamers are often much quicker at picking up new games and are much better at them than someone with no gaming background.)
I would expect the average human to stay very bad at coding, no matter how many books & code examples you give them. I would also expect some smaller class of humans to nevertheless be able to pull that feat off. (E.g. maybe a mathematician well versed in formal logic, who is used to doing complex symbolic manipulation correctly “only on paper”, could probably write non-trivial correct programs just by reading about the subject. In fact, a lot of stuff from computer science was worked out well before computers were built, e.g. Ada Lovelace is usually credited with writing the “first computer program”, well before the first digital computer existed.)
I kind of see your point about having all the game wikis, but I think I disagree about learning to code being necessarily interactive. Think about what feedback the compiler provides you: it tells you if you made a mistake, and sometimes what the mistake was. In cases where it runs but doesn’t do what you wanted, it might “show” you what the mistake was instead. You can learn programming just fine by reading and writing code but never running it, if you also have somebody knowledgeable checking what you wrote and explaining your mistakes. LLMs have tons of examples of that kind of thing in their training data.