Pythonic Headbanger

A study submitted in July 2023 reported that GPT is getting “dumber”, with decreased performance on math calculus and visual reasoning. This caused a bit fuzz on the internet, but anyway, I’d like to make some notes here. An important note about theses notes (jokes and puns aside): they all come from head and from my experience and world knowledge. I did not consult any reference to make them (except for the links, of course), so be aware of this. Here are the notes: GPTs and Language Models based on Transformers learn from text data (as you may know) and represent this acquired knowledge as ontologies (roughly speaking, a network of interconnected concepts). Thus, prompting a GPT or any other language model is basically “querying an ontology”, of course, in a very smart and practical way. Hence, a Language Model actually does not do calculus per se, but queries the “ontology” to try to figure the result. Hence (again), we shouldn’t except that much of GPT in the “math side of the ...

  A couple of weeks ago, I made a tour at the “Museu da Rampa” ( Ramp Museum, in free translation from Portuguese), located in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. This museum tells stories about the coming of US Army to Natal during Second World War, as well as the visit of then US president Winston Churchill to Natal and his meeting with then Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas. For those who do not know, Natal was a strategic spot for Americans during the 2nd World War, because it was faster for the military planes to get to Europe departing from the city. Because of that, Natal received the slang of O trampolim da vitória ( The trampoline of the victory , in free translation). Vargas and Churchill made, then, an agreement to use Natal as a spot for US army. Such agreement marked the coming of US soliders to Natal and its neighbor city, Parnamirim, where military bases were located. The presence of US military in Natal and Parnamirim deeply marked Natal’s and Parnamirim’s histo...