GPT 3.5 displays emergent theory of mind, Perplexity.ai tries to reinvent search
Stanford researcher believes Theory of Mind may have spontaneously emerged in large language models.
I stumbled upon a very interesting new research paper regarding AI and Theory of Mind.
Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to assign unobservable mental states to others that might be different from your own. It’s critical to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality and helps us to predict and explain other people's behavior.
Now, one research paper does not mean AI models are going sentient, but it’s mind-blowing that a large language model that before 2022 showed virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks now has a performance comparable with that of a nine-year-old child.
According to the above-mentioned paper (by Michal Kosinski), the November 2022 version of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 (davinci-003) solved 93% of the Theory of Mind tasks in the test the researcher performed.
So yeah, it’s fun to laugh at ChatGPT when it can’t solve kindergarten riddles or hallucinates, but let's stay on topic, AI advancement is so fast, it cannot be predicted at this point.
In the meantime, everybody still wants to reinvent the search
I got the chance to play for a while with a new concept of web search: perplexity.ai.
It’s an AI-powered information discovery and sharing platform according to the makers and it does feel like a true chatbot-search engine hybrid.
Homes screen is similar to that of google, but I really like the results UI. It tries to summarise what it can find on the web about your query and also displays the sources, but it does not blend information from the various sources, it just lists it in order.
Sometimes the answers look like a mess but sometimes is easy to understand. It also features the option to ask a follow-up question on the same thread you started.
So, in comparison to ChatGPT, it is less factual and more like a companion. From what I’ve seen it can access fresh information about recent or future events.
I like the concept, but it is a long way from being ready for day-to-day use.
It can be accessed at perplexity.ai and it also has a chrome browser extension.
Some example queries I tried:
