Hardware

And for stuff like writing code, it turns out to be not as helpful as expected.

This is not a good judgment and is just taking the ChatGPT user interface at surface value.

It has simply been that LLMs like GPT4 have not been allowed to use tools to write programs outside of lab conditions, so it's the equivalent of you running code in your head based on what is already in your memory.

Once an LLM has access to compilers or interpreters that run code, they can feedback their own mistakes into the next prompt and write working code. We already know that GPT4 can learn python, bash and other interpreted languages by simply allowing it to use the tools and allowing it to feed results back into new prompts. It can also tell which tool to use, based on the input.

The concept of tool use in LLMs is almost the same as for humans in amplifying a specific ability, such as using a calculator for numerical computations or using an SQL database to manage large tables of information.

The tool use that ChatGPT allows today is simply prompting search engines or Dall-E, reading some webpages as input prompts, but there is no feedback loop allowed for fact checking itself.