7 ms·

Show HN: WhyBot, making GPT-4 question itself

77 points by johnqian 3y ago

Hi HN — we’re John and Vish! We built WhyBot, a tool to help you deeply explore a question or topic. You ask a question, and WhyBot responds by building an ever-expanding knowledge graph. It does this by recursively generating answers and follow-up questions. You can change its persona to change the flavor of the generations (try toddler mode!). We originally built this for the AngelList Agent Hackathon (https://twitter.com/AqeelMeetsWorld/status/1650279974405042178?s=20 https://twitter.com/AqeelMeetsWorld/status/16502799744050421...) and got a lot of interest from folks asking to play around with it. So we thought it’d be fun to brush it up and release it as a web app! It’s a work in progress and we plan on adding more features, such as saving, sharing, focusing on one branch and potentially executing code. We hope you enjoy playing around with it and would love to hear any of your feedback or thoughts.

laxels 3y ago
This is great for technical exploration! Are there plans to let users create their own personas?
bhaktatejas922 3y ago
Way more interesting than you'd think given the simplicity and slick ui. ability to choose branches would be great.
IndigoIncognito 3y ago
[flagged]
- ranguna 3y ago
  To save everyone a click: That link tried to open three pop-ups and has an intrusive full screen page block about notifications.
  - IndigoIncognito 3y ago
    Sorry guys I didn't realise it did this, I have Firefox with a bunch of privacy extensions which block popup's, time to look for a new image hoster
- flangola7 3y ago
  My firewall does not enjoy this link.
  - IndigoIncognito 3y ago
    Sorry guys I didn't realise it did this, I have Firefox with a bunch of privacy extensions which block popup's, time to look for a new image hoster
    - flangola7 3y ago
      The DNS request was blocked well before ad pop-ups, just look at any domain checking sore. The final destination was cognitohazards, a hotel
ranguna 3y ago
This is incredibly! I've been benchmarking several LLMs to identify a possible bug in a snippet of code given no context on what is expected from the code. Neither chatgpt, vacuna, open assistant or mpt where able to identify the bug. When I fed the same prompt into this app, the initial reply said there were no bugs, but the first branch immenditly questioned itself with the expected line of thought to identify the bug! I might subscribe to chatgpt just to use this app, great work! I'd love it if this got open sourced. Here's the prompt if you want to test it out: Can you find any bugs in the following snippet? ```ts const queuePositions = [ 1, 2, 3 ]; const pairs: number[][] = []; for (let i = 0; i < queuePositions.length; i += 2) pairs.push(queuePositions.slice(i, i + 2)); ```
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  No need for complicated multi-step apps, GPT 4 can find the bug straight-up: The code snippet you provided is syntactically correct TypeScript code. However, there might be a logical issue depending on the intended use case. The code is set up to iterate over the queuePositions array and slice it into pairs, but if the queuePositions array contains an odd number of elements, the final pair will contain only a single element.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    ChatGPT (3.5-turbo) also provides a similar response: "As an AI language model, I cannot guarantee the correctness of the code, but I could not find any obvious bugs in the given code snippet. However, here are a few observations: - The queuePositions array must contain an even number of elements for this code to work correctly. - pairs is initialized as an empty array of arrays, where each inner array will contain exactly two numbers. - The for loop iterates through queuePositions array in steps of 2, taking two consecutive elements from the array each time starting from index i. - The slice method extracts a portion of the original queuePositions array starting at index i and ending at i + 2, but not including i + 2. - The extracted portion is pushed to the pairs array. - The resulting pairs array will contain pairs of numbers from queuePositions."
    - 3y ago
ranguna 3y ago
Like I mentioned on my other comment, this is amazing! Are there any plans to integrate this with other LLMs providers like open assistant or hugging faces chat?
Memetoml 3y ago
I have not seen a better demonstration on visualizing unlimited/ open ended reasoning like this. I really love this. I'm very curious (and I thought about this before which shows the Zeitgeist) if this can change or enhance the general reasoning skills of people. Our generation already google things constantly, so much that an older couple told me once that their kids don't ask them stuff but Google it. But the reasoning aspect was missing. Now you can't just Google facts but also ask reasoning questions without worries. Ignoring potential miss guidence in these models and hopping for an emerging reasoning truth through wisdom of the masses. Self fulfilling prophecy perhaps?
joelalcedo 3y ago
Asking WhyBot, "What is today's date?" caused a chain of thought provoking ideas about modern society's dependence on technology to tell the time. Cool!
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I think the UI is cool, but I don't really find it that amazing honestly. It just seem to keep prompting itself and never really going anywhere?
m1sta_ 3y ago
Amy plans to open source?
pmoriarty 3y ago
Interesting, but I've found the questions it asks are all pretty conventional and run-of-the-mill, and I wish it would stay on topic for follow-up questions, rather than veering off on barely related tangents.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  I think adding some sort of ability to alter the way it forms follow up questions would 10x the outputs.
do_anh_tu 3y ago
You should tell ChatGPT to translate your question to client language. I tried in Vietnamese but then the next questions and answers is still in English. Pretty awesome idea btw. I would like to highlight a branch for deeper questions. Just to speed things up.
- johnqian 3y ago
  Fixed--made it generate questions in the same language as the answer! Do you find that GPT 3.5 can write in fluent Vietnamese? Branch highlighting is on the top of our to do list, should be able to get it out soon!
scrollaway 3y ago
I asked it why 1+1 equal 3. It’s beautiful. Please add an export.
anibalin 3y ago
This is very clever. Thanks for sharing.
xpil 3y ago
Does it always stop after going 10 layers deep?
apineda 3y ago
Would be cool if you could nix ( delete ) nodes that you don't wish to pursue. Very nice execution!
- vishrajiv 3y ago
  Vish here — you can! It’s easier on desktop but if you hover over edges, they turn red and the pointer turns into a scissor so you can prune that entire downstream branch.
thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
Really great work here, it has inspired me and I think you are on to something.
barking_biscuit 3y ago
This is crazy cool. This would be epic as an extension for text-generation-webui, so that we can run it with local LLMs!
jimkleiber 3y ago
I love this, I found that I was mostly curious about one branch and it took time for it to fill out all the other branches before the one I wanted was filled. Is there any way for me to pause all the other branches and have it only go deeper on one of the branches and then maybe restart other branches selectively?

77 points by johnqian 3y ago

laxels 3y ago

This is great for technical exploration! Are there plans to let users create their own personas?

bhaktatejas922 3y ago

Way more interesting than you'd think given the simplicity and slick ui. ability to choose branches would be great.

IndigoIncognito 3y ago

[flagged]

ranguna 3y ago
To save everyone a click: That link tried to open three pop-ups and has an intrusive full screen page block about notifications.
- IndigoIncognito 3y ago
  Sorry guys I didn't realise it did this, I have Firefox with a bunch of privacy extensions which block popup's, time to look for a new image hoster
flangola7 3y ago
My firewall does not enjoy this link.
- IndigoIncognito 3y ago
  Sorry guys I didn't realise it did this, I have Firefox with a bunch of privacy extensions which block popup's, time to look for a new image hoster
  - flangola7 3y ago
    The DNS request was blocked well before ad pop-ups, just look at any domain checking sore. The final destination was cognitohazards, a hotel

ranguna 3y ago

This is incredibly! I've been benchmarking several LLMs to identify a possible bug in a snippet of code given no context on what is expected from the code. Neither chatgpt, vacuna, open assistant or mpt where able to identify the bug. When I fed the same prompt into this app, the initial reply said there were no bugs, but the first branch immenditly questioned itself with the expected line of thought to identify the bug! I might subscribe to chatgpt just to use this app, great work! I'd love it if this got open sourced. Here's the prompt if you want to test it out: Can you find any bugs in the following snippet? ```ts const queuePositions = [ 1, 2, 3 ]; const pairs: number[][] = []; for (let i = 0; i < queuePositions.length; i += 2) pairs.push(queuePositions.slice(i, i + 2)); ```

jiggawatts 3y ago
No need for complicated multi-step apps, GPT 4 can find the bug straight-up: The code snippet you provided is syntactically correct TypeScript code. However, there might be a logical issue depending on the intended use case. The code is set up to iterate over the queuePositions array and slice it into pairs, but if the queuePositions array contains an odd number of elements, the final pair will contain only a single element.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  ChatGPT (3.5-turbo) also provides a similar response: "As an AI language model, I cannot guarantee the correctness of the code, but I could not find any obvious bugs in the given code snippet. However, here are a few observations: - The queuePositions array must contain an even number of elements for this code to work correctly. - pairs is initialized as an empty array of arrays, where each inner array will contain exactly two numbers. - The for loop iterates through queuePositions array in steps of 2, taking two consecutive elements from the array each time starting from index i. - The slice method extracts a portion of the original queuePositions array starting at index i and ending at i + 2, but not including i + 2. - The extracted portion is pushed to the pairs array. - The resulting pairs array will contain pairs of numbers from queuePositions."
  - 3y ago

ranguna 3y ago

Like I mentioned on my other comment, this is amazing! Are there any plans to integrate this with other LLMs providers like open assistant or hugging faces chat?

Memetoml 3y ago

I have not seen a better demonstration on visualizing unlimited/ open ended reasoning like this. I really love this. I'm very curious (and I thought about this before which shows the Zeitgeist) if this can change or enhance the general reasoning skills of people. Our generation already google things constantly, so much that an older couple told me once that their kids don't ask them stuff but Google it. But the reasoning aspect was missing. Now you can't just Google facts but also ask reasoning questions without worries. Ignoring potential miss guidence in these models and hopping for an emerging reasoning truth through wisdom of the masses. Self fulfilling prophecy perhaps?

joelalcedo 3y ago

Asking WhyBot, "What is today's date?" caused a chain of thought provoking ideas about modern society's dependence on technology to tell the time. Cool!

ChatGTP 3y ago
I think the UI is cool, but I don't really find it that amazing honestly. It just seem to keep prompting itself and never really going anywhere?

m1sta_ 3y ago

Amy plans to open source?

pmoriarty 3y ago

Interesting, but I've found the questions it asks are all pretty conventional and run-of-the-mill, and I wish it would stay on topic for follow-up questions, rather than veering off on barely related tangents.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
I think adding some sort of ability to alter the way it forms follow up questions would 10x the outputs.

do_anh_tu 3y ago

You should tell ChatGPT to translate your question to client language. I tried in Vietnamese but then the next questions and answers is still in English. Pretty awesome idea btw. I would like to highlight a branch for deeper questions. Just to speed things up.

johnqian 3y ago
Fixed--made it generate questions in the same language as the answer! Do you find that GPT 3.5 can write in fluent Vietnamese? Branch highlighting is on the top of our to do list, should be able to get it out soon!

scrollaway 3y ago

I asked it why 1+1 equal 3. It’s beautiful. Please add an export.

anibalin 3y ago

This is very clever. Thanks for sharing.

xpil 3y ago

Does it always stop after going 10 layers deep?

apineda 3y ago

Would be cool if you could nix ( delete ) nodes that you don't wish to pursue. Very nice execution!

vishrajiv 3y ago
Vish here — you can! It’s easier on desktop but if you hover over edges, they turn red and the pointer turns into a scissor so you can prune that entire downstream branch.

thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago

Really great work here, it has inspired me and I think you are on to something.

barking_biscuit 3y ago

This is crazy cool. This would be epic as an extension for text-generation-webui, so that we can run it with local LLMs!

jimkleiber 3y ago

I love this, I found that I was mostly curious about one branch and it took time for it to fill out all the other branches before the one I wanted was filled. Is there any way for me to pause all the other branches and have it only go deeper on one of the branches and then maybe restart other branches selectively?