11 ms·

One of the biggest issues is with cherry-picking. Generative ML results benefit greatly from humans sampling the best results. They are capable of producing ast

by nbardy 6y ago

One of the biggest issues is with cherry-picking. Generative ML results benefit greatly from humans sampling the best results. They are capable of producing astonishing results but don’t do this consistently this has a huge impact on any effort to productize. For example I’ve seen quite a few examples of text->design, text->code, with GPT-3 you could build a demo in a day, but the product will probably be useless if it’s not delivering results 50%+ of the time

drcode 6y ago
I agree, but on the other hand one has to be careful not to be blind to the obvious power of a new technology, simply because it cannot be immediately turned into $$$.
quotemstr 6y ago
I think too few people are taking into account how inscrutable and inconsistent human creative-output results can be. We critique GPT-3 on the basis of it sometimes producing bad results --- but don't we all? Take poetry, for example. "The Complete Works of X", for any X, will probably contain a majority of forgettable or just bad works. What we remember from any author X is his cherry-picked best output. Likewise for ML systems.
- yyyk 6y ago
  The hype/scare re GPT-2/3 (etc.) is not for their poetry output, but rather for its potential for mass propaganda, telemarketing and so on. We can already get humans to do this stuff, all GPT could give is scale (that's no small deal). However, if the output needs to be curated and edited by humans, the scale and automation is gone - we just get a different manual process, with a modest improvement to speed at cost of some decline in quality, and that's not very impactful.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    The truly scary part is SEO where GPT-3 could ruin search engines overnight. Google at this point favours long form content for many search intents. Being able to generate thousands of these pages in one-click is a real problem. Not just because of popular topics e.g. "covid-19 symptoms" but more so for the long tail e.g. "should I drink coffee to cure covid-19".
    - yyyk 6y ago
      Quite a lot of SEO already uses simple word generation techniques. It isn't clear GPT-3 is an improvement there - human text recognition might not be whatever Google does. It may be that Google's algorithms don't care at all how human-like the text is, or that their own recognition algorithm/NN (whatever they use) isn't fooled. Even if it is affected, Google has the money and corpus to build its own competing NN to recognize GPT-3 text.
      - mr__y 6y ago
        While I have no doubts that they could build NN capable of recognizing GPT-3 text I believe that this would still pose a problem given the amount of content to be analyzed at the scale that Google deals with
        yyyk 6y ago
        I'm sure Google out of all entities could handle scale. That said, there might be a different threat to Google. GPT-3 seems really useful as a search engine of sorts (with the first answer implementing the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button). Tune it for a query syntax, and for getting the 'top X' results somehow, then we just need the web corpus and a basic filter over the results. We could have a very interesting Google competitor.
m3kw9 6y ago
I saw a demo of a gpt3 designing an app that looked just like Instagram home feed skeleton. While it seem impressive, but until you show me something more obscure, that was nothing to brag about.
- jbhouse 6y ago
  Please please please post a link to that video. It sounds super interesting
  - Zetaphor 6y ago
    I assume they're referring to this tweet, where someone created a Figma plugin using the API https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - threeseed 6y ago
    It was posted here: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 Honestly not that impressive since you can get comparable results with a series of regex rules given that there are limited ways to describe your intent e.g. "create a button of colour <colour> at the <location of button>"
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      What are your thoughts on why nobody made the set of rules yet?
      - luckylion 6y ago
        If designers wanted to write texts to create visual designs, they'd be using some form of DSL and learn to code, wouldn't they? I believe the hype is that people think they can replace the designer by "just telling the computer" what they want. I don't believe that will work, as they already have trouble telling a human what they want, and a computer won't really know what to do with "I want it to kind of feel like it's from that movie with the blue people that Cameron did, you know?" In my experience, people have a hard time writing their ideas about designs & features down, because they don't know what they want. They want to talk about it abstractly with somebody who has a better understanding of the field so that person can help them develop the idea. I don't think ML will cover that part any time soon.
teruakohatu 6y ago
I don't know about GPT-3 but playing around with GPT-2 I often got the impression that it was regurgitating learned knowledge (reddit comments) rather than actually coming up with something novel. With so many weights, it practically encodes a massive Internet text database.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  Having a better alternative to search engines would be great.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I had that thought too, and my immediate next thought was that the value isn't in knowing the sentences, but in being able to put them together usefully.
joe_the_user 6y ago
If OP article was cherry-picked, the tree must not be very productive. More than cherry-picking, there's the Eliza Effect - it's pretty easy to make people think generated text is intelligent. That text can seem intelligent for a while isn't necessarily impressive at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
- rapnie 6y ago
  It will be very annoying for e.g. forum moderators to determine whether first user posts are just a bit incoherent, or generated spam garbage.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    It's true that distinguishing these articles from ordinary jointed ramblings of poor writers would be hard. But I'm not sure what the benefit of filling forums with babble has to those running these models. Bots offering idiocy and idiocy generally has done lots of damage. But by idiocy here I would quite carefully calculated cleverly polarized positions and I don't think just bot-rot would be enough (to maybe coin a phrase).
  - luckylion 6y ago
    That used to be a pretty annoying thing back in the days of IRC as a kind of DOS: run a bunch of bots that just replay a conversation from another channel. Engaging them fails, but is that because they are bots, or because they're just ignoring you?
    - rapnie 6y ago
      The new kind can be more targeted for specific purposes. They could be excellent tools for trolling a forum, inciting flame wars and such.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        That would require some more advanced tech though. I don't think GPT-3 can target divisiveness yet, especially since it would heavily depend on the community you're writing for, e.g. driving a wedge into the general population is very different than driving a wedge niches. The Linux vs Windows debate might get you engagement in a tech forum, but it'll fall short with social housing activists, and whatever issues they split on will probably not get you anywhere with the tech crowd.
bjourne 6y ago
True! That means that whoever can come up with a system that takes 10 texts written by GPT-3 and always selects the best one (as judged by humans) will become rich and famous. This sampling problem is one of the few major hurdles before generative ai:s become really useful.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > rich Is reddit gold really that valuable? > famous Surely there are easier ways. > really useful We already have enough 2020 reddit commenters regurgitating 2010 hn threads regurgitating 2000 slashdot threads, thanks.
ricksharp 6y ago
Yeah, I saw a text => UI generator. It’s cool, but it looked like very basic stuff - the type of UI that is very easy to create in a few minutes. (And really with what was setup behind the scenes - maybe just as fast to just write the code.) The hard part about software development is not those bits which are common, but the parts that are unique to our specific solution.
- fluffernutter 6y ago
  > but the parts that are unique to our specific solution Search terms tweaked for your unique interests, and not a commercial entity's, for example.
_the_inflator 6y ago
Yes, it is more like happy path testing. However I like spirit of optimism and first looks at encouraging and very promising results. Exciting times!
Vinnl 6y ago
Hmm, I don't know. If you're the IRA [1], it sounds like it could be more efficient to have your trolls select plausible-looking comments from the auto-generated ones rather than having them write them themselves all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
It seems like with minor improvements, you could use this to significantly accelerate mundane parts of programming or writing. Human writes bulletpoints, neural net turns it into a program or letter, human corrects. There already was a pretty smart looking AI-based autocomplete shown on HN a couple weeks ago. This will accelerate development. Is the current version there? Probably not. But GPT-4 might, and would then accelerate the development of future versions. Even though this is not "magic", it sounds like it will turn into a practically usable and extremely valuable tool soon.
- GrantZvolsky 6y ago
  Being a speaker of Czech and English without a single dominant language, I use Google Translate to improve my writing. I will write a draft in the target language and feed Translate the other. It often comes up with improved style and more accurate expressions, especially in Czech. So as far as writing goes, we're already there.

by nbardy 6y ago

drcode 6y ago

I agree, but on the other hand one has to be careful not to be blind to the obvious power of a new technology, simply because it cannot be immediately turned into $$$.

quotemstr 6y ago

I think too few people are taking into account how inscrutable and inconsistent human creative-output results can be. We critique GPT-3 on the basis of it sometimes producing bad results --- but don't we all? Take poetry, for example. "The Complete Works of X", for any X, will probably contain a majority of forgettable or just bad works. What we remember from any author X is his cherry-picked best output. Likewise for ML systems.

yyyk 6y ago
The hype/scare re GPT-2/3 (etc.) is not for their poetry output, but rather for its potential for mass propaganda, telemarketing and so on. We can already get humans to do this stuff, all GPT could give is scale (that's no small deal). However, if the output needs to be curated and edited by humans, the scale and automation is gone - we just get a different manual process, with a modest improvement to speed at cost of some decline in quality, and that's not very impactful.
- threeseed 6y ago
  The truly scary part is SEO where GPT-3 could ruin search engines overnight. Google at this point favours long form content for many search intents. Being able to generate thousands of these pages in one-click is a real problem. Not just because of popular topics e.g. "covid-19 symptoms" but more so for the long tail e.g. "should I drink coffee to cure covid-19".
  - yyyk 6y ago
    Quite a lot of SEO already uses simple word generation techniques. It isn't clear GPT-3 is an improvement there - human text recognition might not be whatever Google does. It may be that Google's algorithms don't care at all how human-like the text is, or that their own recognition algorithm/NN (whatever they use) isn't fooled. Even if it is affected, Google has the money and corpus to build its own competing NN to recognize GPT-3 text.
    - mr__y 6y ago
      While I have no doubts that they could build NN capable of recognizing GPT-3 text I believe that this would still pose a problem given the amount of content to be analyzed at the scale that Google deals with
      - yyyk 6y ago
        I'm sure Google out of all entities could handle scale. That said, there might be a different threat to Google. GPT-3 seems really useful as a search engine of sorts (with the first answer implementing the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button). Tune it for a query syntax, and for getting the 'top X' results somehow, then we just need the web corpus and a basic filter over the results. We could have a very interesting Google competitor.

m3kw9 6y ago

I saw a demo of a gpt3 designing an app that looked just like Instagram home feed skeleton. While it seem impressive, but until you show me something more obscure, that was nothing to brag about.

jbhouse 6y ago
Please please please post a link to that video. It sounds super interesting
- Zetaphor 6y ago
  I assume they're referring to this tweet, where someone created a Figma plugin using the API https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 6y ago
  It was posted here: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 Honestly not that impressive since you can get comparable results with a series of regex rules given that there are limited ways to describe your intent e.g. "create a button of colour <colour> at the <location of button>"
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    What are your thoughts on why nobody made the set of rules yet?
    - luckylion 6y ago
      If designers wanted to write texts to create visual designs, they'd be using some form of DSL and learn to code, wouldn't they? I believe the hype is that people think they can replace the designer by "just telling the computer" what they want. I don't believe that will work, as they already have trouble telling a human what they want, and a computer won't really know what to do with "I want it to kind of feel like it's from that movie with the blue people that Cameron did, you know?" In my experience, people have a hard time writing their ideas about designs & features down, because they don't know what they want. They want to talk about it abstractly with somebody who has a better understanding of the field so that person can help them develop the idea. I don't think ML will cover that part any time soon.

teruakohatu 6y ago

I don't know about GPT-3 but playing around with GPT-2 I often got the impression that it was regurgitating learned knowledge (reddit comments) rather than actually coming up with something novel. With so many weights, it practically encodes a massive Internet text database.

Kinrany 6y ago
Having a better alternative to search engines would be great.
StavrosK 6y ago
I had that thought too, and my immediate next thought was that the value isn't in knowing the sentences, but in being able to put them together usefully.

joe_the_user 6y ago

If OP article was cherry-picked, the tree must not be very productive. More than cherry-picking, there's the Eliza Effect - it's pretty easy to make people think generated text is intelligent. That text can seem intelligent for a while isn't necessarily impressive at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

rapnie 6y ago
It will be very annoying for e.g. forum moderators to determine whether first user posts are just a bit incoherent, or generated spam garbage.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  It's true that distinguishing these articles from ordinary jointed ramblings of poor writers would be hard. But I'm not sure what the benefit of filling forums with babble has to those running these models. Bots offering idiocy and idiocy generally has done lots of damage. But by idiocy here I would quite carefully calculated cleverly polarized positions and I don't think just bot-rot would be enough (to maybe coin a phrase).
- luckylion 6y ago
  That used to be a pretty annoying thing back in the days of IRC as a kind of DOS: run a bunch of bots that just replay a conversation from another channel. Engaging them fails, but is that because they are bots, or because they're just ignoring you?
  - rapnie 6y ago
    The new kind can be more targeted for specific purposes. They could be excellent tools for trolling a forum, inciting flame wars and such.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      That would require some more advanced tech though. I don't think GPT-3 can target divisiveness yet, especially since it would heavily depend on the community you're writing for, e.g. driving a wedge into the general population is very different than driving a wedge niches. The Linux vs Windows debate might get you engagement in a tech forum, but it'll fall short with social housing activists, and whatever issues they split on will probably not get you anywhere with the tech crowd.

bjourne 6y ago

True! That means that whoever can come up with a system that takes 10 texts written by GPT-3 and always selects the best one (as judged by humans) will become rich and famous. This sampling problem is one of the few major hurdles before generative ai:s become really useful.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> rich Is reddit gold really that valuable? > famous Surely there are easier ways. > really useful We already have enough 2020 reddit commenters regurgitating 2010 hn threads regurgitating 2000 slashdot threads, thanks.

ricksharp 6y ago

Yeah, I saw a text => UI generator. It’s cool, but it looked like very basic stuff - the type of UI that is very easy to create in a few minutes. (And really with what was setup behind the scenes - maybe just as fast to just write the code.) The hard part about software development is not those bits which are common, but the parts that are unique to our specific solution.

fluffernutter 6y ago
> but the parts that are unique to our specific solution Search terms tweaked for your unique interests, and not a commercial entity's, for example.

_the_inflator 6y ago

Yes, it is more like happy path testing. However I like spirit of optimism and first looks at encouraging and very promising results. Exciting times!

Vinnl 6y ago

Hmm, I don't know. If you're the IRA [1], it sounds like it could be more efficient to have your trolls select plausible-looking comments from the auto-generated ones rather than having them write them themselves all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

It seems like with minor improvements, you could use this to significantly accelerate mundane parts of programming or writing. Human writes bulletpoints, neural net turns it into a program or letter, human corrects. There already was a pretty smart looking AI-based autocomplete shown on HN a couple weeks ago. This will accelerate development. Is the current version there? Probably not. But GPT-4 might, and would then accelerate the development of future versions. Even though this is not "magic", it sounds like it will turn into a practically usable and extremely valuable tool soon.

GrantZvolsky 6y ago
Being a speaker of Czech and English without a single dominant language, I use Google Translate to improve my writing. I will write a draft in the target language and feed Translate the other. It often comes up with improved style and more accurate expressions, especially in Czech. So as far as writing goes, we're already there.