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I'm surprised that anyone could be so skeptical over what is clearly an incredible technological breakthrough. It's not perfect - in particular the making up n

I'm surprised that anyone could be so skeptical over what is clearly an incredible technological breakthrough. It's not perfect - in particular the making up nonsense problem needs to be solved before it can be relied on - but the difference between this and the "state of the art" just 4 years ago is off the chart. GitHub CoPilot has already changed my day to day life, and I'm frequently astounded by the level of apparent domain specific understanding it shows. Yet, this again blows CoPilot out of the water. I've already used it to draft a number of emails and it did a fine job, if not even better than I would have. I don't know whether it is "general intelligence" or "understanding", however I'm not sure how well defined either of those are. I doubt there's a clear line between non-AGI and AGI, and I feel like we're starting to move into the grey area between the two. I suspect we'll only recognise the line once we've crossed it. Clearly we have a way to go before we can truly claim AGI, but if the next 5 years are anywhere near as revolutionary as the last 5 years... I'm both frightened and excited. But mostly frightened.

layer8 4y ago
I tested ChatGPT with a couple of topics I’m personally unclear on, and while it is linguistically eloquent, it basically just regurgitates the majority opinions that can be found on the internet on those topics (sometimes combining several of those opinions in an incoherent way). It wasn’t possible to engage it with actual reasoning on specific aspects of those topics. It just went with whatever premise you gave it, and/or circled back to the generic exposition. It doesn’t have any thought or understanding of its own.
- simonw 4y ago
  > It doesn't have any thought or understanding of its own Of course it doesn't. Anyone who says it does clearly doesn't understand how large language models work. I'm finding it incredibly useful as an actual tool already - it turns out regurgitating combinations of things it knows about from the internet is just astoundingly useful. I'm having it teach me Rust for example. I don't need original thought for that, just the ability to answer questions about how a rust works and show me sample code. https://github.com/simonw/advent-of-code-2022-in-rust/issues/4 https://github.com/simonw/advent-of-code-2022-in-rust/issues...
  - zadler 4y ago
    I'm not sure why you distinguish large language models as not having understanding, as it shows a high degree of comprehension; in a de facto sense, it understands an awful lot. It understands your inputs well enough to give you useful outputs, and it can absolutely reason creatively about problems you pose to it. It doesn't have it's "own" though or understanding only because it doesn't have it's "own" story and experience to add that element of unique personality.
    - Sevii 4y ago
      We may need to rethink what exactly 'understanding' means in the context of ChatGPT. It's capable of a bunch of things that classically would be defined as understanding. We can claim that language models can't 'understand' things but then we have to explain why x, y or z that language models can do don't count as understanding.
  - anileated 4y ago
    Do you see it as a problem that it’s stripping a large number of people who wrote the resources it regurgitates (such as on teaching Rust) from traffic, potential income and attribution while the money you are charged goes to a VC-funded SV company?
    - stolsvik 4y ago
      What about Google search, then? You’d have to browse very many webpages to find the same thing you do with a single googling. That browsing would have generated revenue that Google now took away.
      - anileated 4y ago
        If Google did this, as in stopped sending users to content producers and just returned aggregated and processed content from all the pages in its index, they’d be met with robots.txt DENY entries and regulated out of existence in developed countries within days. They got burned once[0], so they know to tread carefully. While we can (should?) be offended at the amount of featured snippets Google still shows today, it doesn’t seem comparable in scale. [0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/australia-media-code-facebook-google https://www.wired.co.uk/article/australia-media-code-faceboo...
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Honestly, everything you said about it can describe the majority of people on the majority of topics.
- Springtime 4y ago
  It reminds me a bit of an IRC bot from seven years ago which took top Reddit replies and used them to answer questions. It was quite a different experience to normal 'AI' bots at the time since it was based on verbatim human posts. Examples: <question> Why are plants green? <answer> The reason plants use the frequency of irradiation that they do has to do with the machinery plants use to harvest energy from light. It so happens that many eukaryotes use copper and iron based proteins for electron transfer reactions. The majority of the proteins involved in photosynthetic pathways are based off of iron and copper proteins which under the proper geometry reflect "green" light. <question> Who really controls the world? <answer> The lizard people. <question> Why is Minecraft addictive? <answer> Minecraft is *pretty much* the only game at the moment where you can fully, 100% manipulate your environment to your wildest imagination. Just like Lego!
- int_19h 4y ago
  > it basically just regurgitates the majority opinions that can be found on the internet on those topics (sometimes combining several of those opinions in an incoherent way) And this is different from your average Facebook comment how exactly? I wonder just how much our refusal to acknowledge these things is because it would be a tacit admission of how much we've overestimated our own intellect as a species. What if we ourselves are the "not really intelligent" model with delusions of grandeur, and that is why the AI can already achieve so much? What if most of our civilization does not, in fact, require "real intelligence" to function?
  - layer8 4y ago
    It is very different from having a discussion with another human, following their reasoning, and them following your reasoning, and in that way exploring, developing, validating and invalidating ideas in a dialog. This is one application I would find an AI useful for, as a “second brain” to bounce ideas off of, or to get it to explain things to me that I need clarification on, and it understanding the specific objections or gaps I try to explain back to it.
    - rocho 4y ago
      I think the main differences are internal state and feedback loops. The language model is stateless and immutable, whereas human brains are stateful and plastic. To mimic state within ChatGPT all the previous prompts and responses are fed together with the last one. But of course, that's not very efficient and quite limited. While it's certainly impressive right now, it's nowhere close to general intelligence. Once AI will be able to keep track of stage and update itself through feedback loops, then I'd say we'll be pretty close. Right now it's a language model that is extremely good at detecting patterns and applying them.
- crucialfelix 4y ago
  My productive use of it so far has been exactly that- to state the clearest most obvious consensus opinion. It saved me a lot of reading and research
karmasimida 4y ago
Exactly this seems like a natural extension for Copilot Copilot solved the in context code generation problem while ChatGPT is this session based friend who would look attentively through the whole course of your coding. I tried some relative niche task with ChatGPT and it mostly solved them with high precision. The productivity boost is going to be substantial to reshape software engineering as profession. Moving forward being a full stack engineer would be a bare-minimum, anything that can be done by ChatGPT will not qualify as valuable skill. It will make true 10x engineers works like they have virtually a team. Something is coming after us all, be prepared. I am scared yet can’t wait

layer8 4y ago

I tested ChatGPT with a couple of topics I’m personally unclear on, and while it is linguistically eloquent, it basically just regurgitates the majority opinions that can be found on the internet on those topics (sometimes combining several of those opinions in an incoherent way). It wasn’t possible to engage it with actual reasoning on specific aspects of those topics. It just went with whatever premise you gave it, and/or circled back to the generic exposition. It doesn’t have any thought or understanding of its own.

simonw 4y ago
> It doesn't have any thought or understanding of its own Of course it doesn't. Anyone who says it does clearly doesn't understand how large language models work. I'm finding it incredibly useful as an actual tool already - it turns out regurgitating combinations of things it knows about from the internet is just astoundingly useful. I'm having it teach me Rust for example. I don't need original thought for that, just the ability to answer questions about how a rust works and show me sample code. https://github.com/simonw/advent-of-code-2022-in-rust/issues/4 https://github.com/simonw/advent-of-code-2022-in-rust/issues...
- zadler 4y ago
  I'm not sure why you distinguish large language models as not having understanding, as it shows a high degree of comprehension; in a de facto sense, it understands an awful lot. It understands your inputs well enough to give you useful outputs, and it can absolutely reason creatively about problems you pose to it. It doesn't have it's "own" though or understanding only because it doesn't have it's "own" story and experience to add that element of unique personality.
  - Sevii 4y ago
    We may need to rethink what exactly 'understanding' means in the context of ChatGPT. It's capable of a bunch of things that classically would be defined as understanding. We can claim that language models can't 'understand' things but then we have to explain why x, y or z that language models can do don't count as understanding.
- anileated 4y ago
  Do you see it as a problem that it’s stripping a large number of people who wrote the resources it regurgitates (such as on teaching Rust) from traffic, potential income and attribution while the money you are charged goes to a VC-funded SV company?
  - stolsvik 4y ago
    What about Google search, then? You’d have to browse very many webpages to find the same thing you do with a single googling. That browsing would have generated revenue that Google now took away.
    - anileated 4y ago
      If Google did this, as in stopped sending users to content producers and just returned aggregated and processed content from all the pages in its index, they’d be met with robots.txt DENY entries and regulated out of existence in developed countries within days. They got burned once[0], so they know to tread carefully. While we can (should?) be offended at the amount of featured snippets Google still shows today, it doesn’t seem comparable in scale. [0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/australia-media-code-facebook-google https://www.wired.co.uk/article/australia-media-code-faceboo...
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Honestly, everything you said about it can describe the majority of people on the majority of topics.
Springtime 4y ago
It reminds me a bit of an IRC bot from seven years ago which took top Reddit replies and used them to answer questions. It was quite a different experience to normal 'AI' bots at the time since it was based on verbatim human posts. Examples: <question> Why are plants green? <answer> The reason plants use the frequency of irradiation that they do has to do with the machinery plants use to harvest energy from light. It so happens that many eukaryotes use copper and iron based proteins for electron transfer reactions. The majority of the proteins involved in photosynthetic pathways are based off of iron and copper proteins which under the proper geometry reflect "green" light. <question> Who really controls the world? <answer> The lizard people. <question> Why is Minecraft addictive? <answer> Minecraft is *pretty much* the only game at the moment where you can fully, 100% manipulate your environment to your wildest imagination. Just like Lego!
int_19h 4y ago
> it basically just regurgitates the majority opinions that can be found on the internet on those topics (sometimes combining several of those opinions in an incoherent way) And this is different from your average Facebook comment how exactly? I wonder just how much our refusal to acknowledge these things is because it would be a tacit admission of how much we've overestimated our own intellect as a species. What if we ourselves are the "not really intelligent" model with delusions of grandeur, and that is why the AI can already achieve so much? What if most of our civilization does not, in fact, require "real intelligence" to function?
- layer8 4y ago
  It is very different from having a discussion with another human, following their reasoning, and them following your reasoning, and in that way exploring, developing, validating and invalidating ideas in a dialog. This is one application I would find an AI useful for, as a “second brain” to bounce ideas off of, or to get it to explain things to me that I need clarification on, and it understanding the specific objections or gaps I try to explain back to it.
  - rocho 4y ago
    I think the main differences are internal state and feedback loops. The language model is stateless and immutable, whereas human brains are stateful and plastic. To mimic state within ChatGPT all the previous prompts and responses are fed together with the last one. But of course, that's not very efficient and quite limited. While it's certainly impressive right now, it's nowhere close to general intelligence. Once AI will be able to keep track of stage and update itself through feedback loops, then I'd say we'll be pretty close. Right now it's a language model that is extremely good at detecting patterns and applying them.
crucialfelix 4y ago
My productive use of it so far has been exactly that- to state the clearest most obvious consensus opinion. It saved me a lot of reading and research

karmasimida 4y ago

Exactly this seems like a natural extension for Copilot Copilot solved the in context code generation problem while ChatGPT is this session based friend who would look attentively through the whole course of your coding. I tried some relative niche task with ChatGPT and it mostly solved them with high precision. The productivity boost is going to be substantial to reshape software engineering as profession. Moving forward being a full stack engineer would be a bare-minimum, anything that can be done by ChatGPT will not qualify as valuable skill. It will make true 10x engineers works like they have virtually a team. Something is coming after us all, be prepared. I am scared yet can’t wait