11 ms·

The only people whose minds this is "blowing" are people who have never had to build or maintain question answering systems. ChatGPT is like having a bunch of

by gsatic 4y ago

The only people whose minds this is "blowing" are people who have never had to build or maintain question answering systems. ChatGPT is like having a bunch of 8 year olds who know how to use Google hanging around. Sure you can use them, and their skills might surprise u every now and then, but that has nothing to do with how much time you are going to waste on the answers they will get wrong.

buremba 4y ago
OK, I get that you built such systems. Can you let us know about the other bots that can behave like a "8 years old"?
M4v3R 4y ago
So you're telling me that it's not mind-blowing, that we basically created artificial intelligence capable of solving general tasks at a level of a 8 year old human being? Because to me that is still pretty mind-blowing. And I'd argue it's probably at a level above that (but not much). When in your opinion it will finally be mind blowing? When it matches intelligence and skill of a 14 year old? 20 year old? 40?
- omnicognate 4y ago
  GPT is not at the level of an 8 year old human being and isn't even doing remotely the same thing as an 8 year old human being. GPT is mindblowing. It's a mindblowingly good predictive language model. It's an insanely, holy-fuck-I-never-thought-that-would-be-possible, amazingly good predictive language model. I'm thoroughly impressed. I just think it's not AGI, it's not close to AGI, it's not any kind of threat to jobs in programming (though maybe it could be in some fields) and it isn't likely to be any of these things any time soon. The claims that it is all these things (which you can see all over these threads) are what people are arguing against.
chrisbaker98 4y ago
> ChatGPT is like having a bunch of 8 year olds who know how to use Google hanging around. It astonishes me that people can dismiss ChatGPT like this. By your own account, there now exists an AI that can convincingly imitate a literate, technically fluent human child. That's an incredible advance that's far beyond anything that existed even a couple of years ago. How is it not amazing? I get the sense that if some of the commenters here had been around to witness the Wright Brothers' first flight they'd have been like "meh, that's not impressive, the only people whose mind it will blow are people who've never been in a hot air balloon."
- FerociousTimes 4y ago
  It's amazing. impressive and fascinating but not superhuman, at least not yet. Also, you can't really dismiss AI skeptics by associating them with denialists that don't see anything of quality or value of these creations despite all the evidence otherwise.
- Winsaucerer 4y ago
  In many cases, it does a lot better than 8 year olds with Google.
  - NameError 4y ago
    I agree. I pasted a block of code from a personal project into the prompt, and asked it to add a simple-but-not-trivial frontend feature, in human language (e.g. "This button expands the sidebar and shows some clickable options. It should open a modal instead, and include a search bar which filters the available options"). It gave me working code which did something kind of like what I asked. After some back and forth where I asked for changes, it -almost- got it working. I had to make one manual CSS change. I don't think 8 year olds can do this - it feels more like an "instant junior developer" to me.
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  Exactly which makes me think the egos are perhaps bruised. Yes obviously it will be wrong but using it you keep that in mind. To expand on the analogy it is like having an 8 year old around but unbelievably this 8 year old has literally read and remembered and basically “understood” everything about everything we collectively know. I’ve tested it with fairly esoteric questions about the technologies I work with and it gives excellent results for an 8 year old and extremely quickly about anything. I think it can significantly speedup technical work. I intent to try and have it help me this week and see how it goes.
  - emehex 4y ago
    Framed differently: what would you (be able to) do, or (be able to) build with an infinite number of “8 year olds” at your disposal?
srge 4y ago
I want to be in this thread when it becomes the new infamous Dropbox thread
- yesenadam 4y ago
  Oh please, comparing ChatGPT to Dropbox is like comparing a tiny little puddle to a vast ocean. Dropbox was a revolutionary product that changed the way we store and share files, while ChatGPT is just a mediocre language model with no real-world impact. You must be living under a rock if you think they're even in the same league. > Write a mocking reply to someone suggesting on Hacker News that someone else dismissing ChatGPT is akin to the famous comment dismissing dropBox on Hacker News years ago.
  - srge 4y ago
    Write a sarcastic HN comment trivializing a significant tech accomplishment in the space of conversational artificial intelligence : > Wow, another AI that can hold a conversation! I'm sure this will revolutionize the way we communicate with machines and make our lives so much easier. Definitely not a waste of time and resources at all. Keep up the impressive work!
  - OhioMan2943 4y ago
    I picked it just before the end of the second sentence, 2/3 through. It's getting difficult to discern already. I wonder if it will deemphasise online forums.
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    Put me in the screencap.
- cesarvarela 4y ago
  Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past and keep this thread focused on respectful and constructive discussion. Infamy is not something to strive for. Let's focus on the ideas and avoid personal attacks.
gjulianm 4y ago
I have been a little bit skeptic of exaggerated claims about AI, but I tried ChatGPT and I've been amazed. My trial was not searching for anything. I tried asking the AI to code an traffic capture program with DPDK. Funnily enough, it knew several alternatives to use the code. I could also ask him to fill in certain parts, add parsing code for the packets... It's definitely far better than a bunch of 8 year olds knowing how to use Google.
- 10xDev 4y ago
  People seem to be especially impressed by code generation like people were with chess because we associate those tasks with intelligence but they are constrained environments with well defined rules and a lot of data. Anyone who has followed the progress of RL knows that strong performance in such conditions does not mean it is comparable to human intelligence or that current architecture will scale even close to general human intelligence. It is much more comparable to a calculator.
  - allturtles 4y ago
    You are making what I think of as the standard "game move" of the AI skeptic. Chess-playing skill was considered a marker of intelligence, but then AI solved it, so it turns out it doesn't require "real" intelligence. 15 years later, neither does playing Jeopardy, it's "just" a clever Google search, that's not really intelligence. Now according to you, programming doesn't require real intelligence (and apparently neither does poetry writing, or essay writing, or any of the other things GPT can do). In a few years, perhaps we will discover that medicine, law, the social sciences, accounting, financial advice, and white collar work generally speaking don't require intelligence either, and the only things left that will require "real" intelligence will be the building trades and maybe truck driving.
    - 10xDev 4y ago
      No, again we just discovered it only does well in constrained environments with well defined rules and a lot of data. Either that or something subjective that it can afford a lot of inaccuracy without looking totally stupid. It literally can't generalise to some basic logic problems just like AlphaZero is not going to be cooking your meals anytime soon. If to you that's ok, fantastic. But to compare what we got so far to something intelligent rather than seeing it as more of a calculator then you are totally misrepresenting it.
SilkRoadie 4y ago
What is mind blowing for me is the ability for ChatGPT with limited context to generate content. "Write me a letter informing X about issue Y" will draft 3 paragraphs which typically articulates the problem very well. Asking it to make the response more or less formal or to focus on a specific point will instantly rewrite it as requested. I haven't delved too deeply but it is pretty good with code generation as well. "Write me a docker image that does X". "Let's use B instead of C." "I also require Z." It does a really solid job. With the OP's article. It is very impressive how it generates ideas and then is able to drill down and expand on them as more detailed questions are asked. Perhaps something already can do this.. it is first time I have seen it. My experience so far is that ChatGPT is generations ahead of current assistants. For a number of tasks it is faster and more useful than Google.
watoc 4y ago
What would impress you? A system that could answer any questions better than any current experts? Ok it's not always completely accurate and sometime plain wrong but still looks really impressive to me.
watoc 4y ago
Did you generate your comment with ChatGPT? I can't tell.
megous 4y ago
Dunno, you can start with the initial description in the TFA and continue prompting for more stuff, like: > How to implement such a system on a Linux virtual machine using standard Debian 11 with only distribution provided packages? It gives general steps, all look valid. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8af23d828e8dbf13.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8af23d828e8dbf13.png Then you can prompt for concrete realization of individual steps. > Prepare SQL schema for the application. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/634ebd53d1fffd6c.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/634ebd53d1fffd6c.png > Print the schema in PostgreSQL SQL dialect. Add a command to create a database and load the schema to the database. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/d79b087afa9357a1.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/d79b087afa9357a1.png > Write PHP script to display login page and to allow the user to signup using the above schema. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/ff854f009480d3d9.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/ff854f009480d3d9.png > Rewrite the PHP script to use PosgreSQL PDO and fix SQL injection issues. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/740dc7b18b373e2f.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/740dc7b18b373e2f.png I mean, this is a bit more than a glorified Googlefu. Yesterday I gave it a small sample of a REST API schema description DSL I designed last month and told it to make another example of the similar schema description, and it created a perfectly formatted syntactically valid example that used syntactical elements correctly in contexts where it was not used in original example, but made sense to to use there. It used tokens that were not present in the original sample, but would make sense to use based on the context to a reasonable human, etc. It used documentation comments to document things in plain english. When I prompted it to translate documenation comments to other language, it did translate documentation comments only, etc. I told it to write asterisk PBX module in C that does add a SIP header containing some internal data from asterisk channel. And it kinda did get quite close. There are two SIP channel technologies in asterisk, and it picked the older one. I just told it to rewrite the code using pjsip channel tech (similarly to how I asked it above to switch to postgresql PDO in PHP), and it did. The requested code doesn't exist anywhere as is. I threw at it my private uncommented asterisk C module and told it to summarize what it does, and it did it pretty correctly. Random stuff like that. The mysql code it produced above is horribly insecure, of course, but: > Summarize issues in the above PHP code. Describe how to resolve them in plain english. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/2e77f8a69b3a0763.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/2e77f8a69b3a0763.png > Fix the code to resolve the issues. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/abd5830fb1aa4f9c.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/abd5830fb1aa4f9c.png Yeah, wtf!

by gsatic 4y ago

buremba 4y ago

OK, I get that you built such systems. Can you let us know about the other bots that can behave like a "8 years old"?

M4v3R 4y ago

So you're telling me that it's not mind-blowing, that we basically created artificial intelligence capable of solving general tasks at a level of a 8 year old human being? Because to me that is still pretty mind-blowing. And I'd argue it's probably at a level above that (but not much). When in your opinion it will finally be mind blowing? When it matches intelligence and skill of a 14 year old? 20 year old? 40?

omnicognate 4y ago
GPT is not at the level of an 8 year old human being and isn't even doing remotely the same thing as an 8 year old human being. GPT is mindblowing. It's a mindblowingly good predictive language model. It's an insanely, holy-fuck-I-never-thought-that-would-be-possible, amazingly good predictive language model. I'm thoroughly impressed. I just think it's not AGI, it's not close to AGI, it's not any kind of threat to jobs in programming (though maybe it could be in some fields) and it isn't likely to be any of these things any time soon. The claims that it is all these things (which you can see all over these threads) are what people are arguing against.

chrisbaker98 4y ago

> ChatGPT is like having a bunch of 8 year olds who know how to use Google hanging around. It astonishes me that people can dismiss ChatGPT like this. By your own account, there now exists an AI that can convincingly imitate a literate, technically fluent human child. That's an incredible advance that's far beyond anything that existed even a couple of years ago. How is it not amazing? I get the sense that if some of the commenters here had been around to witness the Wright Brothers' first flight they'd have been like "meh, that's not impressive, the only people whose mind it will blow are people who've never been in a hot air balloon."

FerociousTimes 4y ago
It's amazing. impressive and fascinating but not superhuman, at least not yet. Also, you can't really dismiss AI skeptics by associating them with denialists that don't see anything of quality or value of these creations despite all the evidence otherwise.
Winsaucerer 4y ago
In many cases, it does a lot better than 8 year olds with Google.
- NameError 4y ago
  I agree. I pasted a block of code from a personal project into the prompt, and asked it to add a simple-but-not-trivial frontend feature, in human language (e.g. "This button expands the sidebar and shows some clickable options. It should open a modal instead, and include a search bar which filters the available options"). It gave me working code which did something kind of like what I asked. After some back and forth where I asked for changes, it -almost- got it working. I had to make one manual CSS change. I don't think 8 year olds can do this - it feels more like an "instant junior developer" to me.
alchemist1e9 4y ago
Exactly which makes me think the egos are perhaps bruised. Yes obviously it will be wrong but using it you keep that in mind. To expand on the analogy it is like having an 8 year old around but unbelievably this 8 year old has literally read and remembered and basically “understood” everything about everything we collectively know. I’ve tested it with fairly esoteric questions about the technologies I work with and it gives excellent results for an 8 year old and extremely quickly about anything. I think it can significantly speedup technical work. I intent to try and have it help me this week and see how it goes.
- emehex 4y ago
  Framed differently: what would you (be able to) do, or (be able to) build with an infinite number of “8 year olds” at your disposal?

srge 4y ago

I want to be in this thread when it becomes the new infamous Dropbox thread

yesenadam 4y ago
Oh please, comparing ChatGPT to Dropbox is like comparing a tiny little puddle to a vast ocean. Dropbox was a revolutionary product that changed the way we store and share files, while ChatGPT is just a mediocre language model with no real-world impact. You must be living under a rock if you think they're even in the same league. > Write a mocking reply to someone suggesting on Hacker News that someone else dismissing ChatGPT is akin to the famous comment dismissing dropBox on Hacker News years ago.
- srge 4y ago
  Write a sarcastic HN comment trivializing a significant tech accomplishment in the space of conversational artificial intelligence : > Wow, another AI that can hold a conversation! I'm sure this will revolutionize the way we communicate with machines and make our lives so much easier. Definitely not a waste of time and resources at all. Keep up the impressive work!
- OhioMan2943 4y ago
  I picked it just before the end of the second sentence, 2/3 through. It's getting difficult to discern already. I wonder if it will deemphasise online forums.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  Put me in the screencap.
cesarvarela 4y ago
Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past and keep this thread focused on respectful and constructive discussion. Infamy is not something to strive for. Let's focus on the ideas and avoid personal attacks.

gjulianm 4y ago

I have been a little bit skeptic of exaggerated claims about AI, but I tried ChatGPT and I've been amazed. My trial was not searching for anything. I tried asking the AI to code an traffic capture program with DPDK. Funnily enough, it knew several alternatives to use the code. I could also ask him to fill in certain parts, add parsing code for the packets... It's definitely far better than a bunch of 8 year olds knowing how to use Google.

10xDev 4y ago
People seem to be especially impressed by code generation like people were with chess because we associate those tasks with intelligence but they are constrained environments with well defined rules and a lot of data. Anyone who has followed the progress of RL knows that strong performance in such conditions does not mean it is comparable to human intelligence or that current architecture will scale even close to general human intelligence. It is much more comparable to a calculator.
- allturtles 4y ago
  You are making what I think of as the standard "game move" of the AI skeptic. Chess-playing skill was considered a marker of intelligence, but then AI solved it, so it turns out it doesn't require "real" intelligence. 15 years later, neither does playing Jeopardy, it's "just" a clever Google search, that's not really intelligence. Now according to you, programming doesn't require real intelligence (and apparently neither does poetry writing, or essay writing, or any of the other things GPT can do). In a few years, perhaps we will discover that medicine, law, the social sciences, accounting, financial advice, and white collar work generally speaking don't require intelligence either, and the only things left that will require "real" intelligence will be the building trades and maybe truck driving.
  - 10xDev 4y ago
    No, again we just discovered it only does well in constrained environments with well defined rules and a lot of data. Either that or something subjective that it can afford a lot of inaccuracy without looking totally stupid. It literally can't generalise to some basic logic problems just like AlphaZero is not going to be cooking your meals anytime soon. If to you that's ok, fantastic. But to compare what we got so far to something intelligent rather than seeing it as more of a calculator then you are totally misrepresenting it.

SilkRoadie 4y ago

What is mind blowing for me is the ability for ChatGPT with limited context to generate content. "Write me a letter informing X about issue Y" will draft 3 paragraphs which typically articulates the problem very well. Asking it to make the response more or less formal or to focus on a specific point will instantly rewrite it as requested. I haven't delved too deeply but it is pretty good with code generation as well. "Write me a docker image that does X". "Let's use B instead of C." "I also require Z." It does a really solid job. With the OP's article. It is very impressive how it generates ideas and then is able to drill down and expand on them as more detailed questions are asked. Perhaps something already can do this.. it is first time I have seen it. My experience so far is that ChatGPT is generations ahead of current assistants. For a number of tasks it is faster and more useful than Google.

watoc 4y ago

What would impress you? A system that could answer any questions better than any current experts? Ok it's not always completely accurate and sometime plain wrong but still looks really impressive to me.

watoc 4y ago

Did you generate your comment with ChatGPT? I can't tell.

megous 4y ago

Dunno, you can start with the initial description in the TFA and continue prompting for more stuff, like: > How to implement such a system on a Linux virtual machine using standard Debian 11 with only distribution provided packages? It gives general steps, all look valid. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8af23d828e8dbf13.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8af23d828e8dbf13.png Then you can prompt for concrete realization of individual steps. > Prepare SQL schema for the application. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/634ebd53d1fffd6c.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/634ebd53d1fffd6c.png > Print the schema in PostgreSQL SQL dialect. Add a command to create a database and load the schema to the database. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/d79b087afa9357a1.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/d79b087afa9357a1.png > Write PHP script to display login page and to allow the user to signup using the above schema. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/ff854f009480d3d9.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/ff854f009480d3d9.png > Rewrite the PHP script to use PosgreSQL PDO and fix SQL injection issues. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/740dc7b18b373e2f.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/740dc7b18b373e2f.png I mean, this is a bit more than a glorified Googlefu. Yesterday I gave it a small sample of a REST API schema description DSL I designed last month and told it to make another example of the similar schema description, and it created a perfectly formatted syntactically valid example that used syntactical elements correctly in contexts where it was not used in original example, but made sense to to use there. It used tokens that were not present in the original sample, but would make sense to use based on the context to a reasonable human, etc. It used documentation comments to document things in plain english. When I prompted it to translate documenation comments to other language, it did translate documentation comments only, etc. I told it to write asterisk PBX module in C that does add a SIP header containing some internal data from asterisk channel. And it kinda did get quite close. There are two SIP channel technologies in asterisk, and it picked the older one. I just told it to rewrite the code using pjsip channel tech (similarly to how I asked it above to switch to postgresql PDO in PHP), and it did. The requested code doesn't exist anywhere as is. I threw at it my private uncommented asterisk C module and told it to summarize what it does, and it did it pretty correctly. Random stuff like that. The mysql code it produced above is horribly insecure, of course, but: > Summarize issues in the above PHP code. Describe how to resolve them in plain english. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/2e77f8a69b3a0763.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/2e77f8a69b3a0763.png > Fix the code to resolve the issues. https://megous.com/dl/tmp/abd5830fb1aa4f9c.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/abd5830fb1aa4f9c.png Yeah, wtf!