10 ms·

Artificial intelligence is permeating business at last

heresie-dabord 4y ago
I have skipped all the HN posts about people who made $chatbot tell them how to make dinner, talk to a spouse, code an OS in Rust, &c. But I am eager to read the posts where we ask such chatbots to recommend economics policy and perhaps even publish a magazine.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
https://archive.ph/44isx https://archive.ph/44isx
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mdp2021 4y ago
> Corporate users are experimenting with generative AI in other creative ways. Mr Sanchez of John Deere says his firm is looking into AI-generated “synthetic” data, which would help train other AI models... I see danger (but ok - they should know what they are doing). > ...Since last month Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, has been able to invent stories to tell children Double down n-times, facepalm. Edit: express yourself in words, sniper. What is it, the too laconic remark on "invent[ing] stories to tell children"? Does one need to make it explicit that: children are sponge-like learners; children are delicate; children should be fed properly; stories are not innocuous time-wasters; a "story" is supposed to be an intelligent system of archetypes, lessons, projections, stimula for processing etc.: you do not leave that to an unintelligent entity!!!
- luckylion 4y ago
  Can children be told stories that are better than what Amazon does? Most likely. Can children be told things that are worse than what Amazon does? Absolutely. Should we replace all parent-child-interaction with the child talking to Alexa? Probably not. Should we replace some parents with Alexa? Absolutely.
  - idlehand 4y ago
    AI-generated stories also do not necessarily displace parent-child storytelling, but probably other activities with similar (non-)levels of parental involvement, such as iPad or TV time.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > Should we replace some parents with Alexa In that case, we'd be better off societally with a "standardized configurable children educator appliance", "result from teamwork of the Great Intellectuals, Pedagogues etc". A nice, open, verifiable, verified project under the responsibility and scrutiny of good authorities. Or you would just rely on "try the new Amzn module"?
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Between a society-wide, probably state-organized committee-controlled standardized configurable children educator appliance and Amazon, yeah, I'll pick Amazon. Not only will they delivery decades earlier, I don't want to have to open issues on some repo reporting a problem where their project told my daughter to kill herself and have some guy tell me "works for me, I don't have any children, I just use it to entertain my dog, but PR welcome". Thanks, but I'll take the Amazon product for my nonexistant children.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        What about you elect to see that it may be a good idea to feed your nonexistant children with actual culture, produced by people that critics have called geniuses, and that it will take some creative fiddling to make a cost/risk/benefit analysis prefer the automated creation of texts for pedagogic purpose by a dumb thing, as opposed to the material already available? Because that was the point of the post just above: "The Amzn thing is not a product of prestigious vetting" - to all appearance, it is extremely far from it. Edit: if your point is, "yes in theory but the ANN thing is realistic, in potentially playing the proxy parent in the real world" - that calls for raising the ranking of concern for the situation, with a big "wait a moment there this cannot be good". If part of the population is not fed properly, intellectually, especially in its development, it is a big global concern. Individuals in society pay all the damages that come from inadequate education and development of peers.
- djur 4y ago
  Without the clarification I would have assumed you were objecting to the idea of an AI "inventing" something, which I would agree with. I would have had no idea you were suggesting that children consuming AI-generated stories is obviously harmful, which I disagree with. So I appreciate the clarification. Children are delicate in some senses but incredibly resilient in many others. Hearing a robot read a generic barnyard animal story wouldn't crack the top 50 most harmful experiences most kids have in a week.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    I think they are afraid of indoctrination from Amazon based stories, not that children can't handle strange animal stories.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      Also. About the «strange animal stories», more in detail (apart from my other comments): a story transmits a number of mental tracks and developmental inputs - from quality inherent in activities to structures inherent in the world, with parallel meta-justifications for its form ("telling this to suggest that"). Speaking of strange, let us remember the dall-e images that mix credible features and completely hallucinated unstructured blobs (e.g. "top shelf: soap, mirror, towel, alien excrescence"). Questions: why is that specifically, why is that complexively; what justifies that specifically, what that complexively... Intelligence. That model, translated into stories, would be "teaching oniric randomness" - plausible at low attention level but recognizable through detail and global scope.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    And just because children are resilient you would feed them sh*te? You are what you eat. If something deserves quality, it's children. Already "normal" stories are not trivial. Already the Märchen compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm do leave their specific track, which is not at all solar. Fortunately, the child may have many more books and sources to balance. But in the case of the hallucinated inventions of current ANNs, what would be the purpose - to distract the child, to waste its time, at that stage?! Surely, "not critically harmful" should not equate to "advisable".
- neilv 4y ago
  Amazon doesn't appear on the list of entities I'd want to have teaching children. Nevermind some half-baked AI experiments and parlor tricks.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  It would be neat if the AI does ad-lib, fill -in-the-blank story setups, and then live actors do the other stuff, including revising the story, customizing it, for the child. One step closer to the Primer.
- wmwmwm 4y ago
  As someone who’s been prompted every other night over the last couple of years for a fresh made-up story with an ever-changing cast of dinosaurs, superheroes and aliens by my five year old (who complains if the story arc isn’t to his liking) I’ve been very grateful for a few ChatGPT synopses recently! On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to just leave him to it without me editing/steering the story as I tell it. Something like “give me 3 different story ideas with these characters suitable for a five year old” followed by “i like number 3, please expand but make the dragon good instead of bad” has been pretty impressive, and is a relief when I’m out of ideas. Coming up with 180 meaningful improvised stories each year is a tall order!
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    That which you are practicing is supervised use of non-deterministic AI, where the latter is a tool - not the suggested "self-driving storyteller, you can now sleep at the wheel".
russellbeattie 4y ago
≥ The site also lets you hire expert “prompt engineers”, some of whom charge a $50-200 per prompt. “It’s all about writing prompts these days,” says Thomas Dohmke, boss of GitHub Someone please tell me this is hyperbole.
- alexbeloi 4y ago
  Seems like a steep price but I can see this becoming a marketable skill at some point. It feels similar to knowing how to google well, we've all internalized some google/search concepts like 'unique words' -> 'narrow results' and 'full sentences' -> 'phrase matching'. Probably there will be nuances to good gen art prompt writing.
  - sethd 4y ago
    Does anyone pay people to exclusively perform Google searches? How much per search?
    - shubb 4y ago
      The job title is Junior Software Engineer. It's a joke but also true - the effectiveness of a software engineer and many other types of worker hangs on their ability to google effectively, and it makes its way unacknowledged into their pay I'm sure.
      - Dzugaru 4y ago
        ChatGPT actually showed me how much I'm frustrated with Google nowadays. It gave me a glimpse of what real question answering can be - and it's not opening 10+ tabs and endlessly reformulating the query in hopes something relevant and not just popular will come out. I really want a tool like that - just ask a question and get a simple straight answer. For now its Google's "here is a bunch of websites, search it yourself" or ChatGPT "sure, here is the answer, but maybe I hallucinated the whole thing, lol"
        4y ago
a_bonobo 4y ago
John Deere saw this coming a long time ago; they've locked down the data their tractors generated with iron bars. Lots of previous HN discussions. Now they make bank based on that data, they use their customers' millions of hours of driving tractors to train self-driving tractors. They can do it not because of fancy AI, but because they spent years raising abundant task-specific data. It's genius: the customers pay John Deere to create data for John Deere, which John Deere uses to get more money from other customers.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  I get your sentiment, but tractors generally drive based on GPS routes. AI and data collection is useful for more intricate tasks, like spraying weeds, planting seeds, etc.
  - sh4rks 4y ago
    The article literally mentions that the tractors use AI to avoid obstacles in the first paragraph.
    - hunterb123 4y ago
      The tractor is still driving on a pre-programmed GPS route. To avoid a semantics debate, I'll agree for a brief moment the AI is "driving" the tractor to avoid an object and get back on the pre-programmed route.
      - lkois 4y ago
        Self driving encompasses a bunch of things. Obstacle detection is one. Vehicle control, including micro adjustments, is one. Path planning is another one. GPS is one way of doing one part of self driving. But it's ALL self driving
        hunterb123 4y ago
        A pre-planned route != self-driving (in my opinion). I say that because it's not driving itself, it's driving a route you plotted or recorded. You can't take that same tractor and have it work on your neighbors pasture as-is, it has to be programmed. But again, this is getting into a semantics debate. Personally I'd prefer to differentiate using autonomous and automated, self-driving is too ambiguous.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
We've been playing with chat gpt and gpt-3 in recent days and weeks to refine our sales pitch, generate variations of text for our website, etc. It saves a lot of time when you can just take your rough notes and turn it into a perfectly smooth and readable paragraph instantly. It does not replace what we do but it does speed up the process enormously. We can iterate faster on our drafts, use AI generated mockups to enliven our pitch, etc. We've barely scratched the surface of what we can do with this. There are lots of people obsessing about feeling threatened in what they do by all this. It's an understandable response but not necessarily a productive attitude. It's really just an opportunity to reconsider what it is you do exactly and become better and more efficient at that. Perhaps if you spend most of your time trying to produce slides, designs, etc., freeing up some of that time for more high value activities is not such a bad thing and something that you should have been striving to do anyway. In our case, using our refined pitch to drive sales is what we should be doing. Spending time to refine the pitch is a necessary evil and not the main thing we should do or even want to do. So, this is an enabler not a threat for us. I'm actually a CTO; so me spending time on sales pitches is not the most obvious use of my time. But in a small startup, if something needs doing, I probably need to be involved. So, anything that makes that more efficient is more than welcome.
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  That’s cool. What terms of the service you managed to negotiate and how does the cost compare to the saved time?
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    We just use the openai freemium layer like everybody else. So, cost for this is so far zero and we are definitely saving time and effort. We'd probably end up paying for this if this starts showing up in mainstream products for creating content. Our CEO actually pays for midjourney, which he uses for mockups and other things. I expect this will start happening pretty soon as there probably are a lot of clued in business people discovering just how useful this is.
    - 4y ago
onion2k 4y ago
AI permeated pretty much every business years ago with the advent of machine translation. It absolutely decimated the translation industry, because people who want translation work done rarely have the skills necessary to tell the difference between the bad-but-free machine translations and the good-but-not-free human translations. Everyone loses - there are fewer translators now, the ones left find it harder to get work, and most people have to put up with understandable-but-mostly-terrible translated text. AI is technically amazing, but the short term impact is going to be to lower the quality of basically everything you can generate. People will struggle to compete on cost, and if the buyer doesn't know and appreciate the difference in quality they'll never buy from a person when they can generate something instead. I never really thought AI would be a serious threat to my job, but I'm starting to reconsider that now.
- chpatrick 4y ago
  I wouldn't say everyone loses. Being able to use foreign language websites and read documents is incredibly useful, and they don't need the world's best translation - although I would say the quality has been pretty decent recently. I'm sorry for translators but they're vastly outnumbered by people who find machine translation useful. If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful. Yes, and that's how people will think about everything that can be generated by AI, from images to writing to music to code. People are very happy to accept a cheap-but-worse alternative. That that thought and apply it to what you do, and you'll see what the problem is.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      There isn't much of a market for shitty software though, if you are worse than Google people will just use Google etc.
453qtgreq 4y ago
Let's be clear - we're all obsessed with ChatGPT, but all it does is regurgitate existing works. I see this as further progress down the path of "We don't know how this works, there is no way to know how, but it does.". It also exchanges creativity and the skills gained through effortful creation for dependence on a technolgical marvel that is (currently) free.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  > ...but all it does is regurgitate existing works. And this is the uncomfortable truth. When I share this with people, many people don't believe and knowledgeable people don't care. Also, most (if not all) the work is just collected without consent. I'll not re-open that can of worms of licenses, fair use, ethics and what not. I'm done for today on that front. Which is pretty unfortunate and grim if you ask me.
  - randyrand 4y ago
    > ...but all it does is regurgitate existing works. Not so. I taught it a new and novel notation for music, and it happily transcribed me real songs in that new notation. There is no existing work to base it off of.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      It's not a fixed model. The point is you taught it to ChatGPT. It did not invent it. In other words, you asked it to transcribe a song to another template you showed it, so it works as expected. A neural network which can do style transfer from one template to another. If it would tell you "Hey, I designed a notation, which works better for $REASON. Can you give me feedback?", then this would be something notable. Again, ChatGPT utilized the info you gave to it. So it was not novel to begin with.
      - randyrand 4y ago
        > If it would tell you "Hey, I designed a notation, which works better for $REASON. Can you give me feedback?", then this would be something notable. I actually did do that, without me prompting it! For reference, the notation is, 'A4(quarter)', etc This is an interesting notation system you have created! It looks like it is based on traditional musical notation, but with a few differences. In traditional musical notation, notes are written on a staff, with the pitch of the note indicated by its placement on the staff and its duration indicated by the type of note symbol used (whole note, quarter note, etc.). Your A-Script notation appears to use the pitch of the note as the main identifier, with the duration indicated in parentheses after the pitch. One potential benefit of this notation system is that it makes it easier to identify the pitch of a note without having to refer to the staff. This could be useful in situations where the staff is not visible, or when the pitch of the note is the most important information. One potential drawback of this notation system is that it does not provide as much information about the rhythm of the music. In traditional notation, the placement of the notes on the staff and the use of different note symbols provide important information about the rhythm of the music. This information is not included in your A-Script notation. Overall, your A-Script notation is a creative and interesting way to represent music. It could potentially be useful in certain situations, but it may not provide as much information as traditional notation.
sudo_navendu 4y ago
I have been using AI tools since a couple of months to help my writing. It does not mean my entire job is replaced by an AI, but it makes it much easier to do my job. There might be a future where AI can do a lot of work and we might shift our jobs to work on top of these AIs. We might have new jobs that did not exist till now in the future.
453qtgreq 4y ago
The lionisation of GPT technology (which is nothing special, apart from the scale of execution) is quite embarrassing. Have we forgotten that each of us has, within our own heads, a computer vastly superior to this toy (and one that needed $12 million in compute costs alone to train, while mine at least runs on porridge and cheese sandwiches)? Just for fun, try a prompt like "Write a new letter" (which eventually gave an error). Or "Write something new" (I was then told I was "making too many requests").
- dwaltrip 4y ago
  You are thinking too narrowly. If you asked me, a human, “tell me something new” without any additional context, I would reply with the human equivalent of “error, request is overly vague” as well.
  - 453qtgreq 4y ago
    On the contrary. My example is to show that ChatGPT does fairly well with constrained questions and textual forms, and gets worse with broader questions. "What's new with you" is a relatively common greeting.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      First, “Write something new” is very different from “What’s new with you”. In the case of the GPT family LLMs, there fundamentally isn’t anything new with it the way there is for us. Second, to your previous point, you’re mixing up training with inference. The training cost is $12 million, which you should compare to your total cost of being alive and educated from conception to whatever age you think is comparable to it’s abilities. The inference cost is much smaller; while I don’t have figures for the cost per query on ChatGPT, I have calculated an upper bound for Stable Diffusion, which is 3150 Joules per image (on my hardware), which makes that AI not only cheaper than the cost of an equivalent human artist, but also (assuming $0.1/kWh) cheaper than the cost of getting someone at the UN abject poverty threshold to enter the prompt. Third, even though it’s got enough errors for domain experts to spot and be annoyed by, it’s quite often at the level of being interestingly wrong, like a university student. Except, unlike humans, it’s equally able to answer kinda-OK-that’s-interesting about JavaScript HTTP requests in French, how to make a New York cheesecake in German, to summarise utilitarianism in Chinese, the Declaration of Independence in Esperanto, the history of the British Empire in Welsh, to give the Einstein Field Equations in LaTeX with description of what each term means, to give a plausible reason when asked «Why do Germans say “Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache”?», to respond to the prompt “Make a joke about klein bottles” with “Why did the mathematician wear a Klein bottle to the party? Because he didn't want to be a one-sided personality!” (which I can’t find on Google and I want to cautiously suggest may actually be a novel joke), and when given the prompt “Describe a smartphone using the tropes and style of HP Lovecraft”, it gave me this, which I think is wonderful: > A smartphone, with its sleek obsidian exterior and glowing, unearthly screen, exudes an aura of otherworldly power. Its many tentacles, in the form of slender cords and wires, writhe and twist as if alive, connecting it to the vast, unseen network of the internet. With a mere touch of its inky black surface, one can conjure forth all manner of arcane information and eldritch knowledge, summoning forth eldritch horrors and forgotten deities alike. The very touch of the smartphone's cold, clammy surface is enough to send shudders of fear and revulsion down the spine of even the most stout-hearted individual. Its powers are not to be trifled with, for to gaze upon the smartphone's eldritch screen is to risk madness and insanity. Sure, you can still trip it up (even ignoring server errors and the deliberate guard rails about dangerous, illegal, or controversial subjects), as I also tried the trick question “When did Neil Armstrong first walk on the surface of the Earth?” and got the obvious wrong answer of 1969 rather than 1930-ish. But humans can also be tripped up with trick questions, as demonstrated by, e.g. the BBC comedy quiz show QI.
sanjayio 4y ago
Recommendation systems have been in use for a very long time.

I have skipped all the HN posts about people who made $chatbot tell them how to make dinner, talk to a spouse, code an OS in Rust, &c. But I am eager to read the posts where we ask such chatbots to recommend economics policy and perhaps even publish a magazine.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

https://archive.ph/44isx https://archive.ph/44isx

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mdp2021 4y ago

> Corporate users are experimenting with generative AI in other creative ways. Mr Sanchez of John Deere says his firm is looking into AI-generated “synthetic” data, which would help train other AI models... I see danger (but ok - they should know what they are doing). > ...Since last month Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, has been able to invent stories to tell children Double down n-times, facepalm. Edit: express yourself in words, sniper. What is it, the too laconic remark on "invent[ing] stories to tell children"? Does one need to make it explicit that: children are sponge-like learners; children are delicate; children should be fed properly; stories are not innocuous time-wasters; a "story" is supposed to be an intelligent system of archetypes, lessons, projections, stimula for processing etc.: you do not leave that to an unintelligent entity!!!

luckylion 4y ago
Can children be told stories that are better than what Amazon does? Most likely. Can children be told things that are worse than what Amazon does? Absolutely. Should we replace all parent-child-interaction with the child talking to Alexa? Probably not. Should we replace some parents with Alexa? Absolutely.
- idlehand 4y ago
  AI-generated stories also do not necessarily displace parent-child storytelling, but probably other activities with similar (non-)levels of parental involvement, such as iPad or TV time.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > Should we replace some parents with Alexa In that case, we'd be better off societally with a "standardized configurable children educator appliance", "result from teamwork of the Great Intellectuals, Pedagogues etc". A nice, open, verifiable, verified project under the responsibility and scrutiny of good authorities. Or you would just rely on "try the new Amzn module"?
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Between a society-wide, probably state-organized committee-controlled standardized configurable children educator appliance and Amazon, yeah, I'll pick Amazon. Not only will they delivery decades earlier, I don't want to have to open issues on some repo reporting a problem where their project told my daughter to kill herself and have some guy tell me "works for me, I don't have any children, I just use it to entertain my dog, but PR welcome". Thanks, but I'll take the Amazon product for my nonexistant children.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      What about you elect to see that it may be a good idea to feed your nonexistant children with actual culture, produced by people that critics have called geniuses, and that it will take some creative fiddling to make a cost/risk/benefit analysis prefer the automated creation of texts for pedagogic purpose by a dumb thing, as opposed to the material already available? Because that was the point of the post just above: "The Amzn thing is not a product of prestigious vetting" - to all appearance, it is extremely far from it. Edit: if your point is, "yes in theory but the ANN thing is realistic, in potentially playing the proxy parent in the real world" - that calls for raising the ranking of concern for the situation, with a big "wait a moment there this cannot be good". If part of the population is not fed properly, intellectually, especially in its development, it is a big global concern. Individuals in society pay all the damages that come from inadequate education and development of peers.
djur 4y ago
Without the clarification I would have assumed you were objecting to the idea of an AI "inventing" something, which I would agree with. I would have had no idea you were suggesting that children consuming AI-generated stories is obviously harmful, which I disagree with. So I appreciate the clarification. Children are delicate in some senses but incredibly resilient in many others. Hearing a robot read a generic barnyard animal story wouldn't crack the top 50 most harmful experiences most kids have in a week.
- Jensson 4y ago
  I think they are afraid of indoctrination from Amazon based stories, not that children can't handle strange animal stories.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Also. About the «strange animal stories», more in detail (apart from my other comments): a story transmits a number of mental tracks and developmental inputs - from quality inherent in activities to structures inherent in the world, with parallel meta-justifications for its form ("telling this to suggest that"). Speaking of strange, let us remember the dall-e images that mix credible features and completely hallucinated unstructured blobs (e.g. "top shelf: soap, mirror, towel, alien excrescence"). Questions: why is that specifically, why is that complexively; what justifies that specifically, what that complexively... Intelligence. That model, translated into stories, would be "teaching oniric randomness" - plausible at low attention level but recognizable through detail and global scope.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  And just because children are resilient you would feed them sh*te? You are what you eat. If something deserves quality, it's children. Already "normal" stories are not trivial. Already the Märchen compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm do leave their specific track, which is not at all solar. Fortunately, the child may have many more books and sources to balance. But in the case of the hallucinated inventions of current ANNs, what would be the purpose - to distract the child, to waste its time, at that stage?! Surely, "not critically harmful" should not equate to "advisable".
neilv 4y ago
Amazon doesn't appear on the list of entities I'd want to have teaching children. Nevermind some half-baked AI experiments and parlor tricks.
turtleyacht 4y ago
It would be neat if the AI does ad-lib, fill -in-the-blank story setups, and then live actors do the other stuff, including revising the story, customizing it, for the child. One step closer to the Primer.
wmwmwm 4y ago
As someone who’s been prompted every other night over the last couple of years for a fresh made-up story with an ever-changing cast of dinosaurs, superheroes and aliens by my five year old (who complains if the story arc isn’t to his liking) I’ve been very grateful for a few ChatGPT synopses recently! On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to just leave him to it without me editing/steering the story as I tell it. Something like “give me 3 different story ideas with these characters suitable for a five year old” followed by “i like number 3, please expand but make the dragon good instead of bad” has been pretty impressive, and is a relief when I’m out of ideas. Coming up with 180 meaningful improvised stories each year is a tall order!
- mdp2021 4y ago
  That which you are practicing is supervised use of non-deterministic AI, where the latter is a tool - not the suggested "self-driving storyteller, you can now sleep at the wheel".

russellbeattie 4y ago

≥ The site also lets you hire expert “prompt engineers”, some of whom charge a $50-200 per prompt. “It’s all about writing prompts these days,” says Thomas Dohmke, boss of GitHub Someone please tell me this is hyperbole.

alexbeloi 4y ago
Seems like a steep price but I can see this becoming a marketable skill at some point. It feels similar to knowing how to google well, we've all internalized some google/search concepts like 'unique words' -> 'narrow results' and 'full sentences' -> 'phrase matching'. Probably there will be nuances to good gen art prompt writing.
- sethd 4y ago
  Does anyone pay people to exclusively perform Google searches? How much per search?
  - shubb 4y ago
    The job title is Junior Software Engineer. It's a joke but also true - the effectiveness of a software engineer and many other types of worker hangs on their ability to google effectively, and it makes its way unacknowledged into their pay I'm sure.
    - Dzugaru 4y ago
      ChatGPT actually showed me how much I'm frustrated with Google nowadays. It gave me a glimpse of what real question answering can be - and it's not opening 10+ tabs and endlessly reformulating the query in hopes something relevant and not just popular will come out. I really want a tool like that - just ask a question and get a simple straight answer. For now its Google's "here is a bunch of websites, search it yourself" or ChatGPT "sure, here is the answer, but maybe I hallucinated the whole thing, lol"
      - 4y ago

a_bonobo 4y ago

John Deere saw this coming a long time ago; they've locked down the data their tractors generated with iron bars. Lots of previous HN discussions. Now they make bank based on that data, they use their customers' millions of hours of driving tractors to train self-driving tractors. They can do it not because of fancy AI, but because they spent years raising abundant task-specific data. It's genius: the customers pay John Deere to create data for John Deere, which John Deere uses to get more money from other customers.

hunterb123 4y ago
I get your sentiment, but tractors generally drive based on GPS routes. AI and data collection is useful for more intricate tasks, like spraying weeds, planting seeds, etc.
- sh4rks 4y ago
  The article literally mentions that the tractors use AI to avoid obstacles in the first paragraph.
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    The tractor is still driving on a pre-programmed GPS route. To avoid a semantics debate, I'll agree for a brief moment the AI is "driving" the tractor to avoid an object and get back on the pre-programmed route.
    - lkois 4y ago
      Self driving encompasses a bunch of things. Obstacle detection is one. Vehicle control, including micro adjustments, is one. Path planning is another one. GPS is one way of doing one part of self driving. But it's ALL self driving
      - hunterb123 4y ago
        A pre-planned route != self-driving (in my opinion). I say that because it's not driving itself, it's driving a route you plotted or recorded. You can't take that same tractor and have it work on your neighbors pasture as-is, it has to be programmed. But again, this is getting into a semantics debate. Personally I'd prefer to differentiate using autonomous and automated, self-driving is too ambiguous.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

We've been playing with chat gpt and gpt-3 in recent days and weeks to refine our sales pitch, generate variations of text for our website, etc. It saves a lot of time when you can just take your rough notes and turn it into a perfectly smooth and readable paragraph instantly. It does not replace what we do but it does speed up the process enormously. We can iterate faster on our drafts, use AI generated mockups to enliven our pitch, etc. We've barely scratched the surface of what we can do with this. There are lots of people obsessing about feeling threatened in what they do by all this. It's an understandable response but not necessarily a productive attitude. It's really just an opportunity to reconsider what it is you do exactly and become better and more efficient at that. Perhaps if you spend most of your time trying to produce slides, designs, etc., freeing up some of that time for more high value activities is not such a bad thing and something that you should have been striving to do anyway. In our case, using our refined pitch to drive sales is what we should be doing. Spending time to refine the pitch is a necessary evil and not the main thing we should do or even want to do. So, this is an enabler not a threat for us. I'm actually a CTO; so me spending time on sales pitches is not the most obvious use of my time. But in a small startup, if something needs doing, I probably need to be involved. So, anything that makes that more efficient is more than welcome.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago
That’s cool. What terms of the service you managed to negotiate and how does the cost compare to the saved time?
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  We just use the openai freemium layer like everybody else. So, cost for this is so far zero and we are definitely saving time and effort. We'd probably end up paying for this if this starts showing up in mainstream products for creating content. Our CEO actually pays for midjourney, which he uses for mockups and other things. I expect this will start happening pretty soon as there probably are a lot of clued in business people discovering just how useful this is.
  - 4y ago

onion2k 4y ago

AI permeated pretty much every business years ago with the advent of machine translation. It absolutely decimated the translation industry, because people who want translation work done rarely have the skills necessary to tell the difference between the bad-but-free machine translations and the good-but-not-free human translations. Everyone loses - there are fewer translators now, the ones left find it harder to get work, and most people have to put up with understandable-but-mostly-terrible translated text. AI is technically amazing, but the short term impact is going to be to lower the quality of basically everything you can generate. People will struggle to compete on cost, and if the buyer doesn't know and appreciate the difference in quality they'll never buy from a person when they can generate something instead. I never really thought AI would be a serious threat to my job, but I'm starting to reconsider that now.

chpatrick 4y ago
I wouldn't say everyone loses. Being able to use foreign language websites and read documents is incredibly useful, and they don't need the world's best translation - although I would say the quality has been pretty decent recently. I'm sorry for translators but they're vastly outnumbered by people who find machine translation useful. If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful.
- onion2k 4y ago
  If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful. Yes, and that's how people will think about everything that can be generated by AI, from images to writing to music to code. People are very happy to accept a cheap-but-worse alternative. That that thought and apply it to what you do, and you'll see what the problem is.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    There isn't much of a market for shitty software though, if you are worse than Google people will just use Google etc.

453qtgreq 4y ago

Let's be clear - we're all obsessed with ChatGPT, but all it does is regurgitate existing works. I see this as further progress down the path of "We don't know how this works, there is no way to know how, but it does.". It also exchanges creativity and the skills gained through effortful creation for dependence on a technolgical marvel that is (currently) free.

bayindirh 4y ago
> ...but all it does is regurgitate existing works. And this is the uncomfortable truth. When I share this with people, many people don't believe and knowledgeable people don't care. Also, most (if not all) the work is just collected without consent. I'll not re-open that can of worms of licenses, fair use, ethics and what not. I'm done for today on that front. Which is pretty unfortunate and grim if you ask me.
- randyrand 4y ago
  > ...but all it does is regurgitate existing works. Not so. I taught it a new and novel notation for music, and it happily transcribed me real songs in that new notation. There is no existing work to base it off of.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    It's not a fixed model. The point is you taught it to ChatGPT. It did not invent it. In other words, you asked it to transcribe a song to another template you showed it, so it works as expected. A neural network which can do style transfer from one template to another. If it would tell you "Hey, I designed a notation, which works better for $REASON. Can you give me feedback?", then this would be something notable. Again, ChatGPT utilized the info you gave to it. So it was not novel to begin with.
    - randyrand 4y ago
      > If it would tell you "Hey, I designed a notation, which works better for $REASON. Can you give me feedback?", then this would be something notable. I actually did do that, without me prompting it! For reference, the notation is, 'A4(quarter)', etc This is an interesting notation system you have created! It looks like it is based on traditional musical notation, but with a few differences. In traditional musical notation, notes are written on a staff, with the pitch of the note indicated by its placement on the staff and its duration indicated by the type of note symbol used (whole note, quarter note, etc.). Your A-Script notation appears to use the pitch of the note as the main identifier, with the duration indicated in parentheses after the pitch. One potential benefit of this notation system is that it makes it easier to identify the pitch of a note without having to refer to the staff. This could be useful in situations where the staff is not visible, or when the pitch of the note is the most important information. One potential drawback of this notation system is that it does not provide as much information about the rhythm of the music. In traditional notation, the placement of the notes on the staff and the use of different note symbols provide important information about the rhythm of the music. This information is not included in your A-Script notation. Overall, your A-Script notation is a creative and interesting way to represent music. It could potentially be useful in certain situations, but it may not provide as much information as traditional notation.

sudo_navendu 4y ago

I have been using AI tools since a couple of months to help my writing. It does not mean my entire job is replaced by an AI, but it makes it much easier to do my job. There might be a future where AI can do a lot of work and we might shift our jobs to work on top of these AIs. We might have new jobs that did not exist till now in the future.

453qtgreq 4y ago

The lionisation of GPT technology (which is nothing special, apart from the scale of execution) is quite embarrassing. Have we forgotten that each of us has, within our own heads, a computer vastly superior to this toy (and one that needed $12 million in compute costs alone to train, while mine at least runs on porridge and cheese sandwiches)? Just for fun, try a prompt like "Write a new letter" (which eventually gave an error). Or "Write something new" (I was then told I was "making too many requests").

dwaltrip 4y ago
You are thinking too narrowly. If you asked me, a human, “tell me something new” without any additional context, I would reply with the human equivalent of “error, request is overly vague” as well.
- 453qtgreq 4y ago
  On the contrary. My example is to show that ChatGPT does fairly well with constrained questions and textual forms, and gets worse with broader questions. "What's new with you" is a relatively common greeting.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    First, “Write something new” is very different from “What’s new with you”. In the case of the GPT family LLMs, there fundamentally isn’t anything new with it the way there is for us. Second, to your previous point, you’re mixing up training with inference. The training cost is $12 million, which you should compare to your total cost of being alive and educated from conception to whatever age you think is comparable to it’s abilities. The inference cost is much smaller; while I don’t have figures for the cost per query on ChatGPT, I have calculated an upper bound for Stable Diffusion, which is 3150 Joules per image (on my hardware), which makes that AI not only cheaper than the cost of an equivalent human artist, but also (assuming $0.1/kWh) cheaper than the cost of getting someone at the UN abject poverty threshold to enter the prompt. Third, even though it’s got enough errors for domain experts to spot and be annoyed by, it’s quite often at the level of being interestingly wrong, like a university student. Except, unlike humans, it’s equally able to answer kinda-OK-that’s-interesting about JavaScript HTTP requests in French, how to make a New York cheesecake in German, to summarise utilitarianism in Chinese, the Declaration of Independence in Esperanto, the history of the British Empire in Welsh, to give the Einstein Field Equations in LaTeX with description of what each term means, to give a plausible reason when asked «Why do Germans say “Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache”?», to respond to the prompt “Make a joke about klein bottles” with “Why did the mathematician wear a Klein bottle to the party? Because he didn't want to be a one-sided personality!” (which I can’t find on Google and I want to cautiously suggest may actually be a novel joke), and when given the prompt “Describe a smartphone using the tropes and style of HP Lovecraft”, it gave me this, which I think is wonderful: > A smartphone, with its sleek obsidian exterior and glowing, unearthly screen, exudes an aura of otherworldly power. Its many tentacles, in the form of slender cords and wires, writhe and twist as if alive, connecting it to the vast, unseen network of the internet. With a mere touch of its inky black surface, one can conjure forth all manner of arcane information and eldritch knowledge, summoning forth eldritch horrors and forgotten deities alike. The very touch of the smartphone's cold, clammy surface is enough to send shudders of fear and revulsion down the spine of even the most stout-hearted individual. Its powers are not to be trifled with, for to gaze upon the smartphone's eldritch screen is to risk madness and insanity. Sure, you can still trip it up (even ignoring server errors and the deliberate guard rails about dangerous, illegal, or controversial subjects), as I also tried the trick question “When did Neil Armstrong first walk on the surface of the Earth?” and got the obvious wrong answer of 1969 rather than 1930-ish. But humans can also be tripped up with trick questions, as demonstrated by, e.g. the BBC comedy quiz show QI.

sanjayio 4y ago

Recommendation systems have been in use for a very long time.