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So.. I must say that GPT, and the current moment more broadly, are very exciting. People are rushing around trying to find practical uses for ChatGPT. I think

So.. I must say that GPT, and the current moment more broadly, are very exciting. People are rushing around trying to find practical uses for ChatGPT. I think this time they'll finally start finding them, probably a lot of them. I think this is one of those dam bursting points. The difference between GPT3 and ChatGPT, to me, suggests a lot. Writing code, writing documents, reading them... search... lots of things are about to change fast. The conversation leaked by this microsoft mole is happening in a lot of places. If you can't think of things worth trying to build with GPT... you need to take a bath and try again.^ Bonus points if you can get GPT to code it for you. There are, absolutely, spectres hanging over this stuff. Monopoly, centralisation, nontrasparency is expected. Career anxiety. Skynet is not out of the question. Lots of reasons for trepidation. That said, ATM, I'm mostly excited. This technology is amazing, and it is about to spill out into the world. ^I want a reference book that works as a cascade. A table of contents (or title even) at the top end. Click in for a chapter abstract, then summary, etc. Concise at the top, detailed at the bottom.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
I feel much more like ChatGPT is basically the same as Tesla's autopilot. Wonderful and seems like a huge advancement, but as it's actually applied to situations we see how banal and limited it actually is. But loads of crypto-bro types will make millions selling ChatGPT "modernization consulting", so if you're looking to make a quick buck, highly recommend.
- verelo 4y ago
  I think there’s a difference here. There are cases I’ve found for minor manual tasks, things like real estate listings with some basic programmatically created prompts containing details of a listing. Imo the largest holdback is context. I have some problems that would be amazingly well solved if i could hand gpt3 a whole large document and ask it questions about the document.
  - machiaweliczny 4y ago
    This thing of read that book for me and answer questions would be very useful.
- redorb 4y ago
  ChatGPT is already 10x more useful than crypto and NFTS. The foundational value of ChapGPT is not based on speculation or selling it to the 'next fool'.
  - Jiocus 4y ago
    You are right, of course; The foundational (technical) value isn't based on speculation but that is irrelevant to con-artists or crime organisations who are looking for their next hype product to drive a new round of frauds. The people I see most enthusiastic about the current AI development are not the technologist and developers, but people who aren't involved in tech and doesn't code. There's already adverts on social media for ChatGPT AI services of various trustworthiness. They claim their AIs can construct and implement “the” winning trading algorithms for anyone, for a fee, of course. This issue isn't on GPT per se, but many can't yet see the difference between plausible applications and those which aren't. With each fantastical story about what ChatGPT managed to do, it's hard to blame them.
  - uuvs8 4y ago
    Is it actually? It doesn't give out reliable information and its "creativity" is questionable. Most of the excitement about it has to do with anthropomorphizing a robot that "feels" like an intelligent conversation partner, but it's not. Beyond toys, that is. Similar to crypto. It isn't actually useful as a currency or to store value. Most of the excitemeny had to do with fake "freedom" dreams of the anarchically-leaning crowd and misunderstandings of what it is and isn't. Beyond toys, that is. I see lots of parallels actually.
    - nickthegreek 4y ago
      ChatGPT has real value to me. Ive been using it for my d&d games and to do some simple writing stuff that I hate. It costs me nothing, and I don't have to gamble to use it. Its value over crypto for me and my friends is exponential. Stable Diffusion has been even more valuable for me and I get to run that on my own metal.
    - adamsmith143 4y ago
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Autopilot is playing out that way because there are a really large number of corner cases and fringe complexity to driving, and the consequences of getting things wrong are very expensive. Most uses of ChatGPT will (at least initially) be around automating the easy stuff, and if it gets something wrong it'll be a mild annoyance.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I think people don't realize how many corner cases there are in coding. I think that the problems people have with accounting for all the Autopilot corner cases is going to be repeated with code generation as well.
    - gitfan86 4y ago
      That is true, but think about domains like Advertisements. Ads are currently far from perfect. A 5% click rate is a huge success. If 30% of the ads generated are low quality but 10% do really well it will be a huge benefit
      - iamflimflam1 4y ago
        Exactly, generating moderately decent advertising copy will be really helpful. Even just to start the creative process going. "Here's a description of my product, give me 5 potential tag lines for it." It's a great start for brain storming.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Even there the corner case failures are going to be amazing if we're throwing up AI generated Ads onto billboards indiscriminately. "So it seems our blacklist didn't include the word 'Hilter'...."
      - notahacker 4y ago
        Ad text sounds like the exact opposite of a significant use case really; very little text to generate and high cost from the text being substandard. If 30% of the ads generated are low quality, you're wasting 30% of your ad budget, which is less efficient than paying a human to come up with higher average quality text (unless you're generating unique copy on the fly to evade spam detectors...). Just because current ads are far from perfect doesn't mean generated text isn't on average more banal and less accurate... I think the main use case for pure LLMs will remain those already starting to be tackled by AI: low importance (or testable) information/opinion retrieval, low effort content generation, suggestion prompts and entertainment
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  I already use chatGPT in place of google sometimes. It has upsides and downsides, but I absolutely find it to be useful given the right prompt. Not sure how they will scale it to bing level but if they’re able to respond with both chatGPT response and the normal links I think it’d be a better product.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Couldn't agree more, it's like a "cool trick". I havent' found it really useful for anything except some initial novelty / amusement. I've not opened that tab for weeks.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > Couldn't agree more, it's like a "cool trick". I havent' found it really useful for anything except some initial novelty / amusement. I've not opened that tab for weeks. Same, during the update it just kept crashing and afterward it just seem way too prone to errors to be usable; their have been funny prompts Ive seen thrown around but the novelty wore off just like it did with Dall-E as you saw how many attempts you had to make to get to something viable and more competitors came online: Stable Diffusion. This will keep the AI hype going so I'm not complaining, as a person who studies AI/ML, but it's hardly the miracle they are making it out to be. Perhaps that changes with GPT4, but I fear that sourcing is now becoming critical and just like Co-pilot it will encounter a lot of scrutiny before they can monetize it properly and open source projects will emerge to take market share.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > But loads of crypto-bro types will make millions selling ChatGPT "modernization consulting", so if you're looking to make a quick buck, highly recommend. You guys will attribute anything under the sun to 'crypto-bros' at this point, it's HN's version of boomers 'must be the fault of the millennials,' which is ironic considering how many of you fall into the age group. Furthermore, Sam Altman, former head of YC oversaw the funding of Coinbase which is now the largest crypto exchange in the US, and who himself tried to launch Worldcoin [0]. Which, yes is a (failed) crypto-currency and is also the head of OpenAI, which has created Dall-E and GPT. Listen, I'm all for calling out scammers and have done it after over 10 years in this space, but the level of disillusion and absurd levels of paranoia amongst so many of you to constantly remind us all how 'crypto-bros' are lurking in every corner and under every rock just waiting to pounce on the opportunity to scam when in reality you are witnessing the creation of tech from these very same sectors and the people whose platforms you fear so much. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-every-humans-eyeball-and-give-them-crypto-in-exchange/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-want...
- jklinger410 4y ago
  You will experience the AI revolution like a frog in a boiling pot. By the time you notice that AI is finally useful to you, it will be everywhere. And you will have missed out on the entire field.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Who predicted that the first widely used domestic robot would be anything like the Roomba? AI will have a similar trajectory, IMO. It'll find a bunch of good use cases, but it won't be in predictable places, and the predictable ones won't be as useful as expected.
- vikp 4y ago
  In this particular case (summarizing search results), it seems to work well. I think anchoring to known information helps avoid a lot of the issues (hallucinations, boring language, etc). You can check out an open source demo I made if you want to play around with how search + GPT work - https://github.com/VikParuchuri/researcher https://github.com/VikParuchuri/researcher .
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Last week, about ~30% of my Google searches were instead directed to ChatGPT. It's pretty good if you want a summary of a topic, but every web page wants to give you in depth information assuming you're already an expert. For example "What gas is in double glazing?" or "Tell me how screws are made". It's also good for more creative things, like "Write a story about an escapeologist". I now use it for ideas for bedtime stories for my son.
  - bo1024 4y ago
    How do you know if the summary is accurate?
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      I've spot checked them, and found that for the sorts of queries I do, they seem to be spot on. I wouldn't trust any numbers, or queries where the premise of the question is false though.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  I agree that GPT modernization consulting and such bullshit will emerge. It always does. That's neither here nor there though. It's just noise. Re: Tesla autopilot. I think this is the more serious. Obviously I'm speculating. It is definitely possible that GPT is one more example of AI doing cool tricks, and convincing us that is it farther advanced than it is. That said, I don't think this is another Tesla autopilot for two reasons. Reason one is robotics. Autopilot is robotics and robotics sucks. It's incredibly difficult, frustratingly physical and painfully hard to do the last 20%. The economics is even worse. It's very rare that robotics finds the unit volume necessary to achieve realistic prices. When version 1 is a $10 million dollar replacement for a $50k employee, there's rarely a version 2. It's just very hard to move the ball forward in robotics. Reason two is that GPT is a solution looking for problems. It's more general. Autopilot has one job: drive the car and do the robotaxi thing. There are few stepping stones. Mistakes can kill people and kill Tesla. It either does the job or doesn't, Elonmagic notwithstanding. GPT just needs to do something useful, not any particular thing. It can be used in low stakes applications. It can be bolted on to stuff for shots and giggle. Marginal costs are already zero. Basically, it's software. Software spreads faster and easier.
anoplus 4y ago
I can relate to the career anxiety aspect. The way I want to look at it is, if AI is smart enough to occupy creative jobs such as engineers, the world could be heaven. The "only" problem left is politics. Humans will spend the rest of their unoccupied time negotiating distribution of all resources produced by robots.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  > Humans will spend the rest of their unoccupied time negotiating distribution of all resources produced by robots. I can't see a reason for the dynamics to change from what we have now - those who own the means of production will hoard the new power and those who don't will find their slice of the pie become comparatively even smaller, just as with every increase in efficiency.
  - dd36 4y ago
    And those with power will blame the Other for society’s problems and convince enough of them through media propaganda to vote against their own self interest.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    If the pie is ten times as large, a slice that is half the relative size is still five times larger.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      That's the optimistic way to look at it, sure. No reason to think the slice can't shrink faster than the pie will grow.
    - uuvs8 4y ago
      Indeed. But the feeling of well-being is not absolute, but relative to you socio-economic context. The average American is manitudes better off now than 200 years ago, in absolute terms. But are they just as many magnitudes more happy? No. Depending on study, happiness is significantly less. It's not at all clear that maximizing absolute quality of life is the best ultimate goal.
yurishimo 4y ago
I think the thing that is most needed now, is some way to evaluate and ensure that the results being returned are accurate. Just providing an answer isn't enough. Anyone can ask me a question, and I can give you an answer, but for most topics, it probably won't be the correct answer, but if I know enough buzzwords, I might be able to string together something that _sounds like it could be_ a correct answer. We've seen this already. Except in limited cases, ChatGPT will not tell you that it doesn't know the answer. Or it will confidently give you the wrong answer. I'm reminded of a thread I saw last week where chat GPT was certain that 42 was a smaller number than 65(?) and when asked "can you count from 65 to 42?", it kept going up and up until it inevitably hit some sort of character count limit imposed by the service's algorithm for generating responses. The cool part IMO about ChatGPT is the back and forth conversational style of sharing information. Now we need to integrate that with traditional search indexes and also work to provide the "AI" some sort of score to indicate if the returned results are accurate and be more upfront with the user if a certain confidence interval is not reached. An example of this in traditional search tools, is the "did you mean xxx?" prompt. Until we can "trust" the results to be accurate, I don't see this technology being widely usable to expand the capabilities of users past their own knowledge. If you cannot easily verify the results as they are given to you today, then I don't really see the utility of the program beyond novelty.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  I used it to find quick answers to congressional procedures and laws relating to elections. Very quick, informative replies that would have taken forever to unearth using Google.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    I also found this useful, I was able to get an answer to "is this specific thing in this situation legal in this state" and have it produce correct references to the state code. I don't actually care if it produces an incorrect answer or summary (it wasn't but that's irrelevant), the value is being able to take some complicated context that a search engine can't understand and say "look right here."
  - 4y ago
lostphilosopher 4y ago
I'm excited for ChatGPT in video games. Especially in procedurally generated or Roguelike games.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  Absolutely! A lot of completely new immersion possibilities to try. GPT powered characters will be a fascinating thing.
CSMastermind 4y ago
> The difference between GPT3 and ChatGPT, to me, suggests a lot. Could you be more specific about what those differences are exactly? I'm curious how closely you've watched this space because we're basically exactly where everyone predicted we'd be back in 2018. I haven't seen anything yet that comes as a surprise in terms of the progress we're making. I think the public has the wrong impression of the technology because without seeing the growth in the space it appears as this is a sudden advancement rather than an incremental improvement and you can easily get the wrong impression about future progress extrapolating from an incomplete data set. > Skynet is not out of the question. Lots of reasons for trepidation. It's out of the question with this line of technology. This is not artificial general intelligence and there's no reasonable pathway for it to become AGI. I've used this analogy before but right now it's like we're at the dawn of flight and you're talking about going to the moon. No amount of incremental improvements to an airplane will get you a space traveling vehicle. You need a different technology entirely (a rocket) to make that happen.
- ctoth 4y ago
  I have been watching this space since Skip Thought Vectors in 2015. No. No one in 2018 suspected that large language models would smoothly scale up by simply increasing the number of parameters. There is no clear and obvious path from Attention is All you Need to InstructGPT, which just came out last February without hindsight. Point at a single person, let alone "everyone" who predicted we would have AI-based coding assistance and be integrating this technology into a search engine by 2023. Anyone at all. I'd love to read a paper or even a blog post from 2018 predicting half the things that work now. ! You can't. I've seen some hardcore goalpost moving before, but nothing as obviously provably wrong as "we're basically exactly where everyone predicted we'd be back in 2018." Is this on the path to AGI? I doubt it. You need some sort of actor-critic component likely, though the RLHF stuff is working way better than it has any right to and already is far more agentic than the pure dumb language model of a year ago.
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    > No one in 2018 suspected that large language models would smoothly scale up by simply increasing the number of parameters. https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/language-models.pdf https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/l... That was kind of the entire point of GPT-2. Computerphile summed it up pretty well on GPT-3's release: https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc Here's some quotes from that video: "The thing about gpt2 is just that it was much bigger than anything that came before. It was more parameters and was kind of the point of that paper." ... "They made gpt2 because the curve wasn't leveling off. We've gone 117 times bigger than gpt2 and they're still not leveling off."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

I feel much more like ChatGPT is basically the same as Tesla's autopilot. Wonderful and seems like a huge advancement, but as it's actually applied to situations we see how banal and limited it actually is. But loads of crypto-bro types will make millions selling ChatGPT "modernization consulting", so if you're looking to make a quick buck, highly recommend.

verelo 4y ago
I think there’s a difference here. There are cases I’ve found for minor manual tasks, things like real estate listings with some basic programmatically created prompts containing details of a listing. Imo the largest holdback is context. I have some problems that would be amazingly well solved if i could hand gpt3 a whole large document and ask it questions about the document.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  This thing of read that book for me and answer questions would be very useful.
redorb 4y ago
ChatGPT is already 10x more useful than crypto and NFTS. The foundational value of ChapGPT is not based on speculation or selling it to the 'next fool'.
- Jiocus 4y ago
  You are right, of course; The foundational (technical) value isn't based on speculation but that is irrelevant to con-artists or crime organisations who are looking for their next hype product to drive a new round of frauds. The people I see most enthusiastic about the current AI development are not the technologist and developers, but people who aren't involved in tech and doesn't code. There's already adverts on social media for ChatGPT AI services of various trustworthiness. They claim their AIs can construct and implement “the” winning trading algorithms for anyone, for a fee, of course. This issue isn't on GPT per se, but many can't yet see the difference between plausible applications and those which aren't. With each fantastical story about what ChatGPT managed to do, it's hard to blame them.
- uuvs8 4y ago
  Is it actually? It doesn't give out reliable information and its "creativity" is questionable. Most of the excitement about it has to do with anthropomorphizing a robot that "feels" like an intelligent conversation partner, but it's not. Beyond toys, that is. Similar to crypto. It isn't actually useful as a currency or to store value. Most of the excitemeny had to do with fake "freedom" dreams of the anarchically-leaning crowd and misunderstandings of what it is and isn't. Beyond toys, that is. I see lots of parallels actually.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    ChatGPT has real value to me. Ive been using it for my d&d games and to do some simple writing stuff that I hate. It costs me nothing, and I don't have to gamble to use it. Its value over crypto for me and my friends is exponential. Stable Diffusion has been even more valuable for me and I get to run that on my own metal.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Autopilot is playing out that way because there are a really large number of corner cases and fringe complexity to driving, and the consequences of getting things wrong are very expensive. Most uses of ChatGPT will (at least initially) be around automating the easy stuff, and if it gets something wrong it'll be a mild annoyance.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I think people don't realize how many corner cases there are in coding. I think that the problems people have with accounting for all the Autopilot corner cases is going to be repeated with code generation as well.
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    That is true, but think about domains like Advertisements. Ads are currently far from perfect. A 5% click rate is a huge success. If 30% of the ads generated are low quality but 10% do really well it will be a huge benefit
    - iamflimflam1 4y ago
      Exactly, generating moderately decent advertising copy will be really helpful. Even just to start the creative process going. "Here's a description of my product, give me 5 potential tag lines for it." It's a great start for brain storming.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Even there the corner case failures are going to be amazing if we're throwing up AI generated Ads onto billboards indiscriminately. "So it seems our blacklist didn't include the word 'Hilter'...."
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Ad text sounds like the exact opposite of a significant use case really; very little text to generate and high cost from the text being substandard. If 30% of the ads generated are low quality, you're wasting 30% of your ad budget, which is less efficient than paying a human to come up with higher average quality text (unless you're generating unique copy on the fly to evade spam detectors...). Just because current ads are far from perfect doesn't mean generated text isn't on average more banal and less accurate... I think the main use case for pure LLMs will remain those already starting to be tackled by AI: low importance (or testable) information/opinion retrieval, low effort content generation, suggestion prompts and entertainment
HDThoreaun 4y ago
I already use chatGPT in place of google sometimes. It has upsides and downsides, but I absolutely find it to be useful given the right prompt. Not sure how they will scale it to bing level but if they’re able to respond with both chatGPT response and the normal links I think it’d be a better product.
bamboozled 4y ago
Couldn't agree more, it's like a "cool trick". I havent' found it really useful for anything except some initial novelty / amusement. I've not opened that tab for weeks.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > Couldn't agree more, it's like a "cool trick". I havent' found it really useful for anything except some initial novelty / amusement. I've not opened that tab for weeks. Same, during the update it just kept crashing and afterward it just seem way too prone to errors to be usable; their have been funny prompts Ive seen thrown around but the novelty wore off just like it did with Dall-E as you saw how many attempts you had to make to get to something viable and more competitors came online: Stable Diffusion. This will keep the AI hype going so I'm not complaining, as a person who studies AI/ML, but it's hardly the miracle they are making it out to be. Perhaps that changes with GPT4, but I fear that sourcing is now becoming critical and just like Co-pilot it will encounter a lot of scrutiny before they can monetize it properly and open source projects will emerge to take market share.
Melting_Harps 4y ago
> But loads of crypto-bro types will make millions selling ChatGPT "modernization consulting", so if you're looking to make a quick buck, highly recommend. You guys will attribute anything under the sun to 'crypto-bros' at this point, it's HN's version of boomers 'must be the fault of the millennials,' which is ironic considering how many of you fall into the age group. Furthermore, Sam Altman, former head of YC oversaw the funding of Coinbase which is now the largest crypto exchange in the US, and who himself tried to launch Worldcoin [0]. Which, yes is a (failed) crypto-currency and is also the head of OpenAI, which has created Dall-E and GPT. Listen, I'm all for calling out scammers and have done it after over 10 years in this space, but the level of disillusion and absurd levels of paranoia amongst so many of you to constantly remind us all how 'crypto-bros' are lurking in every corner and under every rock just waiting to pounce on the opportunity to scam when in reality you are witnessing the creation of tech from these very same sectors and the people whose platforms you fear so much. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-every-humans-eyeball-and-give-them-crypto-in-exchange/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-want...
jklinger410 4y ago
You will experience the AI revolution like a frog in a boiling pot. By the time you notice that AI is finally useful to you, it will be everywhere. And you will have missed out on the entire field.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Who predicted that the first widely used domestic robot would be anything like the Roomba? AI will have a similar trajectory, IMO. It'll find a bunch of good use cases, but it won't be in predictable places, and the predictable ones won't be as useful as expected.
vikp 4y ago
In this particular case (summarizing search results), it seems to work well. I think anchoring to known information helps avoid a lot of the issues (hallucinations, boring language, etc). You can check out an open source demo I made if you want to play around with how search + GPT work - https://github.com/VikParuchuri/researcher https://github.com/VikParuchuri/researcher .
londons_explore 4y ago
Last week, about ~30% of my Google searches were instead directed to ChatGPT. It's pretty good if you want a summary of a topic, but every web page wants to give you in depth information assuming you're already an expert. For example "What gas is in double glazing?" or "Tell me how screws are made". It's also good for more creative things, like "Write a story about an escapeologist". I now use it for ideas for bedtime stories for my son.
- bo1024 4y ago
  How do you know if the summary is accurate?
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    I've spot checked them, and found that for the sorts of queries I do, they seem to be spot on. I wouldn't trust any numbers, or queries where the premise of the question is false though.
dalbasal 4y ago
I agree that GPT modernization consulting and such bullshit will emerge. It always does. That's neither here nor there though. It's just noise. Re: Tesla autopilot. I think this is the more serious. Obviously I'm speculating. It is definitely possible that GPT is one more example of AI doing cool tricks, and convincing us that is it farther advanced than it is. That said, I don't think this is another Tesla autopilot for two reasons. Reason one is robotics. Autopilot is robotics and robotics sucks. It's incredibly difficult, frustratingly physical and painfully hard to do the last 20%. The economics is even worse. It's very rare that robotics finds the unit volume necessary to achieve realistic prices. When version 1 is a $10 million dollar replacement for a $50k employee, there's rarely a version 2. It's just very hard to move the ball forward in robotics. Reason two is that GPT is a solution looking for problems. It's more general. Autopilot has one job: drive the car and do the robotaxi thing. There are few stepping stones. Mistakes can kill people and kill Tesla. It either does the job or doesn't, Elonmagic notwithstanding. GPT just needs to do something useful, not any particular thing. It can be used in low stakes applications. It can be bolted on to stuff for shots and giggle. Marginal costs are already zero. Basically, it's software. Software spreads faster and easier.

anoplus 4y ago

I can relate to the career anxiety aspect. The way I want to look at it is, if AI is smart enough to occupy creative jobs such as engineers, the world could be heaven. The "only" problem left is politics. Humans will spend the rest of their unoccupied time negotiating distribution of all resources produced by robots.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> Humans will spend the rest of their unoccupied time negotiating distribution of all resources produced by robots. I can't see a reason for the dynamics to change from what we have now - those who own the means of production will hoard the new power and those who don't will find their slice of the pie become comparatively even smaller, just as with every increase in efficiency.
- dd36 4y ago
  And those with power will blame the Other for society’s problems and convince enough of them through media propaganda to vote against their own self interest.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  If the pie is ten times as large, a slice that is half the relative size is still five times larger.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    That's the optimistic way to look at it, sure. No reason to think the slice can't shrink faster than the pie will grow.
  - uuvs8 4y ago
    Indeed. But the feeling of well-being is not absolute, but relative to you socio-economic context. The average American is manitudes better off now than 200 years ago, in absolute terms. But are they just as many magnitudes more happy? No. Depending on study, happiness is significantly less. It's not at all clear that maximizing absolute quality of life is the best ultimate goal.

yurishimo 4y ago

I think the thing that is most needed now, is some way to evaluate and ensure that the results being returned are accurate. Just providing an answer isn't enough. Anyone can ask me a question, and I can give you an answer, but for most topics, it probably won't be the correct answer, but if I know enough buzzwords, I might be able to string together something that _sounds like it could be_ a correct answer. We've seen this already. Except in limited cases, ChatGPT will not tell you that it doesn't know the answer. Or it will confidently give you the wrong answer. I'm reminded of a thread I saw last week where chat GPT was certain that 42 was a smaller number than 65(?) and when asked "can you count from 65 to 42?", it kept going up and up until it inevitably hit some sort of character count limit imposed by the service's algorithm for generating responses. The cool part IMO about ChatGPT is the back and forth conversational style of sharing information. Now we need to integrate that with traditional search indexes and also work to provide the "AI" some sort of score to indicate if the returned results are accurate and be more upfront with the user if a certain confidence interval is not reached. An example of this in traditional search tools, is the "did you mean xxx?" prompt. Until we can "trust" the results to be accurate, I don't see this technology being widely usable to expand the capabilities of users past their own knowledge. If you cannot easily verify the results as they are given to you today, then I don't really see the utility of the program beyond novelty.

datavirtue 4y ago
I used it to find quick answers to congressional procedures and laws relating to elections. Very quick, informative replies that would have taken forever to unearth using Google.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I also found this useful, I was able to get an answer to "is this specific thing in this situation legal in this state" and have it produce correct references to the state code. I don't actually care if it produces an incorrect answer or summary (it wasn't but that's irrelevant), the value is being able to take some complicated context that a search engine can't understand and say "look right here."
- 4y ago

lostphilosopher 4y ago

I'm excited for ChatGPT in video games. Especially in procedurally generated or Roguelike games.

dalbasal 4y ago
Absolutely! A lot of completely new immersion possibilities to try. GPT powered characters will be a fascinating thing.

CSMastermind 4y ago

> The difference between GPT3 and ChatGPT, to me, suggests a lot. Could you be more specific about what those differences are exactly? I'm curious how closely you've watched this space because we're basically exactly where everyone predicted we'd be back in 2018. I haven't seen anything yet that comes as a surprise in terms of the progress we're making. I think the public has the wrong impression of the technology because without seeing the growth in the space it appears as this is a sudden advancement rather than an incremental improvement and you can easily get the wrong impression about future progress extrapolating from an incomplete data set. > Skynet is not out of the question. Lots of reasons for trepidation. It's out of the question with this line of technology. This is not artificial general intelligence and there's no reasonable pathway for it to become AGI. I've used this analogy before but right now it's like we're at the dawn of flight and you're talking about going to the moon. No amount of incremental improvements to an airplane will get you a space traveling vehicle. You need a different technology entirely (a rocket) to make that happen.

ctoth 4y ago
I have been watching this space since Skip Thought Vectors in 2015. No. No one in 2018 suspected that large language models would smoothly scale up by simply increasing the number of parameters. There is no clear and obvious path from Attention is All you Need to InstructGPT, which just came out last February without hindsight. Point at a single person, let alone "everyone" who predicted we would have AI-based coding assistance and be integrating this technology into a search engine by 2023. Anyone at all. I'd love to read a paper or even a blog post from 2018 predicting half the things that work now. ! You can't. I've seen some hardcore goalpost moving before, but nothing as obviously provably wrong as "we're basically exactly where everyone predicted we'd be back in 2018." Is this on the path to AGI? I doubt it. You need some sort of actor-critic component likely, though the RLHF stuff is working way better than it has any right to and already is far more agentic than the pure dumb language model of a year ago.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  > No one in 2018 suspected that large language models would smoothly scale up by simply increasing the number of parameters. https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/language-models.pdf https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/l... That was kind of the entire point of GPT-2. Computerphile summed it up pretty well on GPT-3's release: https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc Here's some quotes from that video: "The thing about gpt2 is just that it was much bigger than anything that came before. It was more parameters and was kind of the point of that paper." ... "They made gpt2 because the curve wasn't leveling off. We've gone 117 times bigger than gpt2 and they're still not leveling off."

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