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I've found the greatest success with ChatGPT when I use it as a learning / exploration tool. If there is a topic I don't know much about, I can state the questi

• troyvit 4y ago
  Ask Jeeves 2.0!
• m3kw9 4y ago
  My experience is that gpt gives me a very good looking answer, but when doing a cross check, it’s often slight wrong or out right wrong
  • justinpombrio 4y ago
    "Sometimes right, always plausible"
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    garbage in, garbage out.
    • junon 4y ago
      No. That doesn't stand up anymore in this case.
      • lolinder 4y ago
        Why would ChatGPT be the exception to the rule? What architecture are they using that somehow is immune to unwanted trends in the training data? If you're going to make an outlandish claim like that, I'd like to see some arguments to back it up.
        • ALittleLight 4y ago
          ChatGPT can give you bad answers to good questions or good answers to nonsense questions. With ChatGPT it's more like "sometimes garbage".
          • dpkirchner 4y ago
            The garbage is in the source material used to create the model, not the questions.
            • ALittleLight 4y ago
              Same comment still applies. ChatGPT sometimes gives good and bad answers.
              • dpkirchner 4y ago
                I'd argue that level of ambiguity counts as garbage out, although I'm confident it will get better.
              • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  • simplect 4y ago
    Similar to the original comment, it could help with exploratory type of work. It helps me shift things from “things I don’t know about/unaware of” to “things I know I don’t know of”.
  • twobitshifter 4y ago
    I asked it for movie quotes from a specific movie: 7 out of 10 were from the movie but 3 weren’t but sounded plausible
    • rmbyrro 4y ago
      Transformer models suffer from "hallucinations". It can be terrible at giving quotes or references. It's a known limitation with this tech that the industry is working to overcome.
    • snickerer 4y ago
      I asked it 'What hapoened to Gandalf after he fell down from the bridge, fighting the Balrog? Did he die?' The answer was a story about Gandalf beeing hurt badly, beeing rescued by some random dwarfs, and so on. I asked ChatGPT in which book this is described, and it told me that you can read about it on both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So it makes up fun stories. This makes me wondering how much of its explantions about physics (which I don't understand completely) are made-up.
  • Taek 4y ago
    If you are just looking for related vocabulary words, correctness is not a concern.
    • foobarbecue 4y ago
      Is there any reason that ChatGPT is better than a thesuarus?
      • post-it 4y ago
        Well, "I have a thing that can happen with certain probability of success, and it runs repeatedly every 15 minutes. Could you tell me what kind of process this is and how to calculate the probability of 5 consecutive events in 24 hours?" isn't going to be in a thesaurus.
  • fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Sounds like every human I’ve ever met
    • m3kw9 4y ago
      Except we don’t hype humans the same way we hype ChatGPT
      • maksimur 4y ago
        But a human isn't there for you 24 hours a day and for every thing you want to ask for, at the very least.
      • fnordpiglet 4y ago
        It seems like we do in the threads about chatgpt hype. From what I’ve read every human can do advanced mathematics flawlessly and recall every nuance of every subject with perfect fidelity, write clearly and cogently, and it’s all managed through channeling ether and soul spirit fire through emotions that AIs and Vulcans can’t possess.
        • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
          I think you're reading way too much into criticisms of ChatGPT as implying humans are immune to the same criticisms. And then transforming them into complete hyperbole.
      • pigsty 4y ago
        CEOs and various intellectuals very much are hyped up. Then we realize they’re like anyone else and they’re massively demonized
    • sebzim4500 4y ago
      I've certainly met people as confidently incorrect as chatgpt but they are the exception rather than the rule.
  • babyshake 4y ago
    Would it be effective to ask GPT to provide a confidence rating about how sure it is about an answer, or would it be likely to just say that it is confident in its correctness when it is wrong?
    • drcode 4y ago
      I think this is the big question lots of people are working on right now It's apparently really hard to objectively measure/report the "truthiness" of LLM results Allowing an LLM to "improvise" and be a bit fast-and-lose is unfortunately a necessary ingredient in how they currently work.
    • deet 4y ago
      "Confidence" is an unfortunate term that shouldn't be confused with a human logic interpretation of "confidence". In most ML cases (and ChatGPT likely), "confidence" would generally just correlate how closely the query matches data and patterns it's seen in its dataset and inversely correlate with how many conflicting matches and patterns it sees. Humans are subject to the same problem of course. If you asked how confident a person living many centuries ago was that the Earth was flat, they'd probably say "very confident" because there was nothing in their training data / lived experience to conflict with that view. But they'd be wrong. But humans still have a significant advantage in that they report lack of confidence when they sense logical inconsistencies and violations of reasoning to a level that ML models can't (at least not yet). Maybe a fan-out of the possible ways it could answer would be interesting, but really we more need a disclaimer next to every answer that says "this thing that's answering in fully formed language does not have human reasoning capability and can't be trusted (yet)"
      • mike_hearn 4y ago
        Odd/ironic fact: people didn't believe the Earth was flat back then. That's a modern confusion. They believed the Sun revolved around the Earth. Wikipedia has a whole article dedicated to this common belief: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth "The earliest clear documentation of the idea of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks (5th century BC). The belief was widespread in the Greek world when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of Earth around 240 BC. This knowledge spread with Greek influence such that during the Early Middle Ages (~600–1000 AD), most European and Middle Eastern scholars espoused Earth's sphericity.[3] Belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent from the Late Middle Ages onward ... Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution" I asked ChatGPT the same question and it prevaricated: "There is evidence that some people in medieval times believed the Earth was flat, while others believed it was round. The idea that the Earth is round, or more accurately, an oblate spheroid, has been around since ancient times. The ancient Greeks, for example, knew that the Earth was a sphere. However, the idea that the Earth is flat also has a long history and can be traced back to ancient civilizations as well. During the Middle Ages, the idea that the Earth was round was not widely accepted, and there was significant debate about the shape of the Earth. Some people continued to believe in the idea that the Earth was flat, while others argued for a round Earth. It is important to note that the medieval period was a time of great intellectual and scientific change, and ideas about the shape of the Earth and other scientific concepts were still being developed and debated." But from what I know, it's wrong, at least as far as we know the historical record (of course there may have been peasants who believed otherwise but their views weren't recorded). The fact that the Earth is a sphere is obvious to anyone who watched a ship sail over the horizon, which is an experience people had from ancient times.
  • enslavedrobot 4y ago
    Totally. I asked it to describe an obscure lithography technique (rapid electron area masking), and it gave a reasonable summary but at the end claimed it was widely used in industry...it's not used at all.
    • ericbarrett 4y ago
      I asked it about the strong nuclear force and it said the force gets weaker with distance—quite fundamentally wrong (color confinement).
  • wmeredith 4y ago
    This honestly sounds like the same experience one gets when talking to humans :) I'm only half joking. Even experts in their field tend to inject their own biases and experiential preferences when answering questions in depth.
    • adventured 4y ago
      ChatGPT is just your average Reddit user. Even when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong.
      • BbzzbB 4y ago
        Perhaps because it is trained on Redditors and co.
        • z3c0 4y ago
          I'd sure hope not. Reddit comments are a masterclass in disguising ethos and pathos as logos. I'd expect that the boring reality is that it's trained on highly ethos/logos text (academic works) and thus always presents itself as such, even when its weights cause an invalid assertion.
          • robswc 4y ago
            Reddit is exhausting. One big feedback loop. People will say anything to get good karma or avoid saying certain things to avoid being down voted. If there is even just a slight majority in the way the group thinks, it will soon become the dominate opinion. For example, there was a voice actor that lied about being paid a pitiful sum of money for a gig. Everyone took her side initially (as one should _if_ it were true) but the people saying "well, this just seems odd" were being more or less attacked and told their opinions were awful. The quality of discussions I have on HN and niche forums are 100x better than reddit.
            • colejohnson66 4y ago
              TBF, the same can happen here to a lesser extent. False or misleading stories blow up quickly because “$BIGCORP bad”.
• MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  For me it's a weird mixup in my brain of "interactive Google". I know the results I'm going to get back are basically the same as if I went to Google, ran a query, it returns me their top 3-5 scraped "blog articles" based on relevancy, and then I ran it through one of those condensing/summarizing bots. I'm not sure why it's as therapeutic as it is basically interacting with a search engine. I wonder if this kind of technology will remain free for the foreseeable future. Google has to be coming up with something shortly, right? It's interactive search engine results "on steroids" (I think? I can't tell me if brain is tricking me to be biased that it's cooler/more useful than it is. Everybody I tell about it non-tech isn't that impressed/feels it's spammy/crufty/formulaic).
  • jvm___ 4y ago
    I'm not sure why it's as therapeutic as it is basically interacting with a search engine. Because it's like a smart human giving you their best guess. It will never tell you it doesn't know or give you something completely offbase like Google does. It's friendlier than Google but less accurate.
    • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      Is it safe to say in your opinion that Google and ChatGPT are basically trained on the same information? Google crawls the web/scrapes it/indexes it. ChatGPT crawls the web (not sure if they have access to Google's internal scrape results, I doubt it), "trains" a model on it, serves it back to you in a "human friendly readable summarized format". It's just Google from the perspective of "it's going to return the same information Google has" but instead of a search index trying to guess what's relevant it's an interactive language model designed to basically summarize the same underlying blog posts. Is that your opinion/understanding as well?
      • jvm___ 4y ago
        No, not at all. ChatGPT is trained on the same source information, but when you ask a question there's no guarantee it's answer is directly from an actual source, it's always a newly generated "thought". Google is a photocopier. It gives you an exact copy of what it finds. Google doesn't create, just references and links to original sources. Google is a library, but not an author. ChatGPT is an author, but not a library. However, ChatGPT has read every book in the library, so when you ask a question it writes you a story from it's memory based on what it thinks* you want. ChatGPT can write stories about books in the library, and it will probably be right (but maybe not). *Remember the game Plinko from Price is Right? Basically ChatGPT takes your question, drops all the words through its super complicated plinko machine (neural network) and gives you the result. If you ask it for the names of US presidents, it should give you the same answer as Google - even though it came up with it via the plinko method. If you ask it for a story about a singing rock, the process is the same as the presidents list. It drops your request into the network and gives you the result. It's not smart, just wildly complicated. It's also never going to be a photocopier (but it might act like one for certain inputs). ---- The brain breaking part is that when you ask ChatGPT for... "Write me a song about a singing rock" It changes each word into a number-token, then those number-tokens go through the plinko machine. The result is a different set of number-tokens which it converts back to readable words. Inside ChatGPT it doesn't "know" anything. Rock is a number. Singing is a number. Write is a number. But it knows the relationships between those numbers, and what other numbers are nearby the area of the network devoted to songs, so it pulls in words and related concepts like a human would. But it's just numbers with no understanding. Because it's numbers and not understanding, it can be wrong, either completely or subtly. Edit: Asking for the list of us presidents has "David D. Eisenhower (1849-1850)" as number 12 (who isn't a person who was ever president). The rest look right, but ChatGPT is subtlety wrong in this case.
• kenjackson 4y ago
  Actually I find it much better than that for exploratory purposes than just getting search terms. The ability to just keep asking questions for clarification is something that the web was meant to provide with web links, but rarely does a good job of it. If it can simply act as a domain expert that I can talk to, it would be a huge win.
  • lolinder 4y ago
    But it's not a domain expert: it's a language model designed and trained to produce language that could plausibly have been written by a human on the internet. At best it functions as a well-informed amateur, at worst it hallucinates nonsense but writes it in a way that is very convincing.
    • hombre_fatal 4y ago
      To be fair, you just summarized human discourse especially on places like Reddit and HN.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • bamboozled 4y ago
        This comment isn’t helpful or a retort sorry.
      • Xelynega 4y ago
        This makes me think of a quote from one of Dijkstra's lectures: "In the long run I expect computing science to transcend its parent disciplines, mathematics and logic, by effectively realizing a significant part of Leibniz's Dream of providing symbolic calculation as an alternative to human reasoning. (Please note the difference between "mimicking" and "providing an alternative to": alternatives are allowed to be better.)" When talking about a tool thats supposedly greater than humans, why should the shortcomings of humans be relevant? The tools we create to surpass our own capabilities should be greater than our own capabilities, not stunted by the same issues.
• yoyohello13 4y ago
  This is definitely the best use case for these models I've heard. Often when I'm researching a field I'm not familiar with the hardest part is just knowing the vocabulary necessary to express what I want to ask.
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  I've found its good for getting me started. Need to do a presentation on something? Type it into chatGPT. It will generate what is basically an okay outline. You can expand on what you like, cut what you dont. For me getting started is typically the most difficult part (thanks adhd) so this is a huge help.