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I’ve been around this stuff for 7 years now, former co-founder was super into AI hype and actually ended up leaving to go work for OpenAI. Nothing is snowballin

I’ve been around this stuff for 7 years now, former co-founder was super into AI hype and actually ended up leaving to go work for OpenAI. Nothing is snowballing fast now… it’s been the exact same since at least 7 years ago. At the time I have to admit I was equally bullishly myopic, the new models seemed insanely cool and the process seemed super-exponential. I predicted AI may replace programming, art and many things within 5 years. Then I checked in 5 years later - not much really had changed and I revised my predictions way down. Since then I’ve revised them down again actually, as I see them running into scaling issues again, amongst many other issues. The attitude you take is infectious, I saw it firsthand. But if I look at what concrete is changing, it’s not much. Humans love watching Chess. It’s exploded in popularity in the last 4 years. No one watches AI chess, though the top players certainly gain in their practice from it. But where’s the revolution? I know it’s different but I predict the same happens across the “new” areas - image and text generation. They seem amazing, likely beating humans in many ways. But in the end we don’t care much about computers, we care about novelty. Novelty and humanity drive fashion, music, film, literature… basically all art. It needs to innovate, needs to be extremely personal. It’s not going to disrupt any of them, not even close. But it will be used in the loop.

Sparyjerry 4y ago
What is revolutionary is that ChatGPT is indistinguishable from a real person's writing and intelligence on a subject - and not just in text, but in coding. Before ChatGPT any similar program's responses were so obvious bots that you would look at and say "oh that's cool" but it was still garbage you would never use. Now, I've heard people using ChatGPT for self (ai) therapy, asking it what to do, and how to do something. It's a planner, a worker, a designer, an idea machine. It's like Google but actually gets you to the answers you want without the incredible about of garbage that came when SEO websites took over Google. Then you've got the symbiosis with humans, it's not "look at this AI art." It's artists using AI tools to 'produce' 1000 versions of art a day and pick the best one they find most personal. AI art was already entered into a human contest by someone cheating in which it won. Before iPhone there was plenty of similar products but none that put all the pieces together the way an iPhone did. There is a tipping point to AI and ChatGPT is the iPhone of AI.
- nwienert 4y ago
  I don’t see ChatGPT as any different from gpt3 really, it still makes all the same category of mistakes. It’s very distinguishable from a human in that you can trivially make it contradict, say nonsense, and it still makes all sorts of errors especially past a few paragraphs. Very few people are using it. AI therapy is really a great counterexample - it’s not just not up to the task, also highly dangerous. Last thing anyone needs in therapy is to talk to a computer that has no long term memory and will say whatever you want it to - pure demoralization. As far as code - also not really compelling. I’ve tried it and don’t use it, because: 1. It’s worse than Google. Google + stack overflow finds 100% of the same answers, but also gives me many alternatives, verifies they are correct, and adds lots of context. 2. It’s incorrect in subtle ways, often. 3. It’s actually actively bad at programming beyond the simplest smallest isolated problems, which are about 1% of the daily tasks of a software dev. I actually think the confusion of thinking it’s good at programming and art to be fundamental - it’s good at rough things not precise things. So art is more in its wheelhouse and why people are so interested in it. It’ll do some interesting stuff there. But it’s very much not precise, it sucks at math, it’s bad at programming for the same reason. In a very very local scope for a simple type of problem constrained only to that local scope it’s ok, but that’s just not really programming. I did say in the loop it has some value, but it’s truly far from an iPhone in terms of value. About 0% rounded of the population is even aware of it, let alone getting value from it. I have no idea what I’d use it for, its proneness to blunders and bullshit is a real dealbreaker for every application besides illustrations and maybe summarization - and the latters been solved forever, and is a marginal industry. Again there’s a weird need to hype it up it seems, we’re at some peak of the hype curve and people are buying it. I think one reason that happens is because it’s mediocre at a lot of things, so people think it’ll do everything. But it’s got major reasons why it’s mediocre that haven’t changed from gpt3 or earlier. It’s a cool thing certainly, but Google is like 1000x more valuable and idk if even Google was a revolution or just a somewhat big improvement. Four fundamental limiting factors: it’s imprecise (can’t rely on it for unsupervised or technical things), it’s average (not very valuable to art or creative innovation), it’s a liar (not great for many things), and it’s a panderer (therapy, etc).
  - Sparyjerry 4y ago

Sparyjerry 4y ago

What is revolutionary is that ChatGPT is indistinguishable from a real person's writing and intelligence on a subject - and not just in text, but in coding. Before ChatGPT any similar program's responses were so obvious bots that you would look at and say "oh that's cool" but it was still garbage you would never use. Now, I've heard people using ChatGPT for self (ai) therapy, asking it what to do, and how to do something. It's a planner, a worker, a designer, an idea machine. It's like Google but actually gets you to the answers you want without the incredible about of garbage that came when SEO websites took over Google. Then you've got the symbiosis with humans, it's not "look at this AI art." It's artists using AI tools to 'produce' 1000 versions of art a day and pick the best one they find most personal. AI art was already entered into a human contest by someone cheating in which it won. Before iPhone there was plenty of similar products but none that put all the pieces together the way an iPhone did. There is a tipping point to AI and ChatGPT is the iPhone of AI.

nwienert 4y ago
I don’t see ChatGPT as any different from gpt3 really, it still makes all the same category of mistakes. It’s very distinguishable from a human in that you can trivially make it contradict, say nonsense, and it still makes all sorts of errors especially past a few paragraphs. Very few people are using it. AI therapy is really a great counterexample - it’s not just not up to the task, also highly dangerous. Last thing anyone needs in therapy is to talk to a computer that has no long term memory and will say whatever you want it to - pure demoralization. As far as code - also not really compelling. I’ve tried it and don’t use it, because: 1. It’s worse than Google. Google + stack overflow finds 100% of the same answers, but also gives me many alternatives, verifies they are correct, and adds lots of context. 2. It’s incorrect in subtle ways, often. 3. It’s actually actively bad at programming beyond the simplest smallest isolated problems, which are about 1% of the daily tasks of a software dev. I actually think the confusion of thinking it’s good at programming and art to be fundamental - it’s good at rough things not precise things. So art is more in its wheelhouse and why people are so interested in it. It’ll do some interesting stuff there. But it’s very much not precise, it sucks at math, it’s bad at programming for the same reason. In a very very local scope for a simple type of problem constrained only to that local scope it’s ok, but that’s just not really programming. I did say in the loop it has some value, but it’s truly far from an iPhone in terms of value. About 0% rounded of the population is even aware of it, let alone getting value from it. I have no idea what I’d use it for, its proneness to blunders and bullshit is a real dealbreaker for every application besides illustrations and maybe summarization - and the latters been solved forever, and is a marginal industry. Again there’s a weird need to hype it up it seems, we’re at some peak of the hype curve and people are buying it. I think one reason that happens is because it’s mediocre at a lot of things, so people think it’ll do everything. But it’s got major reasons why it’s mediocre that haven’t changed from gpt3 or earlier. It’s a cool thing certainly, but Google is like 1000x more valuable and idk if even Google was a revolution or just a somewhat big improvement. Four fundamental limiting factors: it’s imprecise (can’t rely on it for unsupervised or technical things), it’s average (not very valuable to art or creative innovation), it’s a liar (not great for many things), and it’s a panderer (therapy, etc).
- Sparyjerry 4y ago