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I love watching the bar get raised in real time. If you told people 5 years ago you can have a conv with a ML system and barely be able to tell its not a perso

I love watching the bar get raised in real time. If you told people 5 years ago you can have a conv with a ML system and barely be able to tell its not a person, ask it question about topics and get human like plausible answers, give it text requirements and it would respond with 95% working code people's jaws would drop. I mean even 6 months ago you could tell people that and the response wouldn't be all that different. Now I see so many shifted goal posts "yeah it can talk about most topics, but it's often wrong", "yeah it can generate code, but it has bugs! The nerve of anyone to write buggy code without a compiler to check it." (How well do you write code on the whiteboard at age 18 btw?), or "yes it writes code but not for my favorite language", or "yes it writes correct code but only for programming interview questions: or "yes but it's not optimized for performance". It's amazing how quickly the goal posts have shifted. To me it's absolutely astounding what it's capable of - and I see so many complaints are "it's not the computer from Stat Trek so it's really not much use at all". Yes it can be better improved with acknowledging when it isn't confident in something - but its still incredible what it's doing right now.

thethirdone 4y ago
I don't think its fair to call this raising the bar. I don't think anyone was imagining plausible yet nonsensical text to be the bar for AI. ChatGPT is incredibly good at generating plausible text, but nearly all of the time it fails to hold up to detailed scrutiny. It writes like a human who doesn't know what they are talking about, but have chosen to bullshit something instead of admit they don't know. At least for me, I would have expected more understanding to be necessary to get to ChatGPT levels of plausibility. I would not have expected a bot that does not understand two digit multiplication at all to be able to say anything vaguely convincing about primes, but ChatGPT can. Being thoroughly surprised by how ML improves and then restating your expectations is not the same as raising the bar.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > ChatGPT is incredibly good at generating plausible text, but nearly all of the time it fails to hold up to detailed scrutiny. It writes like a human who doesn’t know what they are talking about, but have chosen to bullshit something instead of admit they don’t know. What do you expect of a model trained, largely, on the public internet? (Note, if it was trained on professionally published books, without quite a bit of selectivity, I would expect the same; this isn’t so much about the internet as about people.)
tombert 4y ago
I am reasonably certain that if you had told me 5 years ago that we’d have a system that could reasonably generate conversational text but it often gave wrong or nonsense answers that seem plausible, my response would have been “that sounds pretty neat”, which is what my response was when I first used ChatGPT a month ago, and is what I started my comment with. At least personally speaking, the goalposts have not shifted. I don’t at all deny that it’s a pretty cool thing, I have found it to be actually really useful to bounce ideas off of, but I guess I was just a little annoyed when I saw (what felt like) a million articles talking about it making engineers useless while the results it generates are actually worse than nothing.

thethirdone 4y ago

I don't think its fair to call this raising the bar. I don't think anyone was imagining plausible yet nonsensical text to be the bar for AI. ChatGPT is incredibly good at generating plausible text, but nearly all of the time it fails to hold up to detailed scrutiny. It writes like a human who doesn't know what they are talking about, but have chosen to bullshit something instead of admit they don't know. At least for me, I would have expected more understanding to be necessary to get to ChatGPT levels of plausibility. I would not have expected a bot that does not understand two digit multiplication at all to be able to say anything vaguely convincing about primes, but ChatGPT can. Being thoroughly surprised by how ML improves and then restating your expectations is not the same as raising the bar.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> ChatGPT is incredibly good at generating plausible text, but nearly all of the time it fails to hold up to detailed scrutiny. It writes like a human who doesn’t know what they are talking about, but have chosen to bullshit something instead of admit they don’t know. What do you expect of a model trained, largely, on the public internet? (Note, if it was trained on professionally published books, without quite a bit of selectivity, I would expect the same; this isn’t so much about the internet as about people.)

tombert 4y ago

I am reasonably certain that if you had told me 5 years ago that we’d have a system that could reasonably generate conversational text but it often gave wrong or nonsense answers that seem plausible, my response would have been “that sounds pretty neat”, which is what my response was when I first used ChatGPT a month ago, and is what I started my comment with. At least personally speaking, the goalposts have not shifted. I don’t at all deny that it’s a pretty cool thing, I have found it to be actually really useful to bounce ideas off of, but I guess I was just a little annoyed when I saw (what felt like) a million articles talking about it making engineers useless while the results it generates are actually worse than nothing.