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I just tried ChatGPT today after weeks of hype on Twitter, and I was surprised to NOT be impressed? First I tried it on a bunch of programming topics -- it def

by chubot 4y ago

I just tried ChatGPT today after weeks of hype on Twitter, and I was surprised to NOT be impressed? First I tried it on a bunch of programming topics -- it definitely gets in the right ballpark, but then the details are frequently wrong. I asked which languages have the F# |> operator, and it told me that OCaml, Elixir, Haskell and Scala do. 2 of them are correct, and 2 appeared wrong, so I googled it. After Googling, then I asked it specifically if Haskell does, and it says no. I ask it if Scala does, and it apologizes for its earlier mistake. It gave me a good although slightly shallow answer about how PyPy works, but then fell down hard for a prolog type checker, and a few other programming queries. It doesn't understand the question. --- It is generally very mealy-mouthed and vague. It often doesn't answer the question directly, but just tells you what it happens to know in the ballpark. I like another framing I saw on Twitter -- it's "mansplaining as a service". If you want someone to confidently explain things you didn't really ask about, and be frequently wrong, that's kinda what it does!! --- After programming, I asked it about Black Sabbath, UFC, travel and biking, health, and got similarly vague/slightly incorrect answers. It confabulates A LOT. The best I can say is that Google is filled with spam now, so chatting with ChatGPT was a relatively fun and focused experience, after I took into account the fact that it is not "honest" and just trying to "please me" with closely related words. I honestly don't get the hype, and I feel like there must have been some coordinated marketing aimed at me ... If this chat is representative of what it can do for programming, then I think this article saying that "programmer salaries will be affected by LLM" is very weird. It is assuming something that simply has NOT happened! --- I mean even Geoff Hinton (who I respect) said several years ago that "we should stop training radiologists", and that plainly did not happen. Likewise with Elon and the fleet of self-driving taxis. I'd honestly be surprised if someone wants to argue that a tech company staffed with LLMs + a few smart people is NOT like those predictions. Of course the blog post doesn't give a time frame, so it can't be falsified. But it appears to be nonsense. (FWIW it doesn't matter to me personally, as I left the industry several years ago. Also FWIW I did work a little bit on deep learning, when the hype was in its upswing.) I agree that a lot of it is anthropomorphism -- projecting some kind of intelligence, knowledge, or intention on what is really a big, expensive bag of data organized to respond to inputs. Maybe there are other models that are better, but I was really, honestly not impressed with ChatGPT. Maybe people were hyping it too much for the last several weeks, and inflated my expectations.

disconcision 4y ago
expectations are interesting things... i was impressed with chatgpt, though not blown away as it's simply the latest in a chain of increasingly impressive research demos. substantially though my experience was the same as yours, though perhaps i'm more forgiving (haskell does have a reverse function application operator, just using a different symbol, and you can get |> in scala via a commonly-used library). i guess one difference might be that i also tried a variety of tasks where confabulation was called for, like making up games and getting it to play them with me. all of this certainly does seem farther from productizability than the optimists admit... it tantalizingly 'almost works' in so many domains, but despite the rate of progress, its not obvious at all to me that it will soon converging on the reliability which is necessary for robust application. playing with the tech in more creative areas has certainly expanded my mind as to what is and what may become possible, and i think this is true of the general reaction as well... it's the flashes of strangeness and potential, the weird use cases like simulated command lines and ascii art games, the cat-and-mouse of prompt injection... not hard to let your imagination run wild... depending on how much disbelief you're willing to suspend.
elcritch 4y ago
That vibes with the images from what I saw with Dall-E. The rendering/styling was superb, however, the logic and scene understanding were toddler-like. Still impressive, but if you had a picture with dogs sometimes a dog head would be pasted on top at the wrong angle. Confabulation is a great term for it IMHO.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  That's basically right, AI of the type we're discussing has high technical ability like ability to draw and make grammatically correct sentences, without understanding the higher level structure of what it's doing. A bit like an enthusiastic teenager. But I can't see how people aren't impressed, we couldn't do this a few years ago, and surely we will build on top of this in coming years.
rightbyte 4y ago
I tried it without reading anything about it and I freaked out about losing my job. Then I tried it for any practical programming and realised it was no immediate threat at least and I calmed down abit.

by chubot 4y ago

disconcision 4y ago

expectations are interesting things... i was impressed with chatgpt, though not blown away as it's simply the latest in a chain of increasingly impressive research demos. substantially though my experience was the same as yours, though perhaps i'm more forgiving (haskell does have a reverse function application operator, just using a different symbol, and you can get |> in scala via a commonly-used library). i guess one difference might be that i also tried a variety of tasks where confabulation was called for, like making up games and getting it to play them with me. all of this certainly does seem farther from productizability than the optimists admit... it tantalizingly 'almost works' in so many domains, but despite the rate of progress, its not obvious at all to me that it will soon converging on the reliability which is necessary for robust application. playing with the tech in more creative areas has certainly expanded my mind as to what is and what may become possible, and i think this is true of the general reaction as well... it's the flashes of strangeness and potential, the weird use cases like simulated command lines and ascii art games, the cat-and-mouse of prompt injection... not hard to let your imagination run wild... depending on how much disbelief you're willing to suspend.

elcritch 4y ago

That vibes with the images from what I saw with Dall-E. The rendering/styling was superb, however, the logic and scene understanding were toddler-like. Still impressive, but if you had a picture with dogs sometimes a dog head would be pasted on top at the wrong angle. Confabulation is a great term for it IMHO.

lordnacho 4y ago
That's basically right, AI of the type we're discussing has high technical ability like ability to draw and make grammatically correct sentences, without understanding the higher level structure of what it's doing. A bit like an enthusiastic teenager. But I can't see how people aren't impressed, we couldn't do this a few years ago, and surely we will build on top of this in coming years.

rightbyte 4y ago

I tried it without reading anything about it and I freaked out about losing my job. Then I tried it for any practical programming and realised it was no immediate threat at least and I calmed down abit.