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I'm trying to understand how big of a deal ChatGPT and the like is or isn't. Even people in AI don't seem to agree on whether it's going to change everything or

I'm trying to understand how big of a deal ChatGPT and the like is or isn't. Even people in AI don't seem to agree on whether it's going to change everything or it's overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? Or somewhere in the middle? "if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind starting shortly... i'm finding it a bit hard to communicate the urgency and heaviness of what's going on" https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1617317478987878400 https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1617317478987878400 "Personally I can give you a formal definition of intelligence and even a number of speculative sketches of how I think it could be implemented, but I will also tell you that strong AI is not within sight and that recent advances are not moving us in the direction of strong AI" https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1617579095885500416 https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1617579095885500416

lm28469 4y ago
Look back at crypto and apply the same logic. It "changed everything" if you are part of the money makers, for the average joe nothing changed
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  I use chatgpt to write code. If it gets a bit better and can connected to an editor to create files, update existing files developer productivity will go through the roof
  - thomasahle 4y ago
    I already fear my productivity drop when OpenAI finally takes ChatGPT offline.
    - rustyminnow 4y ago
      What sorts of things are you using it (successfully) for? I've gotten it to write a script or two for me, but it feels like usually I have to type out so much context (or domain/business knowledge) that it doesn't end up saving much effort.
      - msikora 4y ago
        I use it as an instant StackOverflow for the most part to get around new libraries or libraries/languages I don't use that often. Also generating custom bash one liners or small scripts. It is priceless for this use case. Yeah, sometimes it is wrong, but in my exp. less than 5%. Also we are lucky that for our purposes we can almost always validate the answer almost instantly and without incurring any cost.
      - darkwater 4y ago
        Because you are a developer. Replace yourself with a product manager, and maybe you will start seeing things differently. I think in the long run LLMs will enable the real-deal NoCode solutions. You would probably need to write an essay to get it right, but you will just need to know a human language understood by the LLM and the business domain.
        rustyminnow 4y ago
        Thanks! That really had nothing to do with what I asked tho... This bit of thread is literally about using it to write code, so saying "pretend you're a PM" is not really relevant at all
        darkwater 4y ago
        What I meant is that your (our) job as a developer (in a mid-term future, I would say 10-12 years) will be made largely irrelevant, because a PM will be able to program by explaining what they wants to a LLM. That's why you are not seeing any real benefit from it now.
        rustyminnow 4y ago
        Right that's great. I get that. It's gonna put me out of a job in 10-12 years. I'll worry about that later. The person I responded to was saying that they (as a dev I believe) have been seeing huge productivity gains _right now_ and that's what I'm interested in.
  - scifibestfi 4y ago
    Is it better than Copilot?
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      Different use case I think. With chatGPT you write something like: write a function using the python requests library which makes a get request to the URL example.com, parses the JSON response and returns the value of the "foo" field. Throw an exception if the get request fails, the response is not JSON or is invalid JSON, or if the foo field is not present in the response. I just tried this and got a correct (and reasonable) function on the first try. This kind of high level description to low-level implementation is a huge timesaver but it saves time in a different way than copilot.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      I use it to generate whole test suites from function definitions. Not one test, but dozens, covering various inputs and edge cases. TDD purists will balk at that, but it saves serious amounts of typing out boilerplate. You have to recheck its suggestions, of course. I couldn't get Copilot to spew anything like that (a single simple test at best, and it fails at that more frequently than it produces something useful). It's also quite good at converting relatively simple programs or configs between languages. For example, I used it to convert PostgreSQL DDL queries into Hibernate models (and also in reverse), JS snippets into OCaml, XML into YAML, maven pom.xml into gradle build scripts, and a few more.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    And we use hammers to hit on nails, you still need a knowledgeable/skilled person to build a proper house though
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    I have a website in development aidev.codes that automatically saves the output from OpenAI queries to files you specify (hosts them in a web page if it's that type of file). GitHub integration is one of many things I have planned. Today fixing some bugs with the knowledgebase stuff I just added yesterday and also putting in a template system. It has an !!edit command. Also if you use vim you can try my npm package `askleo` `npm i -g askleo` (not tied to the website but requires your own OpenAI API key) with `:r ! askleo Go function to reverse a list of numbers` or whatever .
- simonw 4y ago
  I don't understand these comparisons between crypto and generative AI models. The AI models just seem so clearly and instantly more useful to me.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > useful to me. To you yes. Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment Crypto seemed very useful to many people, and they still do, you'll find thousand upon thousands of comments and this very website preaching cryptos as the next game changer
    - simonw 4y ago
      Crypto looked useful as long as the price kept going up. Everyone likes free money.
      - TillE 4y ago
        That was the crass money-making part of it, but a lot of nerds earnestly believe(d) that cryptocurrencies would have massive world-changing consequences. I think it's increasingly obvious that there's little rational or empirical basis for such belief. With AI, the biggest claims I see are overwhelmingly from people who are not doing cutting-edge work in the field, who have no real foundation for a belief that these AIs will continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Because to really change the world, they do need to get a lot better.
        simonw 4y ago
        My personal excitement about language models is based on what they can do today. I'm a big believer in the "capability overhang" idea, which is that the existing language models still have a huge array of capabilities that we haven't discovered yet. That theory seems to be proved correct on a constant basis. Even the classic "let's think about this step by step" paper came out less than a year ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 - May 2022.
revolvingocelot 4y ago
Your twit-xamples compare two different things. ChatGPT can pass exams [0] and IQ tests [1], but that doesn't mean it's a "strong AI", just that it's good at talking -- or, rather, creating text output that humans can ascribe thoughtfulness to, because, hey, it's getting the questions right! As right as someone with an IQ of 83 can, anyway. Whether it's "actually" thinking is another question entirely -- but does that matter?! If it -- or its soon-to-be-created, ever-more-complex descendants -- is good enough at aping a human, it'll probably replace a bunch of human jobs. There probably aren't enough "prompt engineer" positions for all the displaced humans to fill. There's your "change everything" -- it might not be a "strong AI", but if people can argue that Searle's Chinese Room [2] is "actually" talking, and it says useful, monetizable things, then it's close enough to be disruptive. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt_exam_study/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt_exam_study/ [1] https://nitter.1d4.us/sergeyi49013776/status/1598430479878856737 https://nitter.1d4.us/sergeyi49013776/status/159843047987885... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
michaelrpeskin 4y ago
I have been saying lately "if your job can be replaced by AI, it should". I know that sounds crass, but I'm a person who is always trying to replace my tasks with small shell scripts leaving only the real thinking to be the stuff that I do. I remember a long time ago Joel from Joel on Software made a post/comment (I can't find it, so it must have been a comment) about how the hard part of programming is interpreting the spec into code, and that programmers often get mad because the "spec isn't complete". Of course the spec isn't complete, if it were complete, it would cover every edge case and be as complex as the code. If you could have AI turn a spec into code, then the real intelligence goes into writing the spec to cover the complexity. It's ok if AI can generate boiler plate for functions or even regurgitate leet code solutions (heck, I gave it the typical "coding challenge" we use here as our first filter and it did a good job). The real intelligence in development is to know what algorithm you want to use for your current problem. So to me ChatGPT isn't that big of a deal. It does some neat things, and it may make some jobs redundant, but I don't see how it could replace the real value that humans bring to a problem. It may keep replacing the bottom tier workers, but that just frees people up to bring value higher up the value chain.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  > programmers often get mad because the "spec isn't complete" > Of course the spec isn't complete, if it were complete, it would cover every edge case and be as complex as the code. Fair, but triggering nonetheless because I've definitely seen this argument used as an excuse for why there was basically no spec aside from "an iPhone app used to rate beer" and that there is some kind of value in such a contribution that couldn't otherwise be found by pulling in random strangers from the street and asking them about cool things they wished that computers could do.
- gcanyon 4y ago
  "If you could have AI turn a spec into code, then the real intelligence goes into writing the spec to cover the complexity." If that's the case, then the spec is code. And this isn't the first time something like that has happened: people who write assembly might say to someone writing Python, "How can you call that code when you don't even know which register is storing a value?"
simonw 4y ago
As a programmer, large language models let me solve an increasing range of problems that I couldn't have solved without them. So I think they are a very big deal. Just one example: parsing structured data out of a big pile of poorly formatted PDF documents. That used to be too difficult and expensive for me to tackle without a small army of data entry people to help do the work. Today I can point Textract OCR at it and then use a language model to extract structured data. (I haven't implemented this particular example just yet, but I'm looking for an opportunity to do so.)
- 6keZbCECT2uB 4y ago
  I think that ChatGPT could be a big accelerator for creative activity, but I wouldn't trust any output that I've only partially verified. That limits it to human scale problems in its direct output, but there are many ways that human scale output like code snippets can be useful on computer scale data.
  - simonw 4y ago
    There are plenty of valuable use-cases that aren't at much risk from hallucinations at all: - Asking it to summarize text - Using it to extract facts from text and present them in an alternative format - turning a chunk of HTML into JSON for example - Creative writing - poems, stories etc - Getting feedback on your own text - asking it what should be tightened up, which bits are confusing and so on - All kinds of code generation activities
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      > turning a chunk of HTML into JSON for example I haven't done exactly that, but based on similar examples this is likely very vulnerable to hallucinations.
      - simonw 4y ago
        For simple things it's pretty safe. I tried pasting in HTML from the homepage of Hacker News and having it turn that into a list of JSON objects each with the title, submitter, number of upvotes and number of comments. Here's a similar trick I did with Copilot: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/reformatting-text-with-copilot https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/reformatting-text-with-co...
jghn 4y ago
I've been using it more and more as a Stackoverflow/Google replacement when working. Sure, it's not always correct, but there's a lot of garbage answers on SO/Google too. But I'm finding it's better at getting me in the right ballpark, and that saves me time.
- msikora 4y ago
  Yes, this is my use case as well and it is amazing at this. Saves a lot of time.
scottLobster 4y ago
IMO it's analogous to adaptive cruise control on cars. It's very useful in certain specific circumstances, and genuinely helpful. But not yet necessary or transformative unless you live in LA/sit in traffic for a living. People are claiming to use it to write code, I'm curious how sophisticated said code is. Sure it might take out of some of the grunt work, like an ultra-sophisticated find-and-replace, but you still have to review all the changes it makes and correct any mistakes so the only thing it really saves is the typing. There's no way you could ask it to write code for a sophisticated architecture without extensive training on said architecture, and I'm not sure how you would even train it for that (can it parse design documents? Diagrams?) The "Look, AI is replacing creative work first, the thing we thought was most immune to AI!" narrative annoys me. IMO it's just yet another factor revealing how little people value "creative" work. There's a reason relatively simplistic Marvel movies make the big bucks and the erudite starving author/artist is a meme. The market does not appreciate creativity for its own sake, and never has. No one cares about the reincarnation of William Shakespeare if he' s using all his talent to write blogspam. No one cares about Monet's ghost's DeviantArt anime titty drawings. People care about creativity because it's a requirement to produce something new and useful, that use can be pragmatic or symbolic, but if it's neither no one cares and the AI-generated equivalent is good enough. You want to see AI-proof creativity (at least currently available AI)? Look at any luxury automobile interior. Look at any sophisticated software/hardware architecture. Look at an aircraft carrier or any other item where there aren't millions of samples to train on. That's not to say AI couldn't contribute to the tools that make these things, but no one working on the above is losing their job to AI any time soon. It's just taking out some of the low-hanging creative fruit. Maybe it's the start of an all-consuming revolution, or maybe this is as far as it goes. Only time will tell, but I've seen enough false revolutions (self-driving cars, AI advertising, crypto) to not buy in until I see hard data of it doing something more than writing convincing youtube intros and being used to cheat on high school essays. If the tools turn out to produce genuine value, then I'll learn how to use them to maximum effect at my job. Nothing to get wound up about either way.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Copilot is perfectly capable of understanding my extremely complex spaghetti code and give accurate suggestions based on the context spanning many files. It truly feels like you're doing pair programming with another human being.
fhe 4y ago
Even if ChatGPT (and LLMs in general) is not the way to go for AGI, there is plenty of evidence so far that it will prove to be a powerful tool. Much like airplanes did little in the way of achieving bird-like flight, but is obviously a useful invention, in many ways superior to bird-like flight.
vb-8448 4y ago
The main problem is that, if you don't know enough details about the domain, *you can never be sure that the response is correct or not*. So, if you are using it as a “personal assistant” and “supervise it” is a big (very big) deal since it's going to save a lot of time. There are also some unknowns related to the cost/time needed to train and run the infrastructure behind it that could change a lot of things.
- throwaway123--4 4y ago
  how about with a stackoverflow like site for help? That's the idea I thought of: https://www.gptoverflow.link/ https://www.gptoverflow.link/
  - vb-8448 4y ago
    Honestly, I don't see any value in it, I already have the chat prompt and just type inside it the question instead of googling and be redirected to “gptoverlow”. Maybe can be useful if actual humans validate/fix ChatGPT response, but in this case probably better to put effort to fix response directly in ChatGPT.
    - throwaway123--4 4y ago
      Not sure you understand. That is what I was going for. 1. share an interesting prompt 2. Have someone validate the response if you're not comfortable with what ChatGPT gave you.
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  After dealing with a lot of contractors for my house, I feel like close supervision with knowledge of the problem domain is also required of many humans.
- deckard1 4y ago
  If it's an assistant that you constantly have to double check their work, then they would get fired ASAP. That's the problem with Copilot. If I'm not familiar with the API calls then I'm still going to have to dig into the docs. I could run it and it might "work", but that doesn't guarantee that it's correct. There are a whole lot of things in the C API that work but are not correct, such as the gets() function. If I have to do such legwork then it's just as easy to write the code myself. The utility of AI is proportional to the trust one has in it. Trust is easy to lose and hard to regain. It will take just a few AI mishaps to ruin a product or even an entire industry.
partiallypro 4y ago
I think it's a big deal for some things, but for others is not. I think it's a good tool, but as of yet can't replace a human. The writing is pretty mediocre. I know people that use it to write slide deck copy, which I think is nice because no one really cares about that and it saves some time. I do think it's a nice tool to get a general idea of something or even can be used as a writing prompt. For some coding answers as of now, it's actually just easier and faster to use Google/Bing and find an answer on StackOverflow.
- DrSiemer 4y ago
  The biggest advantage is not in finding the answer. It's in being able to ask questions about that answer and getting immediate and pretty accurate responses.
williamcotton 4y ago
"if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind starting shortly... i'm finding it a bit hard to communicate the urgency and heaviness of what's going on" "Personally I can give you a formal definition of intelligence and even a number of speculative sketches of how I think it could be implemented, but I will also tell you that strong AI is not within sight and that recent advances are not moving us in the direction of strong AI" Tools that assist in knowledge work can be very useful and very impactful on the knowledge industries without needing to even define "strong AI", let alone "being smart", "knowing ideas", et al. What's important is not what we call these things or how we talk about what they do in an abstract manner rather if these tools are useful. There's a general lesson here: Don't waste your time talking yourself in philosophical circles about what "AI" means, or what "knowing" means, or what "ideas" mean. If you'd like further convincing please see Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. If pressed I'm just going to do a cheap imitation so you might as well get it from the source. Personally, I have found ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Copilot, and a number of other large language models and tools built on large language models to be very useful. I fed a folk song I was working on into ChatGPT and asked it to conjure up some similar evocative scenery... I then generated animations with Stable Diffusion based on a linear interpolation between those descriptions of that evocative scenery in the latent space... Then I wrote wrote some more lyrics about the weird stuff Stable Diffusion was hallucinating... and in the end I had a bunch of visual images, a song, and some animations, all that seem worthy of publishing. The visual components would otherwise never have been made as I don't have the time or money to do much more than sit around with my acoustic guitar and write songs.
- msikora 4y ago
  There is a whole YouTube genre of songs with video where every lyric is a generated image (typically MidJourney). Some of them are pretty cool.
- tmountain 4y ago
  Sounds awesome, care to share?
  - 4y ago
slaymaker1907 4y ago
ChatGPT made me rethink my assessment of how close we are to general AI. I was of the opinion that we need some major architectural innovations to actually get to general AI and while I think we still need some huge discoveries, I think ChatGPT was one of those milestones.
- zeven7 4y ago
  ChatGPT sounds really human, but really I think it's more of a pulling back of the curtain of what many people do a lot of the time: regurgitate ideas. People are capable of more intelligence, but a large part of human work, time, even creativity comes from taking everything you've sucked into your brain during your life and dumping out something else. ChatGPT is amazingly good at this part of mimicking a human.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  Has everyone else been using a different tool than me? ChatGPT is interesting, but is laughably bad at any non-trivial instruction. It's fantastic at generating content that on first glance looks remarkably right, but always fails fine inspection. All I've seen from LLMs is much better demos of the types of funny things markov chains were generating two decades ago (anyone remember the various academic paper generators?). However I have yet to see anything that stands out as really remarkable. My read is that people want to see incredible progress towards strong AI, and LLMs do a great job of letting people feel like they're seeing that if they want to. I suspect in 5 years we'll largely have forgotten about LLMs and in 10 they'll come back into popularity because techniques will become more efficient and computing power will increase enough that people can train them on their home PCs... but they'll still just be a fun novelty.
  - huijzer 4y ago
    > ChatGPT is interesting, but is laughably bad at any non-trivial instruction. Have you actually looked at the linked Cheat Sheet?
  - slaymaker1907 4y ago
    Really? I found it to be extremely capable at very difficult tasks. For example, I had it guide me through using the ODBC SQL drivers (C++). It's also extremely good at generating fictional stories. Unlike other AI solutions, it has a lot of context. For example, it generated one story that mostly used generic names like "the king" or "evil wizard", but I was able to get it to fill in those names in a conversational way, not by modifying the original prompt like you'd need to do with plain GPT-3.
gcanyon 4y ago
"strong AI is not within sight" What is in sight is AI that can (sometimes) fool us into thinking it is "strong". And whether it is or not becomes a point for philosophers to debate. We're heading toward a situation captured fairly well in "The Good Place" -- is Janet actually alive? Is killing her wrong? She would tell you no, as long as you're not approaching the button that actually reboots her :-)
- psychphysic 4y ago
  What it's unequivocally done is shown us that while we thought bigger models would lead to incremental improvements we have had a giant leap with this X10 bigger model. I.e. were not good at predicting how far away stronger AI is. Even if we can comment on strong/weak AI.
- naasking 4y ago
  > What is in sight is AI that can (sometimes) fool us into thinking it is "strong". Or maybe you've fooled yourself into thinking that "strong AI"/general intelligence is actually not just a bunch of tricks that mash together into a smorgasbord that usually works quite well. That includes human intelligence.
  - gcanyon 4y ago
    I have definitely not fooled myself into thinking that "strong AI" is not a bunch of tricks that mash together into a smorgasbord. That's exactly what I think :-) Including human intelligence, as you say. I'm reasonably convinced that "intelligence" is an emergent higher-order abstraction that arises from deterministic processes, at the cellular, or digital, level. I would, however, make a distinction between resilient and brittle intelligence. ChatGPT, for example, seems very human-like for some percentage of responses, but when it goes off the rails, it goes completely wrong. Humans can sometimes be like that, but (I don't think) to the same degree, and certainly they are often capable of a softer landing when they get into unfamiliar territory.
naasking 4y ago
> Even people in AI don't seem to agree on whether it's going to change everything or it's overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? Or somewhere in the middle? It's both IMO. It will change everything but is also overhyped at this point.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Even people in AI don’t seem to agree on whether it’s going to change everything or it’s overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? My feeling is that it (well, LLMs in general, ChatGPT is just the particular one getting public attention) is an overhyped major advancement that is going to change almost everything, but not as much as it is being hyped as changing everything.

lm28469 4y ago

Look back at crypto and apply the same logic. It "changed everything" if you are part of the money makers, for the average joe nothing changed

jiggywiggy 4y ago
I use chatgpt to write code. If it gets a bit better and can connected to an editor to create files, update existing files developer productivity will go through the roof
- thomasahle 4y ago
  I already fear my productivity drop when OpenAI finally takes ChatGPT offline.
  - rustyminnow 4y ago
    What sorts of things are you using it (successfully) for? I've gotten it to write a script or two for me, but it feels like usually I have to type out so much context (or domain/business knowledge) that it doesn't end up saving much effort.
    - msikora 4y ago
      I use it as an instant StackOverflow for the most part to get around new libraries or libraries/languages I don't use that often. Also generating custom bash one liners or small scripts. It is priceless for this use case. Yeah, sometimes it is wrong, but in my exp. less than 5%. Also we are lucky that for our purposes we can almost always validate the answer almost instantly and without incurring any cost.
    - darkwater 4y ago
      Because you are a developer. Replace yourself with a product manager, and maybe you will start seeing things differently. I think in the long run LLMs will enable the real-deal NoCode solutions. You would probably need to write an essay to get it right, but you will just need to know a human language understood by the LLM and the business domain.
      - rustyminnow 4y ago
        Thanks! That really had nothing to do with what I asked tho... This bit of thread is literally about using it to write code, so saying "pretend you're a PM" is not really relevant at all
        darkwater 4y ago
        What I meant is that your (our) job as a developer (in a mid-term future, I would say 10-12 years) will be made largely irrelevant, because a PM will be able to program by explaining what they wants to a LLM. That's why you are not seeing any real benefit from it now.
        rustyminnow 4y ago
        Right that's great. I get that. It's gonna put me out of a job in 10-12 years. I'll worry about that later. The person I responded to was saying that they (as a dev I believe) have been seeing huge productivity gains _right now_ and that's what I'm interested in.
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  Is it better than Copilot?
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Different use case I think. With chatGPT you write something like: write a function using the python requests library which makes a get request to the URL example.com, parses the JSON response and returns the value of the "foo" field. Throw an exception if the get request fails, the response is not JSON or is invalid JSON, or if the foo field is not present in the response. I just tried this and got a correct (and reasonable) function on the first try. This kind of high level description to low-level implementation is a huge timesaver but it saves time in a different way than copilot.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    I use it to generate whole test suites from function definitions. Not one test, but dozens, covering various inputs and edge cases. TDD purists will balk at that, but it saves serious amounts of typing out boilerplate. You have to recheck its suggestions, of course. I couldn't get Copilot to spew anything like that (a single simple test at best, and it fails at that more frequently than it produces something useful). It's also quite good at converting relatively simple programs or configs between languages. For example, I used it to convert PostgreSQL DDL queries into Hibernate models (and also in reverse), JS snippets into OCaml, XML into YAML, maven pom.xml into gradle build scripts, and a few more.
- lm28469 4y ago
  And we use hammers to hit on nails, you still need a knowledgeable/skilled person to build a proper house though
- ilaksh 4y ago
  I have a website in development aidev.codes that automatically saves the output from OpenAI queries to files you specify (hosts them in a web page if it's that type of file). GitHub integration is one of many things I have planned. Today fixing some bugs with the knowledgebase stuff I just added yesterday and also putting in a template system. It has an !!edit command. Also if you use vim you can try my npm package `askleo` `npm i -g askleo` (not tied to the website but requires your own OpenAI API key) with `:r ! askleo Go function to reverse a list of numbers` or whatever .
simonw 4y ago
I don't understand these comparisons between crypto and generative AI models. The AI models just seem so clearly and instantly more useful to me.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > useful to me. To you yes. Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment Crypto seemed very useful to many people, and they still do, you'll find thousand upon thousands of comments and this very website preaching cryptos as the next game changer
  - simonw 4y ago
    Crypto looked useful as long as the price kept going up. Everyone likes free money.
    - TillE 4y ago
      That was the crass money-making part of it, but a lot of nerds earnestly believe(d) that cryptocurrencies would have massive world-changing consequences. I think it's increasingly obvious that there's little rational or empirical basis for such belief. With AI, the biggest claims I see are overwhelmingly from people who are not doing cutting-edge work in the field, who have no real foundation for a belief that these AIs will continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Because to really change the world, they do need to get a lot better.
      - simonw 4y ago
        My personal excitement about language models is based on what they can do today. I'm a big believer in the "capability overhang" idea, which is that the existing language models still have a huge array of capabilities that we haven't discovered yet. That theory seems to be proved correct on a constant basis. Even the classic "let's think about this step by step" paper came out less than a year ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 - May 2022.

revolvingocelot 4y ago

Your twit-xamples compare two different things. ChatGPT can pass exams [0] and IQ tests [1], but that doesn't mean it's a "strong AI", just that it's good at talking -- or, rather, creating text output that humans can ascribe thoughtfulness to, because, hey, it's getting the questions right! As right as someone with an IQ of 83 can, anyway. Whether it's "actually" thinking is another question entirely -- but does that matter?! If it -- or its soon-to-be-created, ever-more-complex descendants -- is good enough at aping a human, it'll probably replace a bunch of human jobs. There probably aren't enough "prompt engineer" positions for all the displaced humans to fill. There's your "change everything" -- it might not be a "strong AI", but if people can argue that Searle's Chinese Room [2] is "actually" talking, and it says useful, monetizable things, then it's close enough to be disruptive. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt_exam_study/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/chatgpt_exam_study/ [1] https://nitter.1d4.us/sergeyi49013776/status/1598430479878856737 https://nitter.1d4.us/sergeyi49013776/status/159843047987885... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

michaelrpeskin 4y ago

I have been saying lately "if your job can be replaced by AI, it should". I know that sounds crass, but I'm a person who is always trying to replace my tasks with small shell scripts leaving only the real thinking to be the stuff that I do. I remember a long time ago Joel from Joel on Software made a post/comment (I can't find it, so it must have been a comment) about how the hard part of programming is interpreting the spec into code, and that programmers often get mad because the "spec isn't complete". Of course the spec isn't complete, if it were complete, it would cover every edge case and be as complex as the code. If you could have AI turn a spec into code, then the real intelligence goes into writing the spec to cover the complexity. It's ok if AI can generate boiler plate for functions or even regurgitate leet code solutions (heck, I gave it the typical "coding challenge" we use here as our first filter and it did a good job). The real intelligence in development is to know what algorithm you want to use for your current problem. So to me ChatGPT isn't that big of a deal. It does some neat things, and it may make some jobs redundant, but I don't see how it could replace the real value that humans bring to a problem. It may keep replacing the bottom tier workers, but that just frees people up to bring value higher up the value chain.

williamcotton 4y ago
> programmers often get mad because the "spec isn't complete" > Of course the spec isn't complete, if it were complete, it would cover every edge case and be as complex as the code. Fair, but triggering nonetheless because I've definitely seen this argument used as an excuse for why there was basically no spec aside from "an iPhone app used to rate beer" and that there is some kind of value in such a contribution that couldn't otherwise be found by pulling in random strangers from the street and asking them about cool things they wished that computers could do.
gcanyon 4y ago
"If you could have AI turn a spec into code, then the real intelligence goes into writing the spec to cover the complexity." If that's the case, then the spec is code. And this isn't the first time something like that has happened: people who write assembly might say to someone writing Python, "How can you call that code when you don't even know which register is storing a value?"

simonw 4y ago

As a programmer, large language models let me solve an increasing range of problems that I couldn't have solved without them. So I think they are a very big deal. Just one example: parsing structured data out of a big pile of poorly formatted PDF documents. That used to be too difficult and expensive for me to tackle without a small army of data entry people to help do the work. Today I can point Textract OCR at it and then use a language model to extract structured data. (I haven't implemented this particular example just yet, but I'm looking for an opportunity to do so.)

6keZbCECT2uB 4y ago
I think that ChatGPT could be a big accelerator for creative activity, but I wouldn't trust any output that I've only partially verified. That limits it to human scale problems in its direct output, but there are many ways that human scale output like code snippets can be useful on computer scale data.
- simonw 4y ago
  There are plenty of valuable use-cases that aren't at much risk from hallucinations at all: - Asking it to summarize text - Using it to extract facts from text and present them in an alternative format - turning a chunk of HTML into JSON for example - Creative writing - poems, stories etc - Getting feedback on your own text - asking it what should be tightened up, which bits are confusing and so on - All kinds of code generation activities
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    > turning a chunk of HTML into JSON for example I haven't done exactly that, but based on similar examples this is likely very vulnerable to hallucinations.
    - simonw 4y ago
      For simple things it's pretty safe. I tried pasting in HTML from the homepage of Hacker News and having it turn that into a list of JSON objects each with the title, submitter, number of upvotes and number of comments. Here's a similar trick I did with Copilot: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/reformatting-text-with-copilot https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/reformatting-text-with-co...

jghn 4y ago

I've been using it more and more as a Stackoverflow/Google replacement when working. Sure, it's not always correct, but there's a lot of garbage answers on SO/Google too. But I'm finding it's better at getting me in the right ballpark, and that saves me time.

msikora 4y ago
Yes, this is my use case as well and it is amazing at this. Saves a lot of time.

scottLobster 4y ago

IMO it's analogous to adaptive cruise control on cars. It's very useful in certain specific circumstances, and genuinely helpful. But not yet necessary or transformative unless you live in LA/sit in traffic for a living. People are claiming to use it to write code, I'm curious how sophisticated said code is. Sure it might take out of some of the grunt work, like an ultra-sophisticated find-and-replace, but you still have to review all the changes it makes and correct any mistakes so the only thing it really saves is the typing. There's no way you could ask it to write code for a sophisticated architecture without extensive training on said architecture, and I'm not sure how you would even train it for that (can it parse design documents? Diagrams?) The "Look, AI is replacing creative work first, the thing we thought was most immune to AI!" narrative annoys me. IMO it's just yet another factor revealing how little people value "creative" work. There's a reason relatively simplistic Marvel movies make the big bucks and the erudite starving author/artist is a meme. The market does not appreciate creativity for its own sake, and never has. No one cares about the reincarnation of William Shakespeare if he' s using all his talent to write blogspam. No one cares about Monet's ghost's DeviantArt anime titty drawings. People care about creativity because it's a requirement to produce something new and useful, that use can be pragmatic or symbolic, but if it's neither no one cares and the AI-generated equivalent is good enough. You want to see AI-proof creativity (at least currently available AI)? Look at any luxury automobile interior. Look at any sophisticated software/hardware architecture. Look at an aircraft carrier or any other item where there aren't millions of samples to train on. That's not to say AI couldn't contribute to the tools that make these things, but no one working on the above is losing their job to AI any time soon. It's just taking out some of the low-hanging creative fruit. Maybe it's the start of an all-consuming revolution, or maybe this is as far as it goes. Only time will tell, but I've seen enough false revolutions (self-driving cars, AI advertising, crypto) to not buy in until I see hard data of it doing something more than writing convincing youtube intros and being used to cheat on high school essays. If the tools turn out to produce genuine value, then I'll learn how to use them to maximum effect at my job. Nothing to get wound up about either way.

Kiro 4y ago
Copilot is perfectly capable of understanding my extremely complex spaghetti code and give accurate suggestions based on the context spanning many files. It truly feels like you're doing pair programming with another human being.

fhe 4y ago

Even if ChatGPT (and LLMs in general) is not the way to go for AGI, there is plenty of evidence so far that it will prove to be a powerful tool. Much like airplanes did little in the way of achieving bird-like flight, but is obviously a useful invention, in many ways superior to bird-like flight.

vb-8448 4y ago

The main problem is that, if you don't know enough details about the domain, *you can never be sure that the response is correct or not*. So, if you are using it as a “personal assistant” and “supervise it” is a big (very big) deal since it's going to save a lot of time. There are also some unknowns related to the cost/time needed to train and run the infrastructure behind it that could change a lot of things.

throwaway123--4 4y ago
how about with a stackoverflow like site for help? That's the idea I thought of: https://www.gptoverflow.link/ https://www.gptoverflow.link/
- vb-8448 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't see any value in it, I already have the chat prompt and just type inside it the question instead of googling and be redirected to “gptoverlow”. Maybe can be useful if actual humans validate/fix ChatGPT response, but in this case probably better to put effort to fix response directly in ChatGPT.
  - throwaway123--4 4y ago
    Not sure you understand. That is what I was going for. 1. share an interesting prompt 2. Have someone validate the response if you're not comfortable with what ChatGPT gave you.
imoverclocked 4y ago
After dealing with a lot of contractors for my house, I feel like close supervision with knowledge of the problem domain is also required of many humans.
deckard1 4y ago
If it's an assistant that you constantly have to double check their work, then they would get fired ASAP. That's the problem with Copilot. If I'm not familiar with the API calls then I'm still going to have to dig into the docs. I could run it and it might "work", but that doesn't guarantee that it's correct. There are a whole lot of things in the C API that work but are not correct, such as the gets() function. If I have to do such legwork then it's just as easy to write the code myself. The utility of AI is proportional to the trust one has in it. Trust is easy to lose and hard to regain. It will take just a few AI mishaps to ruin a product or even an entire industry.

partiallypro 4y ago

I think it's a big deal for some things, but for others is not. I think it's a good tool, but as of yet can't replace a human. The writing is pretty mediocre. I know people that use it to write slide deck copy, which I think is nice because no one really cares about that and it saves some time. I do think it's a nice tool to get a general idea of something or even can be used as a writing prompt. For some coding answers as of now, it's actually just easier and faster to use Google/Bing and find an answer on StackOverflow.

DrSiemer 4y ago
The biggest advantage is not in finding the answer. It's in being able to ask questions about that answer and getting immediate and pretty accurate responses.

williamcotton 4y ago

"if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind starting shortly... i'm finding it a bit hard to communicate the urgency and heaviness of what's going on" "Personally I can give you a formal definition of intelligence and even a number of speculative sketches of how I think it could be implemented, but I will also tell you that strong AI is not within sight and that recent advances are not moving us in the direction of strong AI" Tools that assist in knowledge work can be very useful and very impactful on the knowledge industries without needing to even define "strong AI", let alone "being smart", "knowing ideas", et al. What's important is not what we call these things or how we talk about what they do in an abstract manner rather if these tools are useful. There's a general lesson here: Don't waste your time talking yourself in philosophical circles about what "AI" means, or what "knowing" means, or what "ideas" mean. If you'd like further convincing please see Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. If pressed I'm just going to do a cheap imitation so you might as well get it from the source. Personally, I have found ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Copilot, and a number of other large language models and tools built on large language models to be very useful. I fed a folk song I was working on into ChatGPT and asked it to conjure up some similar evocative scenery... I then generated animations with Stable Diffusion based on a linear interpolation between those descriptions of that evocative scenery in the latent space... Then I wrote wrote some more lyrics about the weird stuff Stable Diffusion was hallucinating... and in the end I had a bunch of visual images, a song, and some animations, all that seem worthy of publishing. The visual components would otherwise never have been made as I don't have the time or money to do much more than sit around with my acoustic guitar and write songs.

msikora 4y ago
There is a whole YouTube genre of songs with video where every lyric is a generated image (typically MidJourney). Some of them are pretty cool.
tmountain 4y ago
Sounds awesome, care to share?
- 4y ago

slaymaker1907 4y ago

ChatGPT made me rethink my assessment of how close we are to general AI. I was of the opinion that we need some major architectural innovations to actually get to general AI and while I think we still need some huge discoveries, I think ChatGPT was one of those milestones.

zeven7 4y ago
ChatGPT sounds really human, but really I think it's more of a pulling back of the curtain of what many people do a lot of the time: regurgitate ideas. People are capable of more intelligence, but a large part of human work, time, even creativity comes from taking everything you've sucked into your brain during your life and dumping out something else. ChatGPT is amazingly good at this part of mimicking a human.
time_to_smile 4y ago
Has everyone else been using a different tool than me? ChatGPT is interesting, but is laughably bad at any non-trivial instruction. It's fantastic at generating content that on first glance looks remarkably right, but always fails fine inspection. All I've seen from LLMs is much better demos of the types of funny things markov chains were generating two decades ago (anyone remember the various academic paper generators?). However I have yet to see anything that stands out as really remarkable. My read is that people want to see incredible progress towards strong AI, and LLMs do a great job of letting people feel like they're seeing that if they want to. I suspect in 5 years we'll largely have forgotten about LLMs and in 10 they'll come back into popularity because techniques will become more efficient and computing power will increase enough that people can train them on their home PCs... but they'll still just be a fun novelty.
- huijzer 4y ago
  > ChatGPT is interesting, but is laughably bad at any non-trivial instruction. Have you actually looked at the linked Cheat Sheet?
- slaymaker1907 4y ago
  Really? I found it to be extremely capable at very difficult tasks. For example, I had it guide me through using the ODBC SQL drivers (C++). It's also extremely good at generating fictional stories. Unlike other AI solutions, it has a lot of context. For example, it generated one story that mostly used generic names like "the king" or "evil wizard", but I was able to get it to fill in those names in a conversational way, not by modifying the original prompt like you'd need to do with plain GPT-3.

gcanyon 4y ago

"strong AI is not within sight" What is in sight is AI that can (sometimes) fool us into thinking it is "strong". And whether it is or not becomes a point for philosophers to debate. We're heading toward a situation captured fairly well in "The Good Place" -- is Janet actually alive? Is killing her wrong? She would tell you no, as long as you're not approaching the button that actually reboots her :-)

psychphysic 4y ago
What it's unequivocally done is shown us that while we thought bigger models would lead to incremental improvements we have had a giant leap with this X10 bigger model. I.e. were not good at predicting how far away stronger AI is. Even if we can comment on strong/weak AI.
naasking 4y ago
> What is in sight is AI that can (sometimes) fool us into thinking it is "strong". Or maybe you've fooled yourself into thinking that "strong AI"/general intelligence is actually not just a bunch of tricks that mash together into a smorgasbord that usually works quite well. That includes human intelligence.
- gcanyon 4y ago
  I have definitely not fooled myself into thinking that "strong AI" is not a bunch of tricks that mash together into a smorgasbord. That's exactly what I think :-) Including human intelligence, as you say. I'm reasonably convinced that "intelligence" is an emergent higher-order abstraction that arises from deterministic processes, at the cellular, or digital, level. I would, however, make a distinction between resilient and brittle intelligence. ChatGPT, for example, seems very human-like for some percentage of responses, but when it goes off the rails, it goes completely wrong. Humans can sometimes be like that, but (I don't think) to the same degree, and certainly they are often capable of a softer landing when they get into unfamiliar territory.

naasking 4y ago

> Even people in AI don't seem to agree on whether it's going to change everything or it's overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? Or somewhere in the middle? It's both IMO. It will change everything but is also overhyped at this point.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Even people in AI don’t seem to agree on whether it’s going to change everything or it’s overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? My feeling is that it (well, LLMs in general, ChatGPT is just the particular one getting public attention) is an overhyped major advancement that is going to change almost everything, but not as much as it is being hyped as changing everything.