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I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But there's definitely u

I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But there's definitely uses for a tool that produces a lot of boilerplate content that a human can then proofread (ex: writing cover letters, filling out unstructured paperwork, etc.) Edit: I personally underestimated the use-case, because the "more optimal" thing to do when auto-filling out paperwork would be to define a formal data-structure with annotations for each field, and then have a system read annotations and spit out autosuggestions. But this is a lot of overhead. If you can have a system that takes in arbitrary text, parses it, and fills it out with pretty good guesses, then that can be much more viable than the previous approach, as it doesn't require an overhaul of, say, the way the US bureaucracy generates paperwork. It's all on the consumer-end, the producer doesn't need to cooperate.

joenot443 4y ago
If you can think of a single individual who can demonstrate knowledge on the fly with the same accuracy and breadth as ChatGPT, I think most of us would agree in calling them “incredibly smart.”
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  If ChatGPT was a person, you'd immediately realize something was very wrong with them. Some kind of idiot savant perhaps who'd memorized an encyclopedia but was confused by how it all fit together, or maybe someone hallucinating and delusional, only able to hold coherent thoughts together for brief stretches of time before babbling gibberish that made no sense.
- freejazz 4y ago
  My gosh. Enough with the anthropomorphizing.
VBprogrammer 4y ago
I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail. I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what the average person would be able to tell you. I thought that was quite impressive for a fairly obscure bit of mechanical engineering.
- karpierz 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, I'd have the following questions: 1. Would you be able to notice if it made something up, given that it's going beyond the detail that you know? 2. Did it have any details that aren't covered in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive
  - hooande 4y ago
    what exactly do you think its going to make up? "The Hybrid Synergy Drive runs on apples and fairy dust"? I doubt that OP wants to build one of the engines, they just want a concise explanation. I've seen gpt hallucinate all kinds of things. But very rarely for something like explaining a process or system.
    - svachalek 4y ago
      It writes things that sound reasonable in context. So it will likely give something that sounds like a Popular Mechanics article about how some kind of machine works, but it may not really be this particular machine that you are asking about, or any actual machine in existence. That's the tricky thing about it, if it actually said "fairy dust" you know you can stop reading, but what it actually writes typically needs some actual understanding of the subject to refute.
- webstrand 4y ago
  In my experience from asking it questions about things that I know well, the deeper you get into the weeds with it, the more likely it is to invent some kind of extremely plausible-sounding but incorrect answer. How confident are you that what it told you is actually correct?
  - tempest_ 4y ago
    That is the one thing I think about when people say "I used it to learn X and it was very good" but when people are learning they are not in a position to to judge if what they learned is correct. A lot of other stuff is just regurgitation of a wiki article. Still it is very interesting and definitely a step forward.
bnralt 4y ago
> I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But likely much better read and with much better discretion that most of people writing content these days. Which I think is part of the point that people are missing. ChatGPT’s output might not be as good as the best writing, but most of what people read is mediocre content with questionable accuracy. Being better than the majority of the writing being consumed is still a pretty big deal, even if it’s not better than all of the writing that’s being consumed. Especially since we can expect ChatGPT to get better. The same is true for AI art. Could you hire a trained artist and work with them to do a better job? Probably, but most people don’t have the time and money to pursue such a project. There are still trained artisans producing high quality physical goods that you can place an order with. But the masses have greatly benefited from the factories that have produced lower quality products that are much more widely available, and available at a moments notice. It’s not wrong to point out when the mass produced stuff might not have the same quality as the products produced. But if you only focus on this aspect you miss the reason why mass production is important.
- idontpost 4y ago
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- logifail 4y ago
  > ChatGPT’s output might not be as good as the best writing, but most of what people read is mediocre content with questionable accuracy. I agree with this, but I think we may be missing the point. Why are people reading mediocre content with questionable accuracy? The problem is not: how to quickly and cheaply create content which is marginally less mediocre and marginally more accurate than what we currently have.
  - bnralt 4y ago
    A lot of it is for entertainment, even when it’s infotainment. News reporting, Wikipedia, current affairs podcast, Tweets, Reddit, Hacker News comments, etc. The inaccuracies here aren’t that important, because the vast majority of this content is just being consumed for dopamine hits and not actually putting the information to use. Some of it is out of necessity. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that many people use Stack Overflow, and though some of the answers there are very good, others aren’t. If someone needs help with a specific problem they’ll often post a question somewhere (Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc.), and the quality of the answer they get is a roll of the die - even whether they’ll get an answer at all. Some of it is because blog spam has made traditional searches much more difficult. There’s another comment that says that there are comments better than Reddit and Hacker News, but if you go into a discussion about Google you’ll find that a lot of people have been doing things such as appending “reddit.com” to searches because otherwise they’ll drown in a mountain of blog spam.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Yeah, I think making a decent, nuanced analysis of ChatGPT and related systems (which the gp starts trying to do) requires one to avoid terms like smart/intelligent/etc. The term intelligence is naturally not fully defined and primarily used by humans to rank each other. So our human intuition about intelligence comes from the ranking we do of people. IE, we have the intuition that "if they can do X, they can easily do Y" about a given person and such an intuition clearly shouldn't carry over to even a very complex machine.

joenot443 4y ago

If you can think of a single individual who can demonstrate knowledge on the fly with the same accuracy and breadth as ChatGPT, I think most of us would agree in calling them “incredibly smart.”

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
If ChatGPT was a person, you'd immediately realize something was very wrong with them. Some kind of idiot savant perhaps who'd memorized an encyclopedia but was confused by how it all fit together, or maybe someone hallucinating and delusional, only able to hold coherent thoughts together for brief stretches of time before babbling gibberish that made no sense.
freejazz 4y ago
My gosh. Enough with the anthropomorphizing.

VBprogrammer 4y ago

I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail. I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what the average person would be able to tell you. I thought that was quite impressive for a fairly obscure bit of mechanical engineering.

karpierz 4y ago
Out of curiosity, I'd have the following questions: 1. Would you be able to notice if it made something up, given that it's going beyond the detail that you know? 2. Did it have any details that aren't covered in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive
- hooande 4y ago
  what exactly do you think its going to make up? "The Hybrid Synergy Drive runs on apples and fairy dust"? I doubt that OP wants to build one of the engines, they just want a concise explanation. I've seen gpt hallucinate all kinds of things. But very rarely for something like explaining a process or system.
  - svachalek 4y ago
    It writes things that sound reasonable in context. So it will likely give something that sounds like a Popular Mechanics article about how some kind of machine works, but it may not really be this particular machine that you are asking about, or any actual machine in existence. That's the tricky thing about it, if it actually said "fairy dust" you know you can stop reading, but what it actually writes typically needs some actual understanding of the subject to refute.
webstrand 4y ago
In my experience from asking it questions about things that I know well, the deeper you get into the weeds with it, the more likely it is to invent some kind of extremely plausible-sounding but incorrect answer. How confident are you that what it told you is actually correct?
- tempest_ 4y ago
  That is the one thing I think about when people say "I used it to learn X and it was very good" but when people are learning they are not in a position to to judge if what they learned is correct. A lot of other stuff is just regurgitation of a wiki article. Still it is very interesting and definitely a step forward.

bnralt 4y ago

> I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But likely much better read and with much better discretion that most of people writing content these days. Which I think is part of the point that people are missing. ChatGPT’s output might not be as good as the best writing, but most of what people read is mediocre content with questionable accuracy. Being better than the majority of the writing being consumed is still a pretty big deal, even if it’s not better than all of the writing that’s being consumed. Especially since we can expect ChatGPT to get better. The same is true for AI art. Could you hire a trained artist and work with them to do a better job? Probably, but most people don’t have the time and money to pursue such a project. There are still trained artisans producing high quality physical goods that you can place an order with. But the masses have greatly benefited from the factories that have produced lower quality products that are much more widely available, and available at a moments notice. It’s not wrong to point out when the mass produced stuff might not have the same quality as the products produced. But if you only focus on this aspect you miss the reason why mass production is important.

idontpost 4y ago
[dead]
logifail 4y ago
> ChatGPT’s output might not be as good as the best writing, but most of what people read is mediocre content with questionable accuracy. I agree with this, but I think we may be missing the point. Why are people reading mediocre content with questionable accuracy? The problem is not: how to quickly and cheaply create content which is marginally less mediocre and marginally more accurate than what we currently have.
- bnralt 4y ago
  A lot of it is for entertainment, even when it’s infotainment. News reporting, Wikipedia, current affairs podcast, Tweets, Reddit, Hacker News comments, etc. The inaccuracies here aren’t that important, because the vast majority of this content is just being consumed for dopamine hits and not actually putting the information to use. Some of it is out of necessity. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that many people use Stack Overflow, and though some of the answers there are very good, others aren’t. If someone needs help with a specific problem they’ll often post a question somewhere (Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc.), and the quality of the answer they get is a roll of the die - even whether they’ll get an answer at all. Some of it is because blog spam has made traditional searches much more difficult. There’s another comment that says that there are comments better than Reddit and Hacker News, but if you go into a discussion about Google you’ll find that a lot of people have been doing things such as appending “reddit.com” to searches because otherwise they’ll drown in a mountain of blog spam.

joe_the_user 4y ago

Yeah, I think making a decent, nuanced analysis of ChatGPT and related systems (which the gp starts trying to do) requires one to avoid terms like smart/intelligent/etc. The term intelligence is naturally not fully defined and primarily used by humans to rank each other. So our human intuition about intelligence comes from the ranking we do of people. IE, we have the intuition that "if they can do X, they can easily do Y" about a given person and such an intuition clearly shouldn't carry over to even a very complex machine.