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There is literally a post on front page on ChatGPT, and Microsoft and Google are preparing to duke it out starting in the _next 2 days_ over big-data generated

• eppp 4y ago
  I kind of doubt they trained chatgpt on petabytes of application logs and web server logs. Is keeping all of this crap even useful for more than a small amount of time at this scale? Actual good information will always be useful, most of this "big data" seems to be the equivalent of recording background static.
• miguelazo 4y ago
  >ChatGPT is literally changing how school will test their students, for a start. Sure, instead of schools checking for plagiarism from other students' papers using turnitin.com, they'll check for plagiarism using ChatGPT tools that scan for known output from their industrial-scale amalgamation of plagiarized materials. Big whoop.
  • humanizersequel 4y ago
    All math homework through the high school level is now as simple as figuring out how to describe it to ChatGPT (or maybe ChatGPT 2.0 for particularly tricky examples). Paper-writing is now a matter of figuring out how to rephrase LLM output in your own words to get around any watermarking or pattern detection.
    • eganist 4y ago
      Wolfram alpha has been around for math cheats (and people like me who just needed a more visual representation to learn) for a while now. Including proof of work.
      • LarryMullins 4y ago
        Years before wolfram alpha, we had TI-89s with computer algebra systems for cheating your way through highschool math.
        • eganist 4y ago
          Oh yeah, it's why most of my classes restricted us to TI-83s. The TI-89 was restricted in schools to basically calc and above, and the TI-92 was just banned. Lol
          • LarryMullins 4y ago
            In my school TI-89s were unrestricted, but I think that was mostly because teachers were only trained with 83s and assumed the 89 had equivalent capabilities. The SAT permitting the 89 probably had something to do with it too, since the 92 was banned (because qwerty as I understand it.)
    • frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
      You can't figure out how to describe a math problem correctly to ChatGPT without already knowing the solution.
    • dhdgrygev 4y ago
      Maybe this should give you a hint that said work is completely pointless and merely exists to waste student's time.
  • bhhaskin 4y ago
    Or just require students to use software that keeps track of version history or require spyware installed.
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Go back to longhand. Even if they are plagiarizing, they might learn something from the exercise of rewriting by hand.
      • suddenclarity 4y ago
        That's solved by putting a pen on your 3d printer.
        • genewitch 4y ago
          Or a second-hand Cricut...
  • Loughla 4y ago
    I mean, that's certainly part of it. But you're also seeing very fast restructuring of individual courses (because programs overall will definitely take years to restructure because higher education moves so damned slow) to account for these tools. In the small institution I am currently working with, the English courses, in one week, integrated chatgpt as a tool for students to work with. It's part of the collaborative idea building and development process now for every student enrolled in creative writing and writing analysis classes, and that happened in one week. I cannot stress enough how unbelievably fast that is for higher ed. That's faster than light speed. And we're not even that well resourced. I have to imagine there are other examples where it's more than just running through a bot to scan for known outputs.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Wow, instead of learning and being creative, just write a out whatever the generic safe whitewashed chatbot says? Why pay for the college?
    • stcroixx 4y ago
      Sounds like they simply panicked and threw something together with little thought or preparation, what, right in the middle of an actual course? And they want to charge kids for this kind of 'expert instruction'? I'd be pissed as a student.
      • Loughla 4y ago
        What a weird assumption you made there. In what way does what I wrote sound panicked? Because it was a week? Yes it was fast, but it was a massive effort of the entire english faculty. It's integrated into existing assignments, modifying processes that are super well established already. It was like integrating a new person into the class. Also, it was before semester, so the students literally saw nothing weird; that was another strange assumption for you to make. Just a tip, and don't read tone in this statement, but don't assume things. 9/10 times you're going to be incorrect. It's much better to ask questions, instead of making statements with question marks at the end of them.
  • scottyah 4y ago
    > industrial-scale amalgamation of plagiarized materials More Big Data!
  • criddell 4y ago
    Is it crazy to think that instead of stepping up in the war against AI we instead try to figure out a way to teach kids assuming they will use AIs?
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Are we trying to produce adults who are able to think critically and creatively, and who reach their full intellectual potential, or are we trying to produce adults who can push a few buttons and blindly believe what the machine tells them?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nickersonm 4y ago
        > In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. - attributed to Socrates by Plato. c.399-347 BCE. “Phaedrus.”
        • drowsspa 4y ago
          Pretty sure there's a fallacy named after this whole "hey this is just exactly like before so we have nothing to be concerned about".
          • nickersonm 4y ago
            The point is that all technology is a tool. Whether it be writing, calculators, or various narrow AI software. We can either bemoan the loss of a now-less-useful skill (memorization, long division, longform writing), or learn how to use these tools to better achieve our goals.
            • 4y ago
  • penjelly 4y ago
    what if teachers ask chatgpt how best to test students despite the existence of a tool like chatgpt enabling cheating
  • maliker 4y ago
    It appears that it's hard to detect AI generated content. E.g. true detection rates are only around 25% and there are also techniques to further mask output [1]. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/chatgpt-can-help-fool-openais-anti-cheating-tool-rcna68855 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/chatgpt-can-help-foo...
    • bombcar 4y ago
      You only need enough to flag suspect content, and then the teacher calls the student in for a quick oral exam - the fakers will flounder, the reals will pass.
      • wongarsu 4y ago
        Even if you understand the material well, doing assigned tasks takes a lot of time. Especially if it's free form text. And "I want to do something more interesting right now" is at least as powerful a motivator to cheat assignments as "I don't know how to do this".
        • red-iron-pine 4y ago
          Aye, if I mostly know a subject why bother to take the time to write 10 pages when I can outsource that to a bot, and if they question me I can do a 20 min oral interview and save myself the trouble? seems like a no-brainer in the long term.
• epicureanideal 4y ago
  I wonder how long until training today’s ChatGPT will cost $1000 of AWS compute. 10 years? At that point, does it keep scaling or is there an S curve where 100x more data and compute only leads to a 2x improvement?
  • thfuran 4y ago
    I think you're underestimating the scale by a few orders of magnitude.
  • the8472 4y ago
    > At that point, does it keep scaling or is there an S curve where 100x more data and compute only leads to a 2x improvement? Careful with the scales. 2x improvement could be interpreted from 80% human performance to 160% human performance. Or going from 10% error rate to 5% (which again crosses into superhuman territory on some tasks). Those last few bits are the critical ones.
  • pphysch 4y ago
    We would need to see incredible advances in energy efficiency for that to happen.
    • simplyluke 4y ago
      We are! Don't even have to reach for fusion potentially being commercial technology to show it. Solar is already approaching $0.03/kilowatt hour and likely to be half of that by the end of the decade. Energy getting very cheap coupled with computing capacity continuing to go way up is going to enable lots of interesting new technologies beyond LLMs
• gardenhedge 4y ago
  That is what the author said. From the article: "Big Data is real, but most people may not need to worry about it."
• pphysch 4y ago
  OpenAI and Google are clearly in the 1% as TFA describes.
• airstrike 4y ago
  > ChatGPT is literally changing how school will test their students, for a start. Here's a novel idea: test students using pen and paper?
  • Mizza 4y ago
    Or, preferably, admit that testing wasn't a good idea to begin with and focus on optimizing children for learning, not test-taking.
    • taftster 4y ago
      I don't even think we're just talking about children either. Test taking in academia (university and above) could stand a much needed fresh look. I am hopeful that a change happens in academia to prepare students for jobs, which is why they are going to school in the first place. Yes, students need to learn how to "think", but really they are wanting to get the technical skills to perform their duties more than anything. We have bestowed too much credence in traditional academia not useful to the average person or average job. College is a "game" for most students, and they put up going through the motions of testing, etc. for the sake of the diploma at the end. I hope we're going to enter a new era of what college means for those looking to get something different out of it.
    • juve1996 4y ago
      At some point you need to see what people know to measure their progress and help them.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    Teachers assign better scores to papers with better penmanship. I forget how strong the effect was, but using a keyboard does help equalize some biases.
    • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      Typewriters for everyone!
    • 4y ago
• snarf21 4y ago
  Big Data drives the most profitable and society bending changes of all time, just to serve us better Ads.
  • ryguyrg 4y ago
    Okay, Google as a company and as a product is definitely in the top 1%, or top 0.0001% where big data drives profitable and bending changes ;-)
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > Maybe what the author is trying to say is 'small-scale big data is dead, but big data chugs on.' That's pretty much exactly what the author says in the article.
• tootie 4y ago
  That's a completely different topic. "Data" is obviously a pretty generic term and "large sets of data" are going to be more and more relevant to the world in general. What he's talking about is the Big Data trend in industry specifically around Business Intelligence (BI). That is, collecting as much data as possible on your users to optimize your product experience and profits. Tracking clicks, purchases, form dropoffs, email opens, ad impressions. It's mostly going to be first-party data (ie what did they do with our own products and content). ChatGPT and the like are not going to get much use from that kind of data and instead are looking at a giant corpus of text and images scraped from a variety of public sources to infer what humans might think sounds smart. It's possible the two worlds will meet, but that's probably not what's going to be announced this week.
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  Yes, this occurred to me as well. The counter narrative here is in fact that the story of the last 2-3 years has been break throughs in AI have come about mostly by scaling up their network sizes and training data sets 5 orders of magnitude or so. I guess the take away however is still that regular businesses really just can't play in this game and should not be assuming they have big data until that fact asserts itself out of necessity rather than the other way around.