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Well, I mean, you can be both. I'm amazed by how right ChatGPT can be despite how often it's wrong. > I've seen ChatGPT make up fake links and fake citations t

Well, I mean, you can be both. I'm amazed by how right ChatGPT can be despite how often it's wrong. > I've seen ChatGPT make up fake links and fake citations that look superficially real but don't really point to anything. I tried asking it the other day for free software that would transcribe video. It gave me five pieces of software, four of which didn't exist and one of which was not free.

verdverm 4y ago
I am amazed with both how right and wrong it can be. It can give impressive responses and fail spectacularly
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I am a little amazed at how people get amazed by it. As a software dev I am expected to get it right, not almost right. I just coded up something that works most of the time but failed in one case and the tester sent it back. In my case that defect takes somewhere between 1% and 500% of the effort to fix as the rest of that ticket but in the case of ChatGPT "close but no cigar" is not close at all in terms of having a strategy that is reliably truthful. If ChatGPT has a really "amazing" ability it is in getting people to think it is amazing. I think of that story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes and that it's not just cheaply dismissive to point out that ChatGPT's core competence is the same as that Emperor because not everybody can pull off what that Emperor pulled off. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect which is a anecdote from the beginning of AI research that seems forgotten today in how people react to ChatGPT.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    It is not amazing all of the time, or perhaps amazing at all, but I can be amazed that LMs have reached a new threshold. I have specific examples where the interaction gave me a correct answer with rational faster than I could Google and sift through results. Something that took us weeks to figure out, ChatGPT gave us the two things we did, from just two prompts about what was going on. This was no trivial coding problem. It involved complications in a distributed build system. Sometimes it's not about getting the exact answer, but getting ideas about where to look. ChatGPT is not just for software either, it is quite useful as a co-writer. To think that ChatGPT is not impressive is to close yourself off from what is actually happening. I was there with you until I started trying it out regularly. To think that it is not providing value is to neglect reality. You do not get to judge others as inferior for finding ChatGPT useful. This is the impression you are giving. Nothing is perfect. Think of something that amazes you and then consider where it is not perfect. It is perfectly reasonable for people to find ChatGPT impressive without it being perfect. DAN and SAM are also impressive sessions people have had with ChatGPT that show somewhere it can be manipulated. TL;DR As devs, we use search because it saves us hours of time. ChatGPT is a tool you should add to your toolbox because it can also save you hours of time.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    > As a software dev I am expected to get it right, not almost right. That is not 100% true. I'm sure all of us have put code in production that we knew had issues and it was a conscious decision given the tradeoffs and timelines. This being separate from the bugs we unknowingly release into the wild.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I can get a good stock pick from time to time throwing at a dart at the newspaper. In fact, those stock picks perform about as well as stock picks from pundits like Jim Cramer.

verdverm 4y ago

I am amazed with both how right and wrong it can be. It can give impressive responses and fail spectacularly

PaulHoule 4y ago
I am a little amazed at how people get amazed by it. As a software dev I am expected to get it right, not almost right. I just coded up something that works most of the time but failed in one case and the tester sent it back. In my case that defect takes somewhere between 1% and 500% of the effort to fix as the rest of that ticket but in the case of ChatGPT "close but no cigar" is not close at all in terms of having a strategy that is reliably truthful. If ChatGPT has a really "amazing" ability it is in getting people to think it is amazing. I think of that story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes and that it's not just cheaply dismissive to point out that ChatGPT's core competence is the same as that Emperor because not everybody can pull off what that Emperor pulled off. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect which is a anecdote from the beginning of AI research that seems forgotten today in how people react to ChatGPT.
- verdverm 4y ago
  It is not amazing all of the time, or perhaps amazing at all, but I can be amazed that LMs have reached a new threshold. I have specific examples where the interaction gave me a correct answer with rational faster than I could Google and sift through results. Something that took us weeks to figure out, ChatGPT gave us the two things we did, from just two prompts about what was going on. This was no trivial coding problem. It involved complications in a distributed build system. Sometimes it's not about getting the exact answer, but getting ideas about where to look. ChatGPT is not just for software either, it is quite useful as a co-writer. To think that ChatGPT is not impressive is to close yourself off from what is actually happening. I was there with you until I started trying it out regularly. To think that it is not providing value is to neglect reality. You do not get to judge others as inferior for finding ChatGPT useful. This is the impression you are giving. Nothing is perfect. Think of something that amazes you and then consider where it is not perfect. It is perfectly reasonable for people to find ChatGPT impressive without it being perfect. DAN and SAM are also impressive sessions people have had with ChatGPT that show somewhere it can be manipulated. TL;DR As devs, we use search because it saves us hours of time. ChatGPT is a tool you should add to your toolbox because it can also save you hours of time.
- verdverm 4y ago
  > As a software dev I am expected to get it right, not almost right. That is not 100% true. I'm sure all of us have put code in production that we knew had issues and it was a conscious decision given the tradeoffs and timelines. This being separate from the bugs we unknowingly release into the wild.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I can get a good stock pick from time to time throwing at a dart at the newspaper. In fact, those stock picks perform about as well as stock picks from pundits like Jim Cramer.