6 ms·

Here's my killer app theory for stuff like GPT, just one example... MS Teams gets the GPT treatment. It watches all your chats, email, calendars, code, wiki, m

Here's my killer app theory for stuff like GPT, just one example... MS Teams gets the GPT treatment. It watches all your chats, email, calendars, code, wiki, meetings, spreadsheets, documents. Where is Slack now? If you want to know absolutely anything from engineering domain knowledge to product strategy through to aiding you in sales, Slack has no answer. Ask Teams to splat you a database table, refine an SQL statement, brief you on a meeting, remind me of who a particular customer is and what sort of sales pitch would appeal to them. I mean, not seeing the potential in GPT is really being intentionally blind to world changing technology. Just the fact that it can scan your whole codebase, find potential security holes, suggest performance blind-spots and indeed write code, or at least suggest code, this alone is such a big change it's hard to get your head around the opportunity. All of that in a chat window or IDE. It's revolutionary.

RandomLensman 4y ago
The real application is increasing bureaucracy massively. Nothing that doesn't get an opinion filed for or some "memo" attached to it. No request for comment ever unanswered, nothing that doesn't deserve some written specs or an risk assessment. No process not documented in lengthy prose etc.
- monkeynotes 4y ago
  Pretty cynical opinion.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    Not even meant to be very cynical. Looking at big organizations, the desire to increase control and oversight a lot will be pretty strong. A lot of technology is already devoted to that end anyway. There will be other, interesting use cases for sure, but control, compliance, documentation, etc. will be big.
    - monkeynotes 4y ago
      Not everything is a big org that spends its time and money chasing compliance for no reason. It's cynical because you are viewing everything through one personal perspective that is loosely grounded in reality, and choosing to not see the rest of the world, which only serves to validate your cynical mindset.
      - RandomLensman 4y ago
        Yes, it is based on my observations. I also see the cool, fast moving smaller companies (and even some big ones) that use AI and technology in fascinating ways - but I would caution against overlooking what a lot of the new technologies might wind up to be used for. For example, modern controlling functions couldn't exist without a certain level of technology. How much technology spend these days is dedicated to some form of administrative tasks? Those $$$ will have an effect.
kypro 4y ago
I was saying the same thing to a colleague a couple of weeks back. The power of ChatGPT will become obvious when it's sucking in all of an orgs data. At that point instead of your boss asking you to send an email to someone or asking the data team to pull some stat, they'll just ask the chatbot to do it for them. My guess is 80%+ of the work most people in corporate jobs do could fairly easily be automated with the next generation of GPT being fully integrated with an organisations data and tools. It's so obvious the power of this technology. Those saying ChatGPT is still making a few programming errors with their crappy prompts are missing the point. Wait until a slightly more advanced version of GPT has access to your dev documentation + all your repos + your jira ticket board + your dev environment. You won't even need to ask it to do anything. Your boss is going to quickly wonder why they need a team of 20 devs when a team of 2 devs reviewing ChatGPT pull requests is 10x more efficient.
- mlsu 4y ago
  If you thought tech debt was bad with human programmers...
  - Swizec 4y ago
    When the funding horizon for your company or project is shorter than the tech debt horizon, the biz pick tech debt every time. Color me jaded, but I don’t care if the crud feature du jour is full of tech debt when we’re gonna throw it out in 3 months anyway.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    Managing outsourced programmers is hard enough...
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Just ask ChatGPT to refactor the code and have it pay down the tech debt.
- somewhereoutth 4y ago
  > Wait until a slightly more advanced version Yes, and therein lies the issue - that last crucial 1%, 0.1% may be impossible to achieve (sort of like attaining lightspeed travel)
nrjames 4y ago
Incidentally, it's amazing how terrible MS Teams is at code blocks, both the creation of them and the copy/pasting/using the code from one somebody else created.
rvz 4y ago
> I mean, not seeing the potential in GPT is really being intentionally blind to world changing technology. Just the fact that it can scan your whole codebase, find potential security holes, suggest performance blind-spots. All of that in a chat window or IDE. It's revolutionary. Except that we are just left with outputs that are untrustworthy. All of these GPT products; ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard, Bing AI are still frequently hallucinating answers and often very incorrect solutions. We have already seen this with Copilot writing vulnerable code. What this current AI hype cycle fails to realize is that given that you still cannot trust the generated output, it cannot be used safely in serious and highly regulated industries such as finance, law and medical professions all of which require trust and have been subject to AI disruption for years all with the same problem of trust being unsolved in AI. It is not enough to even disrupt search engines. There is nothing new or revolutionary about a AI SaaS business with an API with a chatbot generating nonsense. I expect the hype around AI LLM chatbots to subside just like the hype around social spaces apps like Clubhouse did.
- monkeynotes 4y ago
  > outputs that are untrustworthy Seems like this is an interesting engineering or product problem worth solving. History is littered with big problems that were solved. Go look at flight, within 50 years we went from "it's not possible", to it's too fragile, to jets, to international airports and mass transit never before possible. If you work in tech I think you've slept through your life.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Seems like this is an interesting engineering or product problem worth solving. Trust is a social problem, Not an engineering problem. Without a fundamental breakthrough in neural networks in transparency, the use-case for LLMs as search engines will always be eternally untrustworthy. Not even the Bing AI that Microsoft released is even a trustworthy search engine [0] . In fact it is less trustworthy than Google. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853
- unraveller 4y ago
rco8786 4y ago
yes, i've been trying to drive this home to folks around me also. AI is only as good as the data it's learned from. There is little to no value in a really super awesome prompt. "Prompt engineering" is not a real thing. There is, however, enormous value in an AI that has learned on some specific set of data that nobody else has access to. IOW, data is still the currency.
robotburrito 4y ago
Basically everyone I know is on either extreme. Either they say "It just makes stuff up and it's totally useless!" and some how not even admitting it's very cool, or acting like it's going to lead to all of us just being homeless and 1% of of the population that owns the AI having even more wealth.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  sounds like a possible way to detect who will be on which end of the spectrum /s
- monkeynotes 4y ago
  The reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle
crazysim 4y ago
You should see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/premium https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/premium . It may not be what you describe but they are definitely flirting.
swatcoder 4y ago
That won’t work until somebody designs a reliable security model for LLM’s. In the real world, you can’t have a model that slurps up every bit of information in a company and then just lets anybody ask open ended questions about it. But the security solutions for these technologies are far from maturity. They’re almost certainly addressable, but its going to be a whole industry in itself, will take years to take shape, and will probably involve underlying architectures that are designed very differently from what we see in this generation of models.
- monkeynotes 4y ago
  So you agree it's possible, desirable, and game changing? I think those are hugely positive indicators this will happen and people sitting comfortably in the status quo are going to lose out. These corporate AI instances will take huge configuration, and like when IBM started adding infrastructure to large corps it was a huge effort. But the reward and advantage it provided was worth the millions of dollars and years of work. Eventually it all permeated down to consumers. How long this will take it up for debate, but I don't think we can easily dismiss that it's inevitable.
poisonborz 4y ago
Imagine the prompt hacking possibilites, this time not to generate outputs, but to reveal private discourses. Imagine that when this hallucinates, you will have wrong impressions on your colleagues or the state of projects.

RandomLensman 4y ago

The real application is increasing bureaucracy massively. Nothing that doesn't get an opinion filed for or some "memo" attached to it. No request for comment ever unanswered, nothing that doesn't deserve some written specs or an risk assessment. No process not documented in lengthy prose etc.

monkeynotes 4y ago
Pretty cynical opinion.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Not even meant to be very cynical. Looking at big organizations, the desire to increase control and oversight a lot will be pretty strong. A lot of technology is already devoted to that end anyway. There will be other, interesting use cases for sure, but control, compliance, documentation, etc. will be big.
  - monkeynotes 4y ago
    Not everything is a big org that spends its time and money chasing compliance for no reason. It's cynical because you are viewing everything through one personal perspective that is loosely grounded in reality, and choosing to not see the rest of the world, which only serves to validate your cynical mindset.
    - RandomLensman 4y ago
      Yes, it is based on my observations. I also see the cool, fast moving smaller companies (and even some big ones) that use AI and technology in fascinating ways - but I would caution against overlooking what a lot of the new technologies might wind up to be used for. For example, modern controlling functions couldn't exist without a certain level of technology. How much technology spend these days is dedicated to some form of administrative tasks? Those $$$ will have an effect.

kypro 4y ago

I was saying the same thing to a colleague a couple of weeks back. The power of ChatGPT will become obvious when it's sucking in all of an orgs data. At that point instead of your boss asking you to send an email to someone or asking the data team to pull some stat, they'll just ask the chatbot to do it for them. My guess is 80%+ of the work most people in corporate jobs do could fairly easily be automated with the next generation of GPT being fully integrated with an organisations data and tools. It's so obvious the power of this technology. Those saying ChatGPT is still making a few programming errors with their crappy prompts are missing the point. Wait until a slightly more advanced version of GPT has access to your dev documentation + all your repos + your jira ticket board + your dev environment. You won't even need to ask it to do anything. Your boss is going to quickly wonder why they need a team of 20 devs when a team of 2 devs reviewing ChatGPT pull requests is 10x more efficient.

mlsu 4y ago
If you thought tech debt was bad with human programmers...
- Swizec 4y ago
  When the funding horizon for your company or project is shorter than the tech debt horizon, the biz pick tech debt every time. Color me jaded, but I don’t care if the crud feature du jour is full of tech debt when we’re gonna throw it out in 3 months anyway.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  Managing outsourced programmers is hard enough...
- fragmede 4y ago
  Just ask ChatGPT to refactor the code and have it pay down the tech debt.
somewhereoutth 4y ago
> Wait until a slightly more advanced version Yes, and therein lies the issue - that last crucial 1%, 0.1% may be impossible to achieve (sort of like attaining lightspeed travel)

nrjames 4y ago

Incidentally, it's amazing how terrible MS Teams is at code blocks, both the creation of them and the copy/pasting/using the code from one somebody else created.

rvz 4y ago

> I mean, not seeing the potential in GPT is really being intentionally blind to world changing technology. Just the fact that it can scan your whole codebase, find potential security holes, suggest performance blind-spots. All of that in a chat window or IDE. It's revolutionary. Except that we are just left with outputs that are untrustworthy. All of these GPT products; ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard, Bing AI are still frequently hallucinating answers and often very incorrect solutions. We have already seen this with Copilot writing vulnerable code. What this current AI hype cycle fails to realize is that given that you still cannot trust the generated output, it cannot be used safely in serious and highly regulated industries such as finance, law and medical professions all of which require trust and have been subject to AI disruption for years all with the same problem of trust being unsolved in AI. It is not enough to even disrupt search engines. There is nothing new or revolutionary about a AI SaaS business with an API with a chatbot generating nonsense. I expect the hype around AI LLM chatbots to subside just like the hype around social spaces apps like Clubhouse did.

monkeynotes 4y ago
> outputs that are untrustworthy Seems like this is an interesting engineering or product problem worth solving. History is littered with big problems that were solved. Go look at flight, within 50 years we went from "it's not possible", to it's too fragile, to jets, to international airports and mass transit never before possible. If you work in tech I think you've slept through your life.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Seems like this is an interesting engineering or product problem worth solving. Trust is a social problem, Not an engineering problem. Without a fundamental breakthrough in neural networks in transparency, the use-case for LLMs as search engines will always be eternally untrustworthy. Not even the Bing AI that Microsoft released is even a trustworthy search engine [0] . In fact it is less trustworthy than Google. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853
unraveller 4y ago

rco8786 4y ago

yes, i've been trying to drive this home to folks around me also. AI is only as good as the data it's learned from. There is little to no value in a really super awesome prompt. "Prompt engineering" is not a real thing. There is, however, enormous value in an AI that has learned on some specific set of data that nobody else has access to. IOW, data is still the currency.

robotburrito 4y ago

Basically everyone I know is on either extreme. Either they say "It just makes stuff up and it's totally useless!" and some how not even admitting it's very cool, or acting like it's going to lead to all of us just being homeless and 1% of of the population that owns the AI having even more wealth.

anonyfox 4y ago
sounds like a possible way to detect who will be on which end of the spectrum /s
monkeynotes 4y ago
The reality, as always, is somewhere in the middle

crazysim 4y ago

You should see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/premium https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/premium . It may not be what you describe but they are definitely flirting.

swatcoder 4y ago

That won’t work until somebody designs a reliable security model for LLM’s. In the real world, you can’t have a model that slurps up every bit of information in a company and then just lets anybody ask open ended questions about it. But the security solutions for these technologies are far from maturity. They’re almost certainly addressable, but its going to be a whole industry in itself, will take years to take shape, and will probably involve underlying architectures that are designed very differently from what we see in this generation of models.

monkeynotes 4y ago
So you agree it's possible, desirable, and game changing? I think those are hugely positive indicators this will happen and people sitting comfortably in the status quo are going to lose out. These corporate AI instances will take huge configuration, and like when IBM started adding infrastructure to large corps it was a huge effort. But the reward and advantage it provided was worth the millions of dollars and years of work. Eventually it all permeated down to consumers. How long this will take it up for debate, but I don't think we can easily dismiss that it's inevitable.

poisonborz 4y ago

Imagine the prompt hacking possibilites, this time not to generate outputs, but to reveal private discourses. Imagine that when this hallucinates, you will have wrong impressions on your colleagues or the state of projects.