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I'm not convinced at this point that conversational AI fills any legitimate use cases. For all the pushback crypto got here, it's fascinating to see the support

• samspenc 4y ago
  IMHO, true, LLMs have gotten quite a bit of hype since ChatGPT came out, however I wouldn't say they have no legitimate use cases. Personally, I've been able to use them to summarize / rewrite various topics that I am interested in finding out more about but don't want to go to 6-10 different sources to find out more about. So I think they can at least take away some of the drudgery in doing research / summarization work.
  • rcthompson 4y ago
    But how do you trust the output of the summarization? Do you trust yourself to identify when the model goes off the rails and starts making things up?
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      But I also don’t trust what humans write. All the information I get gets a critical eye. ML generated summaries or whatever make ML kinds of mistakes and it’s easy learning what to look for. Just like the kinds of mistakes journalists, random internet people, authors, scientists, etc. make their own brands of mistakes you learn to look out for.
      • mrtranscendence 4y ago
        I dispute that it's easy to discern when AI is making a mistake. ChatGPT has given me very plausible incorrect answers, and had I not been fact checking I would have been none the wiser. I could choose not to trust anything ChatGPT puts out, but if I'm verifying literally everything then it becomes less and less useful as a tool.
  • waboremo 4y ago
    I haven't experienced much help in the research department. That might become a wild goose chase if you're not careful. For creative writing (this isn't limited to stories!) or slightly more contextual boilerplate, I love it. I think of it like a slight upgrade to what I already do, to allow me to get to the steps that really matter, not this revolutionary new world people are imagining it to be.
• dvt 4y ago
  Totally agree with this. Thinking of doing a deep dive to see if there's any actual real uses cases of these toys, but I honestly don't really think so. Art generation is probably the most interesting application, but just having a chatbot to talk to seems like a weird value prop.
  • dmonitor 4y ago
    It’s unfortunate that art generation, something humans genuinely enjoy doing and can be a source of personal fulfillment, is capable of being replaced, but customer service and answering stupid questions are apparently hard problems.
    • dvt 4y ago
      Answering stupid questions has already been thoroughly solved, and you don't need an AI trained on 500 GTX4090s to index a stupid question database. The problem with customer service is that the questions that aren't stupid are genuinely long-tail edge case issues, where an AI is very unlikely to solve the problem.
      • wpietri 4y ago
        For sure. There's a lot of bad customer service out there that is functionally equivalent to modern AI in that it's poor pattern recognition plus no real understanding plus cobbling output together from existing text of varying relevance. But sadly, that may be evidence that there's a market here. If Amazon can cut support costs by 80% and only moderately worsen their already bad quality, some execs would consider it a success, not a failure.
  • zpeti 4y ago
    And the reason ai art is interesting is precisely because art is about mistakes and hallucination and wierdness, and unexpected connections. So the flaws of chat AI currently are exactly what make art great. And art came before science, so perhaps scientific thinking is much harder on an evolutionarily timescale than we think.
  • 4y ago
• saiojd 4y ago
  I'm calling you out: you're being edgy for the sake of being edgy by saying it's grift.
  • dvt 4y ago
    Crypto was pushed by crypto bros and their VC funders, and now AI is being pushed by AI bros and their VC funders (probably the same group). I think there's a lot more overlap than you're giving it credit for.
    • polygamous_bat 4y ago
      > AI is being pushed by AI bros and their VC funders There is a large class of AI researchers who have been working on this problem for decades (and I am one of them). What you see right now is the tip of the iceberg. Compared to that, crypto was invented by an anonymous dude in some random forum. Remember that what you see in the surface is not all there is, and thinking so is a very shallow interpretation of things.
      • roncesvalles 4y ago
        >What you see right now is the tip of the iceberg. This piqued my interest. What more can we expect to see than what's already available for the public to use?
      • YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
        >> There is a large class of AI researchers who have been working on this problem for decades (and I am one of them). Which problem is that? It's not clear from the context and I don't want to make uninformed assumptions. It is true that many people have worked on problems like language understanding, language modelling and language generation for many years. It is also true that most people who are today so excited about large language models don't know anything about all those years of research. My experience is that, at some point, there was a switch from computational linguistics (i.e. doing linguistics with the help of computers) to statistical natural language processing (i.e. trying to represent language with statistics). The idea behind the switch was that understanding human language, its mechanisms, its origins, and so on, is too hard, and we can make a lot of progress if we stop trying to do all that, and instead turn to learning statistics from large corpora (cf. "every time I fire a linguist..."). Of course, without good understanding of what language is, and how it works, it is very difficult to evaluate such progress, but the answer to that was obviously to establish new metrics, and then try to maximise performance according to those metrics; metrics such as BLEU or ROUGE and friends, that are suspiciously like the kind of metric that one would choose if one wanted to measure progress as the ability to learn statistics from a large corpus. So it's true to say that many people have worked on all sorts of problems to do with natural language and AI, but I'm still left wondering exactly what you mean by "this problem". For me the problem is that an entire field of research ("NLP") abandoned the search for answers to interesting scientific questions and turned instead to the production of toys, and to spectacle, presumably because that's where the money is and researchers must also pay them bills. And so now we have large language models that are better at reproducing language than earlier models, but we don't have the tools to evaluate or understand those models; and so people who aren't experts, but also people who are experts, can't separate the wheat from the chaff, and keep coming up with wild, senseless proclamations that could well have been generated by a language model themselves.
• elorant 4y ago
  It certainly has use cases, but they’re more marketing oriented. It can help people who’re not fluent in English write better copy, it can do low key reporting work by writing articles from press releases, it can summarize or classify text, or do sentiment analysis. There are probably a couple of billion in revenues in there with various APIs. But it just isn’t the next big thing as we’ve led to believe the last few weeks. The kind of technology that could give Microsoft a fighting chance against Google.
  • wpietri 4y ago
    > low key reporting work by writing articles from press releases That is not journalism. It is the opposite of journalism.
    • elorant 4y ago
      I didn't said journalism, I said reporting. A lot of the stuff in news outlets are copies of press releases.
      • wpietri 4y ago
        I think "reporting" is a term without an agreed definition outside of journalistic context. But I'd be happy to argue that it isn't reporting either. I agree that there are plenty of outlets that might qualify as news-shaped, or perhaps news-flavored. They might use AI-rewritten press releases. E.g., CNET's private-equity slide into untrustworthiness. But these things are basically parasitic on actual journalism. So although this is technically a use case for ChatGPT, it's a societally negative one.
  • jsemrau 4y ago
    It is important to manage the human/AI interaction in the right way. Asking conversational AI for the truth won't work because they are not built in this way. At least for now. We applied this insight in creating TikTok videos. https://medium.finclout.io/everything-in-this-video-is-generative-ai-f468573dcdae https://medium.finclout.io/everything-in-this-video-is-gener... And while a lot of the basic parts of creativity can be handed over, the implementation of the higher parts of creativity are still firmly in human hands.
• vlunkr 4y ago
  I think it's more useful if you're asking it to create something new, similar to the image generation tools. I can tell it write a script to call some public API, write a rough draft of an essay, generate dialog for a video game, etc. It's up to you to vet the quality, but it can easily do all that. It's still toyish just like the the image tools. Asking it to teach you something and cite sources is a massive stretch. People are just trying to trip it up on a dumb use case. It's pretty fun to trip up an AI, but it's not really surprising.
  • InitialLastName 4y ago
    > Asking it to teach you something and cite sources is a massive stretch. People are just trying to trip it up on a dumb use case. The primary use case of a search engine is to find sources of information on a particular topic. Embedding an AI chat bot in your search engine is very much encouraging users to treat it as something that can find sources of information on a topic.
    • vlunkr 4y ago
      That's true. I'm mostly thinking of chatGPT because that's the one I've used.
  • FormerBandmate 4y ago
    It’s great for summarizing content, or lengthening it. It used to be great for writing insane, outlandish versions of stories such as “a version of the movie Saw as an educational cartoon for preschoolers” or “a breaking bad scene where Walter White reveals himself to be a gothic Satanist” but the woke and copyright edits killed that. Bing will probably do that once I get access tho
• colechristensen 4y ago
  I find it useful for answering technical / programming questions. It is completely unhelpful maybe 20% of the time, explicitly incorrect in a minor detail half the time, and imperfect 80% of the time. However, it gets me an answer to my question in seconds almost always faster than searching. Traditional googling will have me wading through forum posts and bad documentation which almost always takes much longer and sometimes completely fails or takes hours to get the right answer. Fast occasionally wrong answers are way more helpful. I’m quickly switching to first asking chatgpt for an answer and only switching to google or official docs when the answer doesn’t seem to work. I absolutely don’t “trust” it, but I don’t have to. I try its suggestions and if they don’t work move on to other sources of information.
• nlnn 4y ago
  Weirdly, I heard of some genuine use from a family in a pub the other day. Two of the kids were university/college age, talking to their parents about it. They were using one of the AI models daily for things like: recipe ideas for food they had in the house, scheduling daily activities, bouncing ideas off for essays, and asking for gift ideas. They understood it wasn't much good for facts, but liked the conversational interface as a way to give them ideas or jumping off points for things.
  • kmill 4y ago
    I've been using ChatGPT/GPT-3 as a French tutor, to answer questions about different ways to say things, formally or informally. It's not always accurate, but still I learn from it. Amusingly, there's a mildly rude expression that means "I don't care," and ChatGPT's strong aversion to swearing biased it toward completely fabricating a word-for-word translation. It insisted that the verb was a conjugation of something innocuous, and when I pointed out that that verb doesn't conjugate that way, it both agreed with me and continued insisting. It seems to have a pretty solid grasp of language in general (so long as you don't need any hard logic), and it's a fun tool to come up with ideas you personally never had before. This was a little experiment the other day; it's delightful how many silly (yet justified) reasons why you can't walk to Hawaii it came up with. But what do you expect from someone who's only learned about the world by reading the Internet? > By "unsummarizing" we mean to take some text and expand upon it at length, using fancy words, extra facts, anecdotes, and interesting observations. Your goal is to unsummarize the following text as much as possible. > Text to unsummarize: What do you mean I can't walk to Hawaii? (GPT-3 follows) > You may be surprised to learn that it is impossible to walk to the Hawaiian Islands from anywhere on the mainland United States. Though the Hawaiian Islands are located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and are roughly 2,400 miles away from the nearest point on the mainland, it is not possible to walk there due to the vast expanse of ocean between them. Even the most dedicated and determined walker would be unable to traverse the depths of the Pacific. The nearest point of land to the Hawaiian Islands is the Johnston Atoll, which is located approximately 1,400 miles away. That is to say, it is not feasible to traverse the 1,000 miles of open ocean between Johnston Atoll and the Hawaiian Islands by foot. > The Hawaiian Islands were formed as a result of volcanic activity, and the chain of islands were formed over millions of years. This activity is responsible for creating the immense walls of water that separate the islands from the mainland. The Pacific is one of the deepest, widest oceans on the planet, and its depths are not suitable for walking. The bottom of the ocean is filled with a variety of topographical features, such as trenches, ridges, and seamounts, which make it a difficult environment for walking. Additionally, the ocean is filled with a variety of natural hazards, such as hazardous currents, extreme temperatures, sharks, and other dangerous marine life. All of these factors make walking to the Hawaiian Islands not only difficult, but also impossible.
• brushfoot 4y ago
  > For all the pushback crypto got here, it's fascinating to see the support that this grift has gotten. Two very different things. I could never really see crypto taking off without massive political changes. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is already my daily assistant. The utility is here and now. It's rarely perfect, but it gets me 90% of the way there, then I tweak the output. How good it is depends on what you're using it for, as with anything - I don't think it's really a good fit for something like a search engine (yet) as it's terrible with facts. But scaffolding code, summarizing text, expanding outlines - it's very good at those kinds of tasks, often astoundingly good.
  • panarky 4y ago
    > it's terrible with facts It's terrible with specific facts, and frequently hallucinates dates, math, book titles and citations to sources. But it's awesome with ideas and concepts. Today I spent an hour chatting about the competing ideologies, groups, motivations, objectives, and foreign allies and adversaries in Spain leading up to the 1936 coup and civil war. I cross-checked many of its assertions, and it nailed some pretty esoteric stuff.
• jklinger410 4y ago
  > I'm not convinced at this point that conversational AI fills any legitimate use cases. Silly opinion. This is the first wave of conversational AI, and you are calling it quits. This is like "I own a Model T and I'm 100% convinced we'll never make a better vehicle." The use case, at minimum, is: customer support, answering phones, taking orders. Trained on specific data sets and told not to veer outside. Within one, maybe two more iterations of AI (maximum) we will be there 110%. ChatGPT was released widely this year, and there are so many absolute statements about what AI will or won't do. It's frankly silly and maddening.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    My main fear of this tech is how people are reacting to it. > customer support, answering phones, taking orders My secondary fear of this tech is that it will be used for these purposes. Especially support.
  • lordgroff 4y ago
    This may or may not hold true (this DS is nowhere near as convinced as you are) but your parallel with Model T is odd, seeing as how that was immediately useful and absolutely revolutionary.
  • kodah 4y ago
    The Model T was immediately useful and affordable to the average American. It's most notable contribution to American society was connecting those in rural areas to the rest of the country and being affordable enough for those people to afford them. That's why it spread across the US seemingly overnight. ChatGPT on the other hand does a lot of tricks, but trying to fit it into the real world is challenging. Even using it in programming requires someone to double check it's work. The idea that it can handle customer support I think is very dangerous. In an industry that has done the opposite of creating fulfilling customer support experiences we should be wary of filling that void with an LLM that's fraught with factual errors in output. That's to say, ChatGPT does novel things, but nothing useful beyond fantasy (I do hear people talking about using it for RPG characters - which is fair). Ironically, many of the commenters here responded the way cryptobros did when their tech was regarded as useless, which is telling about where this is going. The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was the inability in everyone around it to sit back and acknowledge that how they described it did not match what people wanted and experiences on the ground.
• humanistbot 4y ago
  Except the energy costs for these models is such a tiny fraction of crypto. Cambridge researchers estimate annual energy consumption of just bitcoin at 119 terawatt hours (TWh) [1] or 60 megatons of CO2 [2], just below all of Portugal. Meanwhile, even a very critical paper on this from some Scandinavian researchers [3] says GPT-3 cost 190,000 kWh (0.00019 TWh) to train. ChatGPT/GPT-3.5 is allegedly an order of magnitude larger in terms of data and cost to train, so let's say it is 0.0019 TWh. When The Register reported on that paper, you can see how they tried as hard as they could to make it sound big: the cost to train GPT-3 was the same as driving a car to the moon and back (435k miles). They could have said it cost the same amount of carbon as 25 US drivers emit each year. In the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. That's one long-haul flight per trained model. And you just need to train them once. Querying the models cost far less. And the electricity generated for US-based server farms is way cleaner than cars, planes, or the coal mines powering Chinese bitcoin mines. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index [2] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/ghg/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbeci/ghg/comparisons [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.03051.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.03051.pdf [4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/gpt3_carbon_footprint_estimate/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/gpt3_carbon_footprint...
  • warent 4y ago
    Thank you for this amazingly insightful comment. A question as an ignorant layperson, if I may: They could have said it cost the same amount of carbon as 25 US drivers emit each year. In the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. That's one long-haul flight per trained model. And you just need to train them once. Querying the models cost far less. Don't they need to continuously re-train these models as new information comes in? For example, how does Bing bot get new information? It seems like they would need to routinely keep it up-to-date with its own index.
    • sdiacom 4y ago
      Going by the screenshots in the linked tweets, it seems like it performs searches on Bing in order to obtain up-to-date information to answer its questions with, so there's probably not a need to re-train it daily. So the main question here might be "how much energy does it cost to keep a search engine up-to-date", which may not be cheap, either. There is probably a need to refresh it periodically to account for what the MMAcevedo fictional story [1] calls "context drift" -- the relevant search terms to infer from the query are themselves contextual. Say, if I ask Bing today "is Trump running for president", the right search term today could be "donald trump 2024 election", but ten years from now it might be "eric trump 2036 election". [1]: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
• nikanj 4y ago
  ”Tell me a bedtime story with dragons and rollerskating” is a very reasonable use case. Factual errors don’t matter in numerous cases
• cjf101 4y ago
  Claim verification is currently an open problem, as OpenAI admits to in their own promotional docs for ChatGPT. Issue number 1 here seems fairly thorny. And the second statement reveals the real problem: Even if the model was only trained on truths, would tuning it not to deviate from truth make it less able to answer questions? > ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows. This is definitely not my area of expertise, but intuitively, it looks like increasing the complexity/varying the training techniques can increase the likelihood of correct answers, but I think the need to give the model leeway to let it work means that ultimately, either human or automated fact checking will need to be incorporated when using this kind of model for fact-finding questions.
• goatlover 4y ago
  It could be great for video game characters.
• kilgnad 4y ago
  >I'm not convinced at this point that conversational AI fills any legitimate use cases. \ There's tons of use cases. One of the use cases is definitely NOT startlingly accurate citations. But you're delusional if you think there isn't any use cases.
• morelandjs 4y ago
  I’ve used it as a programming assistant and as a general question-answer assistant and it’s so massively useful despite its imperfections I wonder if I’m using the same tool as people with comments such as yours.
• fleddr 4y ago
  Nobody cares about energy use. People point to an oversized vehicle but will defend their oversized TV with their lives. Whilst rationally speaking there are very few "monster truck" vehicles whilst almost everybody has such a TV. The "do good" factor of banning/taxing the TV would be infinitely more impactful. People hate miners, not for their energy use, instead because they drive up the price of high-end GPUs. High-end GPUs, you know, which gamers intended to use to do high-energy use gaming. Both cases (insanely large TVs and high-end gaming) would be defended by them delivering value or purpose. Well, guess what, the planet doesn't fucking care. There's no such thing. And if anything, neither use cases are in the realm of life support systems.
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Cars use a lot more power than TVs. The average TV (55-inch 4K LED) will use 5.7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per month. A traditional car uses around 40+ kWh, an EV about 30kWh per 100 miles. Personally, I haven't had children. You're welcome.
• HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  I'm not sure how you define "legitimate", but surely what matters is whether people find the technology (in whatever guise - from ChatGPT to Copilot) useful for their own needs. Lots of people seem to have amazingly quickly started using this tech as a productivity tool, for a whole variety of use cases from text generation/summarization of various forms to programming to research/discovery (cf search), etc. A natural language interface and the ability to maintain context over a conversation makes it incredibly easy to interact with. Have you tried to do anything productive with it? If you're just using it as a front end for search then IMO you're missing most of the potential.
  • kodah 4y ago
    > Have you tried to do anything productive with it? I actually play with it a little every day, along with some other models. I'm an end user at the end of the day and a QC at best. The most I've gotten to do that was useful is all what I'd file under "novel". Using it for programming is haphazard, even summaries are a bit fraught because it will feed you wrong information. If you have to verify the critical points of the entire summary then you are only left with a jumping off point, which some random person's blog or "relevant search results" already does for me. As for "legitimate", I meant in the context of a business using it to make or save money (ie: assisting in search). If it lies, or is incorrect, putting it in front of users with a facade of trust/legitimacy seems awfully dangerous. Even image generation is a bit fraught with respect to Stable Diffusion and DALLE, but folks aren't trying to stuff those models into mainstream use cases, so I consider them less a grift. To me, that presents a lack of legitimate use cases.
• deleted 4y ago
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• bujkogfdc 4y ago
  Grift? While there is some valid discussion that needs to be had about the short comings and application of AI (LLMs, neural nets, diffusion models, etc), lumping it to the out right Ponzi scheme of crypto seems either disingenuous or ill informed. Can you elaborate on how they are similar so I can better understand your point of view?
  • kodah 4y ago
    Thanks for asking! I've responded elsewhere in the thread to this. Feel free to cross reference those as well. There's a large amount of cost sunk into the idea of conversational AI from energy use (not just during training, but data storage, on-going compute, etc), to the cost associated with businesses employing people and the personal investment that folks have invested via degrees and time. All of this creates a pretty deep trench worth defending by various interests. These things clearly aren't ready to be put into search engines, yet here we are, and there are people defending it. That's the original grift that makes it akin to crypto if you believe the real problem in crypto wasn't the tech itself but people pushing these concepts into mainstream use before they'd really had time to be vetted and fully understood. The societal impact was massive and on-going. There are also grifts that come from the seed grift, which gets into AI plagiarization and how to train these models. When you add it all together and then frame it under the premise that it's now in one of the most trusted and prominent places in search, I feel justified calling the underlying activity a grift.
• SCLeo 4y ago
  It is useful for actual language related tasks, such as paraphrasing or making the content of an email flow better. However, for anything else, it is mostly hit & miss.
• asdff 4y ago
  If there's one thing it does great is make a bunch of chuck content you can dole out. In the past you'd have to pen the SEOspam yourself. Now you can have chatgpt write you hundreds of decent enough articles to draw people from google search and into seeing your advertisements. Have it script out a dumb podcast or youtube video and use a voice model along with a deepfake for the video, maybe you can automate influencing too, then scale it to a couple thousand such ai influencer models you have running on aws instances. the paycheck would scale itself.
• kerpotgh 4y ago
  This tired comment again. I use chatGPT atleast 10 times a day. It’s made my job atleast 3x more efficient.
• jhanschoo 4y ago
  I've used ChatGPT for - Looking for suggestions for a birthday, with some constraints that make most recommendations impossible. I didn't go with anything straight from the suggestions, but I've went with a personalized variant of one of those. - Looking for suggestions for resources and books on niche languages and read languages. - Looking for documentation on how to do a certain thing using a certain app or framework, several times. It seems to me that ChatGPT is no worse in its recommendations than what an expert can give you recollecting what they encountered a year+ ago (in addition to the training data cutoff) without the opportunity to double check if they remembered correctly. It's immensely useful in the same sense that the expert solves most of the discoverability, and leaves you the relatively easy task of sanity checking. I'm not sure about Bing, but I'd expect similar or better, or eventually similar or better.
• mola 4y ago
  This thing is (atleast) an extremely good general natural language understanding engine. It's very useful for parsing natural language. It can replace a ton of specially made parses and NERs etc with zero extra training. This is a very useful building block we didn't have before. I don't get why ppl are focusing on the chat aspects so much.
  • nieve 4y ago
    A natural language understanding engine that _makes things up_ is not extremely good.
    • mola 4y ago
      I'm talking about the understanding part. I would not use it to generate responses but to parse natural language to a structure you can use progrematically. From my experience it doesn't make things up for this sort of tasks