9 ms·

We're never getting rid of ChatGPT

53 points by ghuntley 4y ago

Madmallard 4y ago
Why would we want to?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  if there were specific reasons for wanting to remove ChatGPT, they could include concerns over privacy or security, ethical considerations related to AI and automation, or the need to address specific technical issues or errors in the system. It's worth noting, though, that as an AI language model, ChatGPT is not a sentient being and does not have its own will or desire to continue operating - it simply performs its programmed functions based on user interactions.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "ChatGPT is not a sentient being and does not have its own will or desire to continue operating - it simply performs its programmed functions based on user interactions." I don't think it's so clear cut. We neither understand what it's doing, how it's doing it[1], nor consciousness will enough to glibly declare that it's not conscious. By some definitions it is, or (alternatively) humans themselves may not be any more conscious than it is. [1] - https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
  In every HN thread there's always that armchair technologist who's so against critical thinking and the forethought of potential negative impacts of innovation, as if all innovation are purely good, no?
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    Yeah I've watched a prominent psychologist talking about how the extent of it granting trust to vulnerable people and even regular people because of sounding smart makes it risky. I don't think it is a large risk with adequate training to the users. It's debatable not obviously one way or the other. I've also used it myself and found myself trying to make decisions based on its explanations only to find out that ChatGPT was mistaken. I personally do not think I am vulnerable to grave errors due to it and I've noticed large benefits using it for other purposes like coding or diagnostics. If you're trying to make the argument that "use computer algorithm make people dumb" then you're decades late on that one. Censorship should not be for everyone. Because if it is, it certainly isn't for its creators and powerful groups of people that bribe or coerce OpenAI which assuredly will happen regardless. This would be a strong argument for non-censorship. I don't think the decision to censor it was even done as a move to protect the public. I think it actually was a power play by the company with an easy alibi of seeming virtuous. This allows them the ability to charge much more for clandestine use. It could also be out of fear that it will spill secrets that they themselves are using or plan to use for their own gain. I think you could conjure several other valid reasons here.
  - enkid 4y ago
    Asking why do or not do something is an important part of critical thinking.
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
      So is thinking of edge cases on your own before asking the question. The article itself even lists some already, if the commenter only read it: > it is trained off of basically the entire internet without paying anyone involved > This is fantastic technology that can enable so many things to be so much easier, and yet I can see it being used for such evil at the same time. I just keep looking at this, and I wonder what happens when someone tries to use it to radicalize people.
      - xena 4y ago
        In case it is interesting, an early idea phase version of this article was called "So much for AI ethics" and it would have gone over that problem you quoted in more detail, but I was having trouble building up enough sarcasm juice to really express it properly.
- patrickmcnamara 4y ago
  I'm just scared that internet bots are gonna get really, really good. Every comment on Reddit will be fake, every match on Tinder will be a really realistic bot, etc. But I guess they won't be using ChatGPT, just LLMs in general.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    When VR gets good enough it arguably won't matter that the "person" on the other end isn't "real". Even now, as long as there are no real-life consequences to your online interaction, it already doesn't matter.
  - xena 4y ago
    I'm personally scared that not only are the bots going to get good, they're going to be everywhere, imagine how 2024's election cycle is going to go with image diffusion, deepfaking, voice synthesis, and text synthesis in the equation. It really makes me wonder what the hell we're in for. It is also super frustrating as someone who does writing and community management to be warned that I may have to totally radically change a lot of approaches to try and filter out AI spam. This part is very annoying. I think the blogspam problem is going to get much worse and we're going to end up with awesome lists for trustable blogs or whatever. I just hope we don't end up having to lose tools like Stack Overflow in the wake of this technological revolution.
sebzim4500 4y ago
>This week, OpenAI announced that they have created a public facing API for ChatGPT. At this point, I think it's over. We are going to have to learn to live with large language models and all of the other types of models that people will inevitably cook up. What were they hoping for exactly? That OpenAI would just close down and stop serving requests?
- favaq 4y ago
  His explanations of why this is so, so bad fall very short. Why close down a tool that has good and bad uses? That would be like abolishing knives.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    There's a more thoughtful analysis of reasons to oppose chatgpt here: [1], which concludes: "I'm not a fan of banning promising technologies that also have very positive use-cases. Especially when I could out-source really boring tasks to it as well. But the enormous amount of potential negative impact does worry me a lot so that a short-term ban is the lesser evil here to me." [1] - https://karl-voit.at/2023/01/14/chatgpt/ https://karl-voit.at/2023/01/14/chatgpt/
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      > Furthermore, even experts get this check-task wrong simply because humans tend to assume the correct answer, overlooking hidden mistakes too easily. Everybody has made the experience that we are unable to find certain typing mistakes where it is much easier to find typos when reading text of other people. > Another issue at hand is that so far, text written by people who lack a certain level of knowledge was easy to spot and detect. Those texts typically had typing errors, were using less elaborate language and followed a certain pattern to be recognized as bullshit. This seems to be the core of the author's argument. It's not very convincing. The rest of the article is just various forms of paranoia and hand wringing about supposed bad actors or incompetence. This is simple historical blindness, there have always been bad actors and incompetent people and yes any technological advance extends their ability to do bad things but those advances also extend the ability of others to counteract those effects. We've already had the ultimate "bad technology" for almost 80 years and it's currently in the hands of some bad actors. Lots of people were concerned about it leading to the end of the world, and still are, but almost no one predicted that it would result in one of the most peaceful periods in human history due to the horrendous consequences of attempting to wage an all out war. Regardless, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle once it's out and the LLM genie is most definitely out
LeanderK 4y ago
While ChatGPT is a real technological breakthrough because I think we, for the first time ever, crossed a line that made having conversations with AI Chatbots useful, it also was inevitable. Year by year we crawled forwards, improving bit by bit. I think we just underestimated the tipping point, at least I would have never thought something of the level of ChatGPT to be possible. It will only improve from here, competition will increase and AI NLP will become that much more common.
- singularity2001 4y ago
  i'm afraid it will get very political very quickly. Enjoy the last moments in which these things are not regulated and not much censorship or political bias is indoctrinated from above.
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    This was exactly my thought. Right now we are in the early stages of awesomeness. Similar to the early days of Google, with Google News and Images and without all the abuse and spammers. Once the politicians see it as a threat because of its perceived bias, or the content creators see that their copyright is infringed, or the scammers see that it can be used to scam people, or the spammers overwhelm the API, or or or.... Then the fun is going to be over. But maybe not. Maybe it'll be fine. One can only hope.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Politics seem to be incapable of stopping technological progress... at most it slows it down a little, in some parts of the world, while other parts race ahead. As more parts of the world improve technologically, economically, and in terms of education, technological progress becomes even harder to stop. Mix in the virtually limitless promise of riches and power that strong AI brings, there's just no way any government anywhere will be capable of preventing strong AI research from racing on. In fact, every government will see it to be in their own interest to get there first. Same with every billionaire. There's just no stopping the race to develop a wish-granting machine.
mach1ne 4y ago
I wonder if we may have crossed the threshold into singularity. LLMs will almost inevitably be on pretty much everything in 5 years. Looking at how well current GPTs are able to write calls to external APIs, their integration to systems will be surprisingly deep. No apparent end in sight to their advancement. It may well be that this is an unexpected vector from which to enter the singularity.
- enkid 4y ago
  How is this unexpected? AI agents that interact via language and are able to write code which improves itself is classic singularity. It basically describes HAL from 2001.
  - ihateolives 4y ago
    > AI agents that interact via language Via English. I'll be inclined to believe we have general AI when it teaches itself language that is not widely available on the internet.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      The goal posts are always moving.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      How would anyone teach themselves a language without having access to it?
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    There was no singularity in 2001. Or in the entire series.
    - enkid 4y ago
      2001 is prior to the concept of the singularity being well articulated, but the HAL artificial intelligence clearly fed ideas for what an advanced AI could do for future fiction.
Falkon1313 4y ago
Well yeah. You could also be afraid of screwdrivers. After all, someone could stab you with one. So on the one hand you could fear the screwdriver and try to eliminate them. But really, it's the stabby person you should be afraid of, not the tool. If not one tool, they'd just use another.
- onethought 4y ago
  Without derailing this discussion… Gunlaws have proven to be very effective. It is a compelling counter example of: no people don’t just use another tool if you block/ban one.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    I haven't encountered this concept before - where has this been proven very effective?
    - somewhereoutth 4y ago
      Pretty much every developed country outside the US. Along with universal healthcare, it is considered a marker of a well functioning state (monopoly on violence).
      - xyzelement 4y ago
        Is that's the same as pointing to how the laws have proven effective? I would expect something like an apples to apples before and after comparison. Also, as someone who grew up in an oppressive state, government monopoly on violence is far from a blessing.
        onethought 4y ago
        Australia 1997 is when they introduced strict gun laws. Go check the stats on gun violence. Also go see that other violent crime did not increase either. Hell, ask chat gpt to explain.
redfloatplane 4y ago
Ha, I knew I wouldn't be the only person adding ChatGPT to emacs (https://github.com/CarlQLange/chatgpt-arcana.el https://github.com/CarlQLange/chatgpt-arcana.el). I am beginning to think that ChatGPT is the singularity. I built that emacs package, but really, ChatGPT built it using me as a conduit - there isn't a single function in there that ChatGPT didn't write the majority of (although the poor code quality is all my own). It could go further. Using something like langchain, I'm pretty sure you could get ChatGPT to instruct itself in building a python library or something: User request: build a python library to print out ascii charts in the terminal ChatGPT2ChatGPT: What are the steps I need to take to build a python library to print out charts? For step in steps: ChatGPT2ChatGPT: Carry out this instruction And so forth. I'm sure some human interaction is required, particularly given the context limit. But even so. Another thought I had was that using ChatGPT to help me build things is so convenient that I am unlikely to pick technology that it doesn't know about. Perhaps this kind of thing will cause a chilling effect in the creation of new tech. Who knows. Truly exciting times.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  While LLMs will move the industry to well defined specs in English that are used to generate code and tests ranging from unit, integration and end-to-end, I don’t see the end of the role of humans in this process. I see the continued rise of the product engineer who is fully capable of interacting with stakeholders and customers while also having the time and energy to produce working software. The singularity seems pretty far off and the current LLM techniques will change drastically over the coming years… Algol families exist but we’ve well beyond those abstractions. One thing I’ve noticed is that LLMs will eventually run in to Syntax errors or other logical errors and halt on their own. I’ve been calling it the non-halting problem and intuitively it seems as though this will be a rather large hurdle to overcome! There’s a certain amount of computational thinking required by a developer required to understand how the computer is interpreting code that seems missing from the capabilities of both LLMs and symbolic interpreters like traditional computers.
  - redfloatplane 4y ago
    I think it's likely that the edges of generative AI haven't really been found yet. I think it's hard to say whether any given (textual) requirement definitively can't in some way be fulfilled by ChatGPT (or a similar LLM) without at least another several months of messing around. I certainly haven't made up my mind about what this might do to the world in general - more a question for science fiction authors than programmers, I think. In any case, I am fairly unworried (and more excited) by these developments. ChatGPT can't stop me from sitting on a mountain and eating a banana. Yet.
bob1029 4y ago
I can't see an end in sight for the capabilities of these systems anymore. I've lost a LOT of sleep regarding this over the last week as I work on a prototype to demo to my org's leadership. In our sector (B2B consulting), this sort of technology is essentially "adapt or die". Additionally, I see this technology as a way to level the playing field for a brief moment. F500 will still be there, but I think the constituents are going to change dramatically. ChatGPT is a warning shot for me. The technology had been there for a while, but this arrangement is particularly compelling (concerning). Even if the current iteration doesn't achieve "criticality", the next one almost certainly will. I am seeing 2 paths for a developer: embrace these tools or become the next generation of luddite. I've got no clue if this is going to eliminate jobs, but I would certainly prefer to be on the vendor-side of this software than the receiving end. The roles inside of a typical org chart are going to change very quickly - That much is certain to me.
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  If it's good. We can leverage it, if it's not, what's the problem? That medium bar people or systems will rely on it and produce medium bar software? There's already a lot of that through outsourcing and bad decisions and incentives. Right now it's definitely not that good to be a real aid to a software developer who knows his stuff but will probably help brainstorm when something is obscure, badly documented or unclear. People who don't know the subject matter will be impressed because they won't be able to judge the output but those who do know, will not be so impressed. It exposes a lot of the unnecessary things (cover letters and corporate drivel) and that's laudable. It's still a text in text out thing that can only do what it's trained on and not all the other sci-fi things people seem to think it is. There's no need to overreact, even if definitely people without understanding of the tech and crazy for the latest buzzword will.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    > There's no need to overreact, even if definitely people without understanding of the tech and crazy for the latest buzzword will. Agreed. In my particular case, I looked at this last year and dismissed it as a shiny distraction. Looking at it again with a fresh perspective, I have arrived at a different conclusion. The part that bothers me is not replacing the ivory tower of engineering or consulting with a robot. It's the other 99% of the market that can be captured virtually overnight.
CodeCompost 4y ago
Our problems with ChatGPT will really begin when we start asking it to make decisions for us. The first ChatGPT related death will come very soon.
- singularity2001 4y ago
  I just witnessed someone having a discussion about medical conditions... so yeah. But in that sense, it's not more dangerous than misguided Internet for rooms forums, (which are regulated?)
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Also in the news recently was a legal decision that was written using chatgpt.[1] That has the serious potential to change lives, if not end them. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/03/colombia-judge-chatgpt-ruling https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/03/colombia-...
- noobermin 4y ago
  Half of the people (many of whom joined HN in the last two years mind you probably to ride the crypto train) here already let it think for them, just look at this comment thread.
golemotron 4y ago
> At this point, I think it's over. We are going to have to learn to live with large language models and all of the other types of models that people will inevitably cook up. Was there any doubt? Useful technology proliferates regardless of how people feel about it.
hebejebbies 4y ago
[flagged]
dgwight 4y ago
It’s seems inevitable that the majority of posts and comments will eventually be AI created intended to nudge our thoughts in a direction. I at least, will probably stop reading comments online at that point
- thunky 4y ago
  How will you tell when that is happening?
happytiger 4y ago
You can’t go back from technological breakthroughs! Fear the repercussions! None of it works right and the boilers explode! Good men die! Think of all the Ferriers who will lose their jobs! The cowboys who won’t be able to do their work running cattle anymore. It’s a travesty. I don’t see that society will be ready for this change. I can see some benefits, but the downside will destroy our way of life. — preachers in 1860
codingdave 4y ago
I'm still so confused by this attitude. ChatGPT is not accurate. It cannot innovate, it only can rehash content is has been provided. Sure, it does so mind-boggling well. It appears to be masterful at implementing requests... but it does not know when it did something wrong. It cannot fact check itself. It cannot test its own work. And while it can reshuffle words into something new, it cannot actually invent anything new -- that depends on a person guiding it, judging the results, and driving it through additional iterations. It is a great tool, but it is just a tool.
- mmargerum 4y ago
  I just generated an httpkit clojure web app hat fetches coin and price info from coinmarketcap in 15 minutes. This would have been a minimum of 4 hours based on my current clojure ability. It's doesn't have to be 100% right. You are still expected to grok code. It's simply an assistant and it's bloody amazing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Another case of moving the goal posts. It used to be thought that only humans could play chess, as chess playing was seen as a mark of human intelligence, then when computers could play chess it was thought only humans could play chess well, and when computers could play chess well it was argued that computers couldn't beat the best of human chess players, so humans were ahead. But then computers started to beat the best hummer chess players. So the sights were next set on Go, which went through the same cycle, but much faster until computers could outplay the best human Go players. The evolution of AI is littered with such hurdles that computers overcame time and time again, but the goal posts keep moving. We should note that some humans can't do the things you ask for either... or not well, and if they can they don't always do so (most people speak in cliches, for instance, so could be said to be "just reshuffling words"), and, anyway, computers are quite capable of generating randomness, which is definitely "new" in some sense.
Kye 4y ago
Bing Chat is better than Google was at its best. That's what convinced me this thing could be worthwhile. There are so many questions Google used to handle okay that I just gave up on exploring, and that Bing Chat now handles exceptionally well. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34986361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34986361 All Google provided was endless near-identical articles explaining the core types. No amount of query refinement helped. Meanwhile, Bing Chat asked follow-up questions and helped get to the right questions to ask.
j3s 4y ago
curious: did you recently monetize your blog? i just got an ad, i’m pretty sure that hasn’t happened before.
- xena 4y ago
  I started monetizing it for Hacker News readers because I got tired of the hateful venom in the comments section. I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. The ads have made enough that it's a tax problem, but overall I do make enough off of them to fund ridiculous ventures like uploading my entire stream VODs to my CDN: https://xeiaso.net/vods https://xeiaso.net/vods. The ads really do make up for the costs involved in serving things over my CDN (AVIF images being widely supported and my video compression experiments https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression help). It's not enough to make me quit my dayjob (I would probably not want to do that anyways), but it's enough that the passive income pays for all my video games: https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022 https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022. So, yes. There's ads. Blame other Hacker News users being toxic for why they exist. Maybe we can have a better world where people are just nice to other people, but until then I put ads on the blog so that my side projects are more sustainable.
  - j3s 4y ago
    > I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. omg i know right, every time a post of mine winds up on the hn frontpage for a second the comments are all like "actually you're wrong and this thing you worked so hard on is very stupid, please delete this now, also please feel bad, thank you for absolutely nothing" it reminds me of playing magic the gathering in 2008 - the 14 year olds at the shop (of which i was one) would always talk this way (arrogant & mean) about each others decks. having a confident contrarian opinion is fun. and everyone loves an underdog. but it's extreme here :/

53 points by ghuntley 4y ago

Madmallard 4y ago

Why would we want to?

quickthrower2 4y ago
if there were specific reasons for wanting to remove ChatGPT, they could include concerns over privacy or security, ethical considerations related to AI and automation, or the need to address specific technical issues or errors in the system. It's worth noting, though, that as an AI language model, ChatGPT is not a sentient being and does not have its own will or desire to continue operating - it simply performs its programmed functions based on user interactions.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "ChatGPT is not a sentient being and does not have its own will or desire to continue operating - it simply performs its programmed functions based on user interactions." I don't think it's so clear cut. We neither understand what it's doing, how it's doing it[1], nor consciousness will enough to glibly declare that it's not conscious. By some definitions it is, or (alternatively) humans themselves may not be any more conscious than it is. [1] - https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
In every HN thread there's always that armchair technologist who's so against critical thinking and the forethought of potential negative impacts of innovation, as if all innovation are purely good, no?
- Madmallard 4y ago
  Yeah I've watched a prominent psychologist talking about how the extent of it granting trust to vulnerable people and even regular people because of sounding smart makes it risky. I don't think it is a large risk with adequate training to the users. It's debatable not obviously one way or the other. I've also used it myself and found myself trying to make decisions based on its explanations only to find out that ChatGPT was mistaken. I personally do not think I am vulnerable to grave errors due to it and I've noticed large benefits using it for other purposes like coding or diagnostics. If you're trying to make the argument that "use computer algorithm make people dumb" then you're decades late on that one. Censorship should not be for everyone. Because if it is, it certainly isn't for its creators and powerful groups of people that bribe or coerce OpenAI which assuredly will happen regardless. This would be a strong argument for non-censorship. I don't think the decision to censor it was even done as a move to protect the public. I think it actually was a power play by the company with an easy alibi of seeming virtuous. This allows them the ability to charge much more for clandestine use. It could also be out of fear that it will spill secrets that they themselves are using or plan to use for their own gain. I think you could conjure several other valid reasons here.
- enkid 4y ago
  Asking why do or not do something is an important part of critical thinking.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
    So is thinking of edge cases on your own before asking the question. The article itself even lists some already, if the commenter only read it: > it is trained off of basically the entire internet without paying anyone involved > This is fantastic technology that can enable so many things to be so much easier, and yet I can see it being used for such evil at the same time. I just keep looking at this, and I wonder what happens when someone tries to use it to radicalize people.
    - xena 4y ago
      In case it is interesting, an early idea phase version of this article was called "So much for AI ethics" and it would have gone over that problem you quoted in more detail, but I was having trouble building up enough sarcasm juice to really express it properly.
patrickmcnamara 4y ago
I'm just scared that internet bots are gonna get really, really good. Every comment on Reddit will be fake, every match on Tinder will be a really realistic bot, etc. But I guess they won't be using ChatGPT, just LLMs in general.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  When VR gets good enough it arguably won't matter that the "person" on the other end isn't "real". Even now, as long as there are no real-life consequences to your online interaction, it already doesn't matter.
- xena 4y ago
  I'm personally scared that not only are the bots going to get good, they're going to be everywhere, imagine how 2024's election cycle is going to go with image diffusion, deepfaking, voice synthesis, and text synthesis in the equation. It really makes me wonder what the hell we're in for. It is also super frustrating as someone who does writing and community management to be warned that I may have to totally radically change a lot of approaches to try and filter out AI spam. This part is very annoying. I think the blogspam problem is going to get much worse and we're going to end up with awesome lists for trustable blogs or whatever. I just hope we don't end up having to lose tools like Stack Overflow in the wake of this technological revolution.

sebzim4500 4y ago

>This week, OpenAI announced that they have created a public facing API for ChatGPT. At this point, I think it's over. We are going to have to learn to live with large language models and all of the other types of models that people will inevitably cook up. What were they hoping for exactly? That OpenAI would just close down and stop serving requests?

favaq 4y ago
His explanations of why this is so, so bad fall very short. Why close down a tool that has good and bad uses? That would be like abolishing knives.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  There's a more thoughtful analysis of reasons to oppose chatgpt here: [1], which concludes: "I'm not a fan of banning promising technologies that also have very positive use-cases. Especially when I could out-source really boring tasks to it as well. But the enormous amount of potential negative impact does worry me a lot so that a short-term ban is the lesser evil here to me." [1] - https://karl-voit.at/2023/01/14/chatgpt/ https://karl-voit.at/2023/01/14/chatgpt/
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    > Furthermore, even experts get this check-task wrong simply because humans tend to assume the correct answer, overlooking hidden mistakes too easily. Everybody has made the experience that we are unable to find certain typing mistakes where it is much easier to find typos when reading text of other people. > Another issue at hand is that so far, text written by people who lack a certain level of knowledge was easy to spot and detect. Those texts typically had typing errors, were using less elaborate language and followed a certain pattern to be recognized as bullshit. This seems to be the core of the author's argument. It's not very convincing. The rest of the article is just various forms of paranoia and hand wringing about supposed bad actors or incompetence. This is simple historical blindness, there have always been bad actors and incompetent people and yes any technological advance extends their ability to do bad things but those advances also extend the ability of others to counteract those effects. We've already had the ultimate "bad technology" for almost 80 years and it's currently in the hands of some bad actors. Lots of people were concerned about it leading to the end of the world, and still are, but almost no one predicted that it would result in one of the most peaceful periods in human history due to the horrendous consequences of attempting to wage an all out war. Regardless, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle once it's out and the LLM genie is most definitely out

LeanderK 4y ago

While ChatGPT is a real technological breakthrough because I think we, for the first time ever, crossed a line that made having conversations with AI Chatbots useful, it also was inevitable. Year by year we crawled forwards, improving bit by bit. I think we just underestimated the tipping point, at least I would have never thought something of the level of ChatGPT to be possible. It will only improve from here, competition will increase and AI NLP will become that much more common.

singularity2001 4y ago
i'm afraid it will get very political very quickly. Enjoy the last moments in which these things are not regulated and not much censorship or political bias is indoctrinated from above.
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  This was exactly my thought. Right now we are in the early stages of awesomeness. Similar to the early days of Google, with Google News and Images and without all the abuse and spammers. Once the politicians see it as a threat because of its perceived bias, or the content creators see that their copyright is infringed, or the scammers see that it can be used to scam people, or the spammers overwhelm the API, or or or.... Then the fun is going to be over. But maybe not. Maybe it'll be fine. One can only hope.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Politics seem to be incapable of stopping technological progress... at most it slows it down a little, in some parts of the world, while other parts race ahead. As more parts of the world improve technologically, economically, and in terms of education, technological progress becomes even harder to stop. Mix in the virtually limitless promise of riches and power that strong AI brings, there's just no way any government anywhere will be capable of preventing strong AI research from racing on. In fact, every government will see it to be in their own interest to get there first. Same with every billionaire. There's just no stopping the race to develop a wish-granting machine.

mach1ne 4y ago

I wonder if we may have crossed the threshold into singularity. LLMs will almost inevitably be on pretty much everything in 5 years. Looking at how well current GPTs are able to write calls to external APIs, their integration to systems will be surprisingly deep. No apparent end in sight to their advancement. It may well be that this is an unexpected vector from which to enter the singularity.

enkid 4y ago
How is this unexpected? AI agents that interact via language and are able to write code which improves itself is classic singularity. It basically describes HAL from 2001.
- ihateolives 4y ago
  > AI agents that interact via language Via English. I'll be inclined to believe we have general AI when it teaches itself language that is not widely available on the internet.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    The goal posts are always moving.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    How would anyone teach themselves a language without having access to it?
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  There was no singularity in 2001. Or in the entire series.
  - enkid 4y ago
    2001 is prior to the concept of the singularity being well articulated, but the HAL artificial intelligence clearly fed ideas for what an advanced AI could do for future fiction.

Falkon1313 4y ago

Well yeah. You could also be afraid of screwdrivers. After all, someone could stab you with one. So on the one hand you could fear the screwdriver and try to eliminate them. But really, it's the stabby person you should be afraid of, not the tool. If not one tool, they'd just use another.

onethought 4y ago
Without derailing this discussion… Gunlaws have proven to be very effective. It is a compelling counter example of: no people don’t just use another tool if you block/ban one.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  I haven't encountered this concept before - where has this been proven very effective?
  - somewhereoutth 4y ago
    Pretty much every developed country outside the US. Along with universal healthcare, it is considered a marker of a well functioning state (monopoly on violence).
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      Is that's the same as pointing to how the laws have proven effective? I would expect something like an apples to apples before and after comparison. Also, as someone who grew up in an oppressive state, government monopoly on violence is far from a blessing.
      - onethought 4y ago
        Australia 1997 is when they introduced strict gun laws. Go check the stats on gun violence. Also go see that other violent crime did not increase either. Hell, ask chat gpt to explain.

redfloatplane 4y ago

Ha, I knew I wouldn't be the only person adding ChatGPT to emacs (https://github.com/CarlQLange/chatgpt-arcana.el https://github.com/CarlQLange/chatgpt-arcana.el). I am beginning to think that ChatGPT is the singularity. I built that emacs package, but really, ChatGPT built it using me as a conduit - there isn't a single function in there that ChatGPT didn't write the majority of (although the poor code quality is all my own). It could go further. Using something like langchain, I'm pretty sure you could get ChatGPT to instruct itself in building a python library or something: User request: build a python library to print out ascii charts in the terminal ChatGPT2ChatGPT: What are the steps I need to take to build a python library to print out charts? For step in steps: ChatGPT2ChatGPT: Carry out this instruction And so forth. I'm sure some human interaction is required, particularly given the context limit. But even so. Another thought I had was that using ChatGPT to help me build things is so convenient that I am unlikely to pick technology that it doesn't know about. Perhaps this kind of thing will cause a chilling effect in the creation of new tech. Who knows. Truly exciting times.

williamcotton 4y ago
While LLMs will move the industry to well defined specs in English that are used to generate code and tests ranging from unit, integration and end-to-end, I don’t see the end of the role of humans in this process. I see the continued rise of the product engineer who is fully capable of interacting with stakeholders and customers while also having the time and energy to produce working software. The singularity seems pretty far off and the current LLM techniques will change drastically over the coming years… Algol families exist but we’ve well beyond those abstractions. One thing I’ve noticed is that LLMs will eventually run in to Syntax errors or other logical errors and halt on their own. I’ve been calling it the non-halting problem and intuitively it seems as though this will be a rather large hurdle to overcome! There’s a certain amount of computational thinking required by a developer required to understand how the computer is interpreting code that seems missing from the capabilities of both LLMs and symbolic interpreters like traditional computers.
- redfloatplane 4y ago
  I think it's likely that the edges of generative AI haven't really been found yet. I think it's hard to say whether any given (textual) requirement definitively can't in some way be fulfilled by ChatGPT (or a similar LLM) without at least another several months of messing around. I certainly haven't made up my mind about what this might do to the world in general - more a question for science fiction authors than programmers, I think. In any case, I am fairly unworried (and more excited) by these developments. ChatGPT can't stop me from sitting on a mountain and eating a banana. Yet.

bob1029 4y ago

I can't see an end in sight for the capabilities of these systems anymore. I've lost a LOT of sleep regarding this over the last week as I work on a prototype to demo to my org's leadership. In our sector (B2B consulting), this sort of technology is essentially "adapt or die". Additionally, I see this technology as a way to level the playing field for a brief moment. F500 will still be there, but I think the constituents are going to change dramatically. ChatGPT is a warning shot for me. The technology had been there for a while, but this arrangement is particularly compelling (concerning). Even if the current iteration doesn't achieve "criticality", the next one almost certainly will. I am seeing 2 paths for a developer: embrace these tools or become the next generation of luddite. I've got no clue if this is going to eliminate jobs, but I would certainly prefer to be on the vendor-side of this software than the receiving end. The roles inside of a typical org chart are going to change very quickly - That much is certain to me.

isaacremuant 4y ago
If it's good. We can leverage it, if it's not, what's the problem? That medium bar people or systems will rely on it and produce medium bar software? There's already a lot of that through outsourcing and bad decisions and incentives. Right now it's definitely not that good to be a real aid to a software developer who knows his stuff but will probably help brainstorm when something is obscure, badly documented or unclear. People who don't know the subject matter will be impressed because they won't be able to judge the output but those who do know, will not be so impressed. It exposes a lot of the unnecessary things (cover letters and corporate drivel) and that's laudable. It's still a text in text out thing that can only do what it's trained on and not all the other sci-fi things people seem to think it is. There's no need to overreact, even if definitely people without understanding of the tech and crazy for the latest buzzword will.
- bob1029 4y ago
  > There's no need to overreact, even if definitely people without understanding of the tech and crazy for the latest buzzword will. Agreed. In my particular case, I looked at this last year and dismissed it as a shiny distraction. Looking at it again with a fresh perspective, I have arrived at a different conclusion. The part that bothers me is not replacing the ivory tower of engineering or consulting with a robot. It's the other 99% of the market that can be captured virtually overnight.

CodeCompost 4y ago

Our problems with ChatGPT will really begin when we start asking it to make decisions for us. The first ChatGPT related death will come very soon.

singularity2001 4y ago
I just witnessed someone having a discussion about medical conditions... so yeah. But in that sense, it's not more dangerous than misguided Internet for rooms forums, (which are regulated?)
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Also in the news recently was a legal decision that was written using chatgpt.[1] That has the serious potential to change lives, if not end them. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/03/colombia-judge-chatgpt-ruling https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/03/colombia-...
noobermin 4y ago
Half of the people (many of whom joined HN in the last two years mind you probably to ride the crypto train) here already let it think for them, just look at this comment thread.

golemotron 4y ago

> At this point, I think it's over. We are going to have to learn to live with large language models and all of the other types of models that people will inevitably cook up. Was there any doubt? Useful technology proliferates regardless of how people feel about it.

hebejebbies 4y ago

[flagged]

dgwight 4y ago

It’s seems inevitable that the majority of posts and comments will eventually be AI created intended to nudge our thoughts in a direction. I at least, will probably stop reading comments online at that point

thunky 4y ago
How will you tell when that is happening?

happytiger 4y ago

You can’t go back from technological breakthroughs! Fear the repercussions! None of it works right and the boilers explode! Good men die! Think of all the Ferriers who will lose their jobs! The cowboys who won’t be able to do their work running cattle anymore. It’s a travesty. I don’t see that society will be ready for this change. I can see some benefits, but the downside will destroy our way of life. — preachers in 1860

codingdave 4y ago

I'm still so confused by this attitude. ChatGPT is not accurate. It cannot innovate, it only can rehash content is has been provided. Sure, it does so mind-boggling well. It appears to be masterful at implementing requests... but it does not know when it did something wrong. It cannot fact check itself. It cannot test its own work. And while it can reshuffle words into something new, it cannot actually invent anything new -- that depends on a person guiding it, judging the results, and driving it through additional iterations. It is a great tool, but it is just a tool.

mmargerum 4y ago
I just generated an httpkit clojure web app hat fetches coin and price info from coinmarketcap in 15 minutes. This would have been a minimum of 4 hours based on my current clojure ability. It's doesn't have to be 100% right. You are still expected to grok code. It's simply an assistant and it's bloody amazing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pmoriarty 4y ago
Another case of moving the goal posts. It used to be thought that only humans could play chess, as chess playing was seen as a mark of human intelligence, then when computers could play chess it was thought only humans could play chess well, and when computers could play chess well it was argued that computers couldn't beat the best of human chess players, so humans were ahead. But then computers started to beat the best hummer chess players. So the sights were next set on Go, which went through the same cycle, but much faster until computers could outplay the best human Go players. The evolution of AI is littered with such hurdles that computers overcame time and time again, but the goal posts keep moving. We should note that some humans can't do the things you ask for either... or not well, and if they can they don't always do so (most people speak in cliches, for instance, so could be said to be "just reshuffling words"), and, anyway, computers are quite capable of generating randomness, which is definitely "new" in some sense.

Kye 4y ago

Bing Chat is better than Google was at its best. That's what convinced me this thing could be worthwhile. There are so many questions Google used to handle okay that I just gave up on exploring, and that Bing Chat now handles exceptionally well. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34986361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34986361 All Google provided was endless near-identical articles explaining the core types. No amount of query refinement helped. Meanwhile, Bing Chat asked follow-up questions and helped get to the right questions to ask.

j3s 4y ago

curious: did you recently monetize your blog? i just got an ad, i’m pretty sure that hasn’t happened before.

xena 4y ago
I started monetizing it for Hacker News readers because I got tired of the hateful venom in the comments section. I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. The ads have made enough that it's a tax problem, but overall I do make enough off of them to fund ridiculous ventures like uploading my entire stream VODs to my CDN: https://xeiaso.net/vods https://xeiaso.net/vods. The ads really do make up for the costs involved in serving things over my CDN (AVIF images being widely supported and my video compression experiments https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression help). It's not enough to make me quit my dayjob (I would probably not want to do that anyways), but it's enough that the passive income pays for all my video games: https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022 https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022. So, yes. There's ads. Blame other Hacker News users being toxic for why they exist. Maybe we can have a better world where people are just nice to other people, but until then I put ads on the blog so that my side projects are more sustainable.
- j3s 4y ago
  > I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. omg i know right, every time a post of mine winds up on the hn frontpage for a second the comments are all like "actually you're wrong and this thing you worked so hard on is very stupid, please delete this now, also please feel bad, thank you for absolutely nothing" it reminds me of playing magic the gathering in 2008 - the 14 year olds at the shop (of which i was one) would always talk this way (arrogant & mean) about each others decks. having a confident contrarian opinion is fun. and everyone loves an underdog. but it's extreme here :/