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> I really hope, if these this stuff is going to be ubiquitous, that there are big strides made in improving the quality of the output, very soon. Is there any

> I really hope, if these this stuff is going to be ubiquitous, that there are big strides made in improving the quality of the output, very soon. Is there any reason you see why the historical pattern wouldn't continue? 6 years ago this tech was fantasy, 4 years ago we had rough prototypes, 2.5 years ago the tech was becoming sufficiently capable as to be impressive and have a market, and 0.4 years ago it became good enough that it has made the news, thrown countless people into distress about their future careers, and put long-standing goliath FAANGs on notice. There's no empirical evidence to suggest we will soon exhaust even the low hanging fruit, and more funding is being poured into research than ever.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Then again, AI is like VR. Something genuinely new and interesting happens every couple of decades, gets hyped to the moon... and then absolutely nothing happens for another ten or twenty years. The term "AI winter" is no joke. It was coined for a reason. AI has always evolved via punctuated equilibrium. Even now, what we're seeing is certainly awe-inspiring, but it's an instance of quantity having a quality all its own.
- copperx 4y ago
  Even if progress halted for 10 years, there is a LOT of low hanging fruit to be picked with the current models to develop all kinds of novel integrations.
sharkjacobs 4y ago
Tesla enabled Autopilot in 2015, Siri was available in 2011, the Oculus Rift consumer version was sold in 2015. When those first launched I believed, like you believe about deep learning generative models, that they were the rough first versions with huge potential and lots of obvious room for improvement, but they've all just stagnated and plateaued since then. I really do hope that GPT will be able to make incremental improvements which shore up some of its weaknesses and deficiencies, and that it becomes more useful and reliable. But if it doesn't I'm worried that there is so much investment and momentum behind it that I will have to use it all the time even though it still sucks.
- flangola7 4y ago
  I don't think those are objectively comparable. The amount of simple but significant optimizations that are clearly achievable is many. We're in the steam can turn a wheel phase.

CamperBob2 4y ago

Then again, AI is like VR. Something genuinely new and interesting happens every couple of decades, gets hyped to the moon... and then absolutely nothing happens for another ten or twenty years. The term "AI winter" is no joke. It was coined for a reason. AI has always evolved via punctuated equilibrium. Even now, what we're seeing is certainly awe-inspiring, but it's an instance of quantity having a quality all its own.

copperx 4y ago
Even if progress halted for 10 years, there is a LOT of low hanging fruit to be picked with the current models to develop all kinds of novel integrations.

sharkjacobs 4y ago

Tesla enabled Autopilot in 2015, Siri was available in 2011, the Oculus Rift consumer version was sold in 2015. When those first launched I believed, like you believe about deep learning generative models, that they were the rough first versions with huge potential and lots of obvious room for improvement, but they've all just stagnated and plateaued since then. I really do hope that GPT will be able to make incremental improvements which shore up some of its weaknesses and deficiencies, and that it becomes more useful and reliable. But if it doesn't I'm worried that there is so much investment and momentum behind it that I will have to use it all the time even though it still sucks.

flangola7 4y ago
I don't think those are objectively comparable. The amount of simple but significant optimizations that are clearly achievable is many. We're in the steam can turn a wheel phase.