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Hah! My first thought was, "Oh, is their plan this time to give the playbook to Microsoft?" I confess that the current ChatGPT hype wave leaves me feeling cold
by wpietri 4y ago
Hah! My first thought was, "Oh, is their plan this time to give the playbook to Microsoft?"
I confess that the current ChatGPT hype wave leaves me feeling cold. A lot of people are obviously excited about it. But then, a lot of people have been excited about VR and blockchains, and I'm still waiting to see significant uptake. I have to wonder if this is another area where it's more sci-fi driven novelty hypnosis than the beginning of a revolution.
- carom 4y agoThe computer vision capabilities of deep learning are pretty amazing. I'm surprised they aren't being utilized more.
- Tanjreeve 4y agoThey are. Its just mostly gone into giving people cat ears on social media sites.
- happymellon 4y agoChatGPT - Write for me the next superhero script for Marvel about someone who magically has super powers. That's essentially where we are going with this.
- taylorius 4y agoThough to be fair, GPT 0.1 could probably do a plausible job of that.
- pipo234 4y agoAs a general critique on 2023 society, it's remarkable how much discourse is about AI becoming like humans, while there is little talk of how creative human roles are increasingly behaving like robots. Block buster Hollywood scripts for the most part seem to come straight out of Southpark's Computerized Automatron.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> while there is little talk of how creative human roles are increasingly behaving like robots There is, in fact, a vast amount of talk about that, has been for decades. You might not see a lot of it on HN, but that's mostly because its off-topic.
- izacus 4y agoYes, rehashing a thing that's been done 15x before is indeed what ChatGPT is best at.
- nickpp 4y agoHumans were doing that just fine already.
- Kye 4y agoIt's coming. I'm playing No Man's Sky, and it benefits from the DLSS on my Nvidia GPU. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/may-2021-rtx-dlss-game-update/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/may-2021-rtx-dlss-... The FPS effect is tangible. The visual effect is subtle in a game made in 2016 before anyone in the mainstream was talking about this sort of thing, but imagine the possibilities for an indie developer without much funding. They can make their assets at a resolution that's reasonable for their budget, but that would look bad scaled up with traditional methods. They can offer higher resolutions at AAA quality without an AAA performance tuning and asset budget.
- machiaweliczny 4y agoIt’s mostly industrial and NSA use cases for now but I think 3D models will be next thing. Also I think that once GPT will understand images the designers and front-end devs jobs will start evaporating.
- Tanjreeve 4y agoI'm dubious about the NSA use cases and most of the US defense policy establishment seems to agree. Most of those types of use cases are pathologically fixated on provability and traceability on why an inference was made programmatic "i reckon" is largely useless in the context of anything important. The problems there remain processing complex data accurately and quickly.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoI'm not sure if it's that chatGPT is that good, or that traversing today's attention-weaponized web is that bad, but I think I'm getting about a 30% productivity boost by replacing: Google -> Stack Overflow With... chatGPT --maybe--> Google --> Stack Overflow I won't make predictions about the future, but it's been pretty transitive for today.
- shever73 4y agoSame here, except I dropped Google as my search engine of choice a long time ago. ChatGPT is great for doing some of the heavy lifting. I pasted in a list of raw, unprocessed data and asked it to give me unique values sorted alphabetically. I know I could have done it in code, but just being able to paste it in, give a plain English command and get the same results was fantastic.
- aeonmyst 4y agoHow do you verify if what ChatGPT returns is actually correct? I'd be scared that it would have hallucinated a new value in its response. Although hmm, on the other hand, it's also arguable that what we may have have coded would be subject to errors too.
- mchaver 4y ago> How do you verify if what ChatGPT returns is actually correct? A bit ironically, if it is regarding a fact, I perform a search on DDG or google and find an authoritative website or paper to corroborate it. So it still feels like search outside of an LLM is an important tool. If the result is code I can test it myself.
- IanCal 4y agoThere needs to be some lexicon for this kind of thing. Theres a parallel with NP problems, some things are hard to figure out but easy to verify. Others hard to do both.
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- IIAOPSW 4y agoThe other day, for the first time, GPTina asked a question back at me... I think beginning of a revolution. The ground has shifted under our feet.
- devwastaken 4y agoFor search, chatgpt is the best out there. If I have a question I don't have to read the whole Wikipedia entry. Chatgpt just gives me the relevant part.
- skybrian 4y agoAnd you trust the answer without knowing where it came from?
- arlcode 4y agoFor now. The SEO people around the globe and the product people at Microsoft had not yet time to work ads into it systematically. It'll be really interesting to see how resistent it is to these problems. Once upon a time Google Search was a great product.
- lakomen 4y agoYup but I would never give Microsoft that much power again. They already have too much, and they're abusing it.
- wpietri 4y agoOh, the horrors! Reading a whole Wikipedia entry! (Which is not what people trying to answer a question do anyhow; they look at headings and skim for the bit they want.) I believe that gives an answer. But the right answer? Even Wikipedia doesn't guarantee that.
- spookie 4y agoI wouldn't trust it. Believe me, I learned the hard way.
- chii 4y ago> But then, a lot of people have been excited about VR and blockchains dunno about blockchains, but i'm sure there isn't 100million VR units sold. Plus you don't need to pay upfront to use chatGPT to try it. And everyone who has tried it has been amazed, or at least, impressed at how good the responses are. Not saying that the language models and AI hype is to be believed, but there's substance there. If you are an investor, you should be wary of missing out. And if you're not an investor, you should be wary of losing your human advantage in the economy.
- wpietri 4y ago> And everyone who has tried it has been amazed, or at least, impressed at how good the responses are. This is almost the definition of a novelty effect. Consider, for example, 3D. Stereoscopic 3D has gone through at least 5 waves of people trying it, saying, "Amazing! This will change everything!" But so far every time everything has not been changed. (The 5 waves I count: Brewster stereoscopes in the 1850s, 3D still viewers in the 1940s, 3D movies in the 1950s, VR in the 1990s, and 3D movies/TV starting in 2009. Assuming that we see the current wave of VR/metaverse hype as still open, of course.) The question for me is what happens once something gets past "amazing". For example, consider Shazam's music recognition technology. It was widely considered amazing at the time. But in very short order it became boring, as it had basically one use case, one that did not matter much to most people.
- turmeric_root 4y agoYeah I spent a week or two getting excited playing with ChatGPT but then I got bored. I also bought a Quest 2 a while ago and sold it after a few months, so I guess the novelty just wears off quickly for me.
- wpietri 4y agoI think that just puts you ahead of the curve. But perhaps not very far ahead. I rented the Quest for a couple weeks at Christmastime. The first week everybody thought it was amazing, me included. Things tapered off in the second week, with the kids back on their Switches and the Playstation. When I mailed it back nobody even noticed. I hear a fair number of anecdotes like that. And I find very few people for whom VR games are a daily driver the way, say, mobile games are.
- unxdfa 4y agoI agree. However the ChatGPT situation is the first hype that’s really been harmful rather than just disruptive. It can and is being used to generate low accuracy noise which degrades quality information. I suspect our demise isn’t going to be a big bang but a slow fizzle of information decay. And this is the start of it. At best it’s going to make us stupider.
- fock 4y agorecently I tried to search for CO2-consumption (as in usage as an industrial gas) on Google. It didn't return 1 useful hit, everything was about emissions. So: We are already there, all without ChatGPT... ChatGPT (with its cool ways to make it nondeterministic, like: replacing tokens with synonyms and raising the temperature. Or: retraining it...) will make things worse definitely. Probably the way to go is for {academia,sects,orgs with sense for humanity,...} to build stores of attributable information and then start shunning the branches which produce bullshit (this is what scientific publishing should do already.... it doesn't... even without ChatGPT there's already templated articles strewn around the corpus and noone cares). The main issue there is, that this means that they will also have to stop using a lot of technology (and buy a 32nm foundry...), because many orgs are probably already poisoned.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoI went and searched for "CO2 industrial applications -emissions" without the quotes. This was the first result: https://applications.messergroup.com/co2-applications https://applications.messergroup.com/co2-applications There were a number of other relevant results. Papers on various applications of CO2, forum posts, etc. Nothing on emissions. Sure google is a lot worse these days than it used to be, but it still seems plenty usable to me and I have no issues finding what I want with some basic operators.
- Crosseye_Jack 4y ago> with some basic operators The problem imo is that Google was good enough that basic operators were not required, as such the avg Joe is amazed when finding out that such operators exist, and Google doesn’t really promote the advanced search page these days.
- h10h10h10 4y agoI've never been excited about VR and 'blockchains'. I was, and still am, excited for Bitcoin, which in my opinion is the only useful application of blockchain. I use Bitcoin in a daily basis, and I have done it for over a decade. As for ChatGPT, I'm actually using it and it enhances my productivity by a lot. So, I believe this isn't just hype.
- raspberry1337 4y agoMay I use how you use bitcoin on a daily basis? I see it primarily as a form of storage, obv I am wrong here
- h10h10h10 4y agoI see it primarily as a form of transfering money, not storing money. I get paid overseas, convert it to bitcoin, transfer it to my wallet, then sell immediately.
- mach1ne 4y agoIt depends on what you expect of ChatGPT. A reliable human-like assistant? No. A reliable natural-language API to every IoT capable device? Absolutely.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoHuman-like and reliable are not coterminous.
- rg111 4y agoIt is a common and uninformed HN fallacy to equate AI and Blockchain. While Blockchain only has hype, AI has hype and real applications. While there are enough bottom-feeder AI bros on Twitter and Discord, AI does have real applications and it solves real problems and makes people real money. You need to shift your focus from the AGI and LLM hype to real application areas. I have shipped end-user facing real world AI product myself. It saved each client (non tech companies) 2-3mn USD per year, and made our company money. I can say with authority that if you think AI and blockchain are the same, you are plain WRONG.
- Nullabillity 4y agoAnd yet, all you focus on is how much money you made off of it, not what those applications actually were.
- rg111 4y agoNo, you are wrong. That's why I wrote non-tech companies in parenthesis. For a tech company, you can sell codegen software where the customers solely determine value. You can sell another tech company Blockchain Snake Oil and make money off of it. My work was not such a case. End users, consumers saw real value which made their lives better in a small way, and help save our coustomer, a business- save millions of dollars. I really care about my work, and rejected many offers where I could have made more money working on snake oil recipe.
- wpietri 4y agoYou will note that I talked about ChatGPT, not AI. So this: > I can say with authority that if you think AI and blockchain are the same, you are plain WRONG. Is attacking a straw man that you built all by yourself.
- spullara 4y agoI don't know, maybe use it?
- wpietri 4y agoSee, I got that answer a lot with VR. And like you, they never asked whether I had used it, generally assuming that the only possible way I could be skeptical is through ignorance. But as with both of those and plenty of other novel technology, whether or not I like it doesn't answer most of my questions, which are about what other people will use things for. E.g., I did not like YouTube, but I am just not a video person. So me using YouTube and saying "meh" wasn't informative, because I wasn't the target audience. Similarly, I was wowed by the modern VR experience, but being wowed didn't make me a long-term user, something apparently true for a lot of people.
- frumper 4y agoI know several people that use it to save time composing letters and emails. They can dictated the important bits and let it structure the words. They love it. Its value is probably about right at $20/mo for a tool. It isn’t the greatest thing ever, but it’s useful for language composition. It’s easy to alter the response and build upon it to correct anything that needs adjusting. They don’t use it to give them the universal truth of the world.
- wpietri 4y agoI have heard this use case mentioned, and I get why lazy writers might want it. But I'm not seeing yet that it's good for readers. Can it bulk out actual points? Sure. As a reader, do I want the useful bits scattered among a bunch of fluff prose? Definitely not. And that goes double for anything that is supposed to be meaningful human connection. E.g., after my mom died, I got a number of nice notes of condolence from people. I appreciated them. If any of them had felt machine-generated, that person would be dead to me. So my general feeling about the composition case is that it is going to vastly enable the generation of documents that are, to one degree or another, bullshit. And I don't think that's a net positive for society. It's not like we had a bullshit shortage previously.
- everdrive 4y agoI think ChatGPT will get to us whether we want it or not. It has more obvious consumer applications, and I'm sure it has applications which have not been realized yet. The most obvious applications I can think of off the top of my head: - Customer reviews on sites like Amazon can be gamed with significantly better accuracy, at significantly higher numbers. Presumably there will be a period where this is successful for marketers, and then eventually people will come to wholly distrust customer reviews altogether. This will also likely be the death of the "reddit" trick, where you can just query on reddit for real, live customer experiences with products. - Significantly increased ads on anything like a social network, where a "user" might be talking about a product. - Generally cheaper ability to write advertisements in a broad category of platforms. - Sponsored misinformation (government, corporate, etc.) at scale. To be clear, I think that ChatGPT is going to be a disaster for the internet.
- causi 4y agoMine was "Oh, they're going to hold their useful products hostage until we sign up for their ChatGPT competitor?" like they did with Google+.
- ImprobableTruth 4y agoChatGPT has over 100 million users 2 months in. It's not even remotely comparable to VR or blockchain.
- dmix 4y ago100%, this is a tool that is going to be on every person's phone in the next 5yrs. Whether it's ChatGPT or via search engines or another interface. This has massive implications for the world. The recent South Park episode where the boys are using ChatGPT to write the perfect romantic replies to their girlfriends really opened my eyes to how impactful this is going to be, not just business copywriting/education essays/etc but even for social interactions like dating (Tinder is going to get interesting). It's like an autocomplete for your day-to-day life.
- snickerbockers 4y agoI think at the very least this is going to lead to some major changes in UI design, but first they need to reel it in and get it under control instead of training it off of Reddit posts and then making a surprise pikachu face when it turns out to be an arrogant cunt. But it's definitely not going to go nearly as far as people are predicting. The more i use it the more it becomes apparent to me that there's no real intelligence behind it, just large-scale pattern recognition that makes it seem real because I'm not intelligent enough to comprehend the patterns.
- dmix 4y ago> apparent to me that there's no real intelligence behind it Does it even need to be to be useful? A ChatGPT that is legitimately "intelligent" would basically be the El Dorado of tech. There's plenty of value between here and there. The big issue IMO is people are going to Chatgpt's website explicitly and having certain high expectations. Or they use it via Bing expecting it to be a search engine answer machine. Once such an interface is more directly integrated into our lives in a clean way where people understand what it is and what the limitations are it could easily be an app that basically everyone has installed, but more like a super-useful tool like Google Maps rather than replacing Google. That's still a big business and major development for the industry. And even if the consumer daily-used mobile app thing or some high-visibility Google integration turns out to be less interesting/useful than predicted, there's still a million niche business and hobby usecases.
- wpietri 4y agoI just want to take a moment to appreciate the poetry of this: > training it off of Reddit posts and then making a surprise pikachu face when it turns out to be an arrogant cunt
- nunez 4y agoMost people have heard of blockchain (through crypto), but non-techies are _actually using_ ChatGPT for daily tasks. Departments of ed and universities moved fast in integrating anti-ChatGPT into their programs. The hype is real.
- wpietri 4y agoI suppose I should have been more specific. I can believe people will be using this. I'm just not yet seeing how it will make things net better. So yes, academic cheaters will surely be trying to use it, although we'll see whether they actually succeed. But continuing with your analogy, I'll note that the people who fight financial crimes and fraud have absolutely had to integrate responses to cryptocurrencies. That didn't prove that there was lasting value to the cryptocurrency hype wave.
- simonw 4y agoI used it to release some software that used AppleScript to export data from Apple Notes, starting from zero knowledge of AppleScript two hours earlier: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript
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- wpietri 4y agoThanks for the example. I will note that you didn't use it for most of the coding. And that looking at your code, you also seem perfectly capable of figuring out the AppleScript if you had wanted to. In an amount of time that would not have wildly increased the total project time. So overall, this looks very "stone soup" to me. Did it get you over a hump? Surely. Did it actually contribute much in terms of code? Not from what I see in your script.
- pixl97 4y agoNot op, but this seems like a particularly weird take... I do support work myself, and our developers have a function that is broken and shoving too much stuff into the database. This crap is compiled into a DLL so I can't do anything about directly. Went to GPT and said "hey, I have a table named X, when Y updates write a trigger that deletes this" In a few seconds it dumps out a working trigger. Now, I've never written one of these before, dong SQL stuff isn't really my forte, but with a basic understanding of what I needed done I got working code with an explanation faster than I could parse the how to. Even if AI doesn't contribute more than that, for lots of use cases it's more than enough.
- delusional 4y agoIn general it seems like the things that have actually ended up changing the world significantly in my lifetime seemed insignificant when they were first introduced. The first time I was on the internet it seemed novel, but unimportant. When I created my first social media account, it was interesting, playful, and not going to change the world. The iPhone was a joke, who would want a phone that big? The simple fact that people are predicting that GPT will somehow change the world makes me doubt its actual value.
- wpietri 4y agoThose are your personal reactions, but those were not common reactions at the time. In the early 1990s I was telling people the Internet was amazing and showing it off to them. Social media was a huge deal starting with SixDegrees. The iPhone was incredibly hyped at the time. I think ChatGPT is worth doubting, but I think your examples need some work.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoHave you had a chance to use Bing Search with AI/ChatGPT? I have been using it for over two weeks and I am pleasantly surprised how practical and generally useful it is. I pay for a premium OpenAI ChatGPT account, but except for explaining what code in unfamiliar programming languages does (including libraries it is calling), and occasionally having it write an email for me I don't get a lot of value out of it. I do get a lot of value from the OpenAI APIs (as well as the offerings from Hugging Face).