6 ms·

I might be in the minority here, but I'm not using any AI tools so far, probably to my detriment. I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools u

by imiric 4y ago

I might be in the minority here, but I'm not using any AI tools so far, probably to my detriment. I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. There is some progress in this space, but they're not great yet, and I don't have the resources to run them. I'm hoping that the requirements will go down, or I might just host it on a cloud provider. The amount of people who don't think twice about sending these services all kinds of private data, even in the tech space, is concerning. Keyloggers like Grammarly are particularly insidious.

smrtinsert 4y ago
This is 100% why I'm watching Alpaca with more interest. I also keep thinking we're at the mainframe era of AI as a tool. For now its on some remote server, but the power will explode when its on all our devices and casually useful for everthing.
pmoriarty 4y ago
Me neither, but I think before long people like us are going to be left behind. We're like people who insist on continuing to ride horses in the age of the automobile.
- imiric 4y ago
  I think that time will come, but we'll have self-hosted options before employers start discriminating based on performance with or without AI tools. So I'm not too worried about it.
- re-thc 4y ago
  Automobile were faster or equivalent to horses (even early 1s). At the moment GPT isn't. Well I hope... I've definitely seen teams and codebases with worse output than GPT so...
  - dharmab 4y ago
    > Automobile were faster or equivalent to horses (even early 1s). The automobile was invented in 1885, but didn't replace the horse until the 1910s.
    - re-thc 4y ago
      For the same reasons or different 1s? Could be cost, accessibility and others.
      - dharmab 4y ago
        Largely because of infrastructure. You could get animal feed in places you couldn't get gasoline and oil. And horses don't need smooth roads.
- precompute 4y ago
  That won't happen, you can't expect to be "left behind" by a tool that's this easy to use. The big downsides of using a LLM will show up long-term, people will be chained to them and won't be able to do simple, trivial things on their own.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    Most people can't change their own oil, replace radiator fluid, or know the difference between a hubcap and a distributor cap. And yet life seemingly goes on...
    - precompute 4y ago
      Sure, but they can read, synthesize information, understand things without it being spoonfed to them. Or at least a certain slice of the population can. But when that slice gets a really simplified interface they're going to be chained to it hopelessly. The day when people need a LLM / ""AI"" to translate real life for them into their personal vocabulary isn't far off. It won't signal the start of some enlightened age, instead, it'll be the end of literacy. These systems feed on the user, and then it gets recursive.
thefz 4y ago
Same! Never even opened ChatGPT page nor used an AI bot.
- hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
  Good for you! If you don't want to learn new tools, you shouldn't.
  - thefz 4y ago
    Tools? Nah. I would not trust that stuff for anything, not even a recipe on how to make plain bread. A good old Google search followed by reasoning on what you have found is still the most valuable tool. Learn to sift through information, filter, ingest.
    - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
      Exactly, because Google search isn't a tool.
- mordae 4y ago
  Yeah, you really should. Said as someone who waits for the ability to self-host before doubling down on these tools.
  - thefz 4y ago
    No, I really shouldn't.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
I don't use them either. I've played around with ChatGPT and Copilot a little, and found that they often are subtly, but very confidently wrong in their output when asked to perform a programming task. Sure you could spend ages refining the prompt etc, but its going to be faster to just write the fucking code yourself in the first place most of the time. Then there's the privacy/security concerns...
- imiric 4y ago
  I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generated code is valid, and fix it, is negligible compared to the alternative of writing it all manually. Of course, I'm saying this without actually having used it for programming, so I might be way off base, but the feedback from coworkers who rely on even the now basic GitHub Copilot is that it greatly improves their productivity. I'm envious, of course, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my privacy for that.
  - fooker 4y ago
    People who are downvoting this: please set up and use GitHub copilot once, maybe for some auxiliary thing not connected to your main task. It is not just a tool for students to write assignments. In experienced hands it can easily double your productivity.
    - applesauce004 4y ago
      I agree with this statement a lot. Using Copilot saves you a lot of tedium if you are comfortable with the language already. If you are new to the language, then it might trip you up a bit (at least in its current incarnation). Here is an example where it helps. I tried to initiate a connection to a Mongodb server using Python. While i have used many databases before, I have never used Python and MongoDB together. So, i knew i would have to have some kind of MongoDB library, a connection Factory and a connection string. I could have googled all of these things. I did the following in VS Code using CoPilot. def get_db(): """Initialise a MongoDB connection to a local database""" It then automatically filled in the rest. db = getattr(g, '_database', None) if db is None: db = g._database = MongoClient('mongodb://localhost:27017/') return db Notice above, that it knew i was using a flask environment and added the line getattr. Why this is a productivity boost is that i did not have to alt-tab to a browser, search for "pythong mongodb tutorial example" and then type it out. I was able to do the whole thing from VS Code and since i use vsvim, i could do this without taking my fingers off of the keyboard. This is the next jump since autocompletion. I like it.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
> I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. Interestingly, my point to The Verge was exactly that. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 Me: > So, imagine it. You'll have a ChatGPT on your laptop -- your very own, that you can use for whatever purposes you want. Personally, I'll be hooking it up to read my emails and let me know if anything comes in that I need to pay attention to, or hook it up to the phone so that it can schedule doctor's appointments for me, or deal with AT&T billing department, or a million other things. The tech exists right now, and I'd be shocked if no one turns it into a startup idea over the next few years. (There's already a service called GhostWrite, where you can let GPT write your emails on your behalf. So having one talk on the phone on your behalf isn't far behind.) The article: > Presser imagines future versions of LLaMA could be hosted on your computer and trained on your emails; able to answer questions about your work schedules, past ideas, to-do lists, and more. This is functionality that startups and tech companies are developing, but for many AI researchers, the idea of local control is far more attractive. (For typical users, tradeoffs in cost and privacy for ease of use will likely swing things the other way.) Notice how they turned the point around from "you can host it yourself" to "but typical users probably won't want that," like this is some esoteric concern that only three people have. So like, it's not just you. If you feel like you're "in the minority" just because you want to run these models yourself, know that even as an AI researcher I, too, feel like an outsider. We're in this together. And I have no idea why things are like this. But I just wanted to at least reassure you that the frustrations exist at the researcher level too.
- imiric 4y ago
  That's an interesting interview, thanks for sharing. Though I draw the line with using these tools at helping me out with the drudgery of daily work. I don't want them to impersonate me, or write emails on my behalf. I cringe whenever Gmail suggests the next phrase it thinks I want to write. It's akin to someone trying to end your sentences for you. Stop putting words in my mouth! The recent Microsoft 365 Copilot presentation, where the host had it ghost write a speech for their kid's graduation party[1]—complete with cues about where to look(!)—is unbelievably cringey. Do these people really think AI should be assisting with such personal matters? Do they really find doing these things themselves a chore? > And I have no idea why things are like this. Oh, I think it's pretty clear. The amount of resources required to run this on personal machines is still prohibitively high. I saw in one of your posts you mentioned you use 8xA100s. That's a crazy amount of compute unreachable by most people, not to mention the disk space it requires. Once the resource requirements are lowered, and our personal devices are _much_ more powerful, then self-hosting would be feasible. Another, perhaps larger, reason, is that AI tools are still a business advantage for companies, so it's no wonder that they want to keep them to themselves. I think this will change and open source LLMs will be widespread in a few years, but proprietary services will still be more popular. And lastly, most people just don't want/like/know how to self-host _anything_. There's a technical barrier to entry, for sure, but even if that is lowered, most people are entirely willing to give up their personal data for the convenience of using a proprietary service. You can see this today with web, mail, file servers, etc.; self-hosting is still done by a very niche group of privacy-minded tech-literate people. Anyway, thanks for leading the way, and spreading the word about why self-hosting these tools is important. I hope that our vision becomes a reality for many soon. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebls5x-gb0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebls5x-gb0s
Applejinx 4y ago
Likewise, but not over trusting it with my data. I'm capable of getting this stuff running locally: in fact I got a computer specifically with this in mind. I'm not doing the kind of work that lends itself to AI tools, or at least what I've been focussing on hasn't lent itself to such tools. Not yet. The places I'd use it are rough drafting in an area where a community of basic people with more knowledge than me could get the job done. For instance, at one point I got Stable Diffusion to generate a bunch of neat album covers in various styles, like I was an art director. Also asked it to draw toys of certain kinds as starting points for game characters. I wanted some prompts. In my job I quickly get to where I have to start coming up with ideas most people don't think of. That said, I see marketing possibilities: 'this is the category in which I work, tell me what you need out of it'. Then, when you have the thing made, 'this is the thing, why do you want to buy it?' ChatGPT would be able to answer that. It's least capable of coming up with an idea outside the mainstream, but it ought to be real good at tapping the zeitgeist because that's all it is, really! It's a collective unconscious. It's ONLY a collective unconscious. Sometimes what you need to do is surprise that collective unconscious, and AI won't be any better at that than you can be. But sometimes you need to frame something to make sense to the collective unconscious, and AI does that quite easily. If you asked your average person 'what is great art?' they would very likely fall back on something like Greg Rutkowski, rather than say Basquiat. If you ask AI to MAKE art, it can mimic either, but will gravitate towards formulas that express what its collective unconscious approves of. So you get a lot of Rutkowski, and impress a lot of average people.
znpy 4y ago
Me neither. I’m waiting for the whole thing to evolve enough to have self hosted stuff to run at home.
hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
So, are you using Google search? Your argument of "I don't trust it with my data and won't until you can self host" should apply to google search as well, no? And alternative take is that for whatever reason you've decided you didn't want to use new tools, a posteriori created an argument to justify that, and haven't realized the same argument applies to your old tools.
- ornornor 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    This is not whataboutism. GP identifies an action that analogous and holds certain properties as the original action, in the process illuminating how the issues of approach A exist in approach B.
    - ornornor 4y ago
      But it is. "You're concerned about your data when using ChatGPT but you're probably using Google so your concerns are invalid"
      - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        They are not expressing that the concerns are invalid, they are expressing that one is held onto a higher standard than the other.
        ornornor 4y ago
        Agree to disagree then.
        hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
drawkbox 4y ago
I use AI/ML for ideas today. I love the simple input/output of the chat style, it will win for most things just as keyword search is the best for search output. I use it for re-writing content better, writing ideas, simplifying text (legal/verbose -- simplifying terms is a killer feature really) and context even though trust is limited of the output it is helpful. I love the art / computer vision side of AI/ML. Though I only like to do that with tools on my machine than rely on a dataset or company that is very closed, that is harder to do with AI/ML because of the storage/processing needed. I hate blackboxes and magic I don't have access to, though I am a big fan of stable unchanging input/output atomic apis, as long as I have access to the flow. The chat input/output is so simple it will win as it will never really have a breaking change. Until commercial AI/ML GPTs are more open in reality it can't be trusted to not be a trojan horse or trap. What happens when it goes away or the model changes or the terms change? As far as company/commercial, Google seems to be the most open and Google Brain really started this whole thing with transformers. Transformers, the T in GPT was invented at Google during Google Brain [1][2]. They made possible this round of progress. > Transformers were introduced in 2017 by a team at Google Brain and are increasingly the model of choice for NLP problems, replacing RNN models such as long short-term memory (LSTM). The additional training parallelization allows training on larger datasets. This led to the development of pretrained systems such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which were trained with large language datasets, such as the Wikipedia Corpus and Common Crawl, and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Google also gave the public TensorFlow [3] and DeepDream [4] that really started the intense excitement of AI/ML. I was super interested when the AI art / computer vision side started to come up. The GANs for style transfer and stable diffusion are intriguing and euphoric almost in output. In terms of GPT/chat, Bard or some iteration of it, will most likely win long term, though I wish it was just called Google Brain. Bard is a horrible name. ChatGPT basically used Google Brain created AI tech, transformers. These were used to build ClosedGPT. For that reason it is NopeGPT. ChatGPT is really just datasets, which no one knows, these could swap at any time run some misinformation then swap the next day. This is data blackboxing and gaslighting at the up most level. Not only that it is largely funded by private sources and it could be some authoritarian money. Again, blackboxes create distrust. Microsoft is trusting OpenAI and that is a risk. Maybe their goal is embrace, extend, extinguish here but it seems with Google and Apple that Microsoft may be a bit behind on this. Github Co-pilot is great though. Microsoft usually comes along later and make an accessible version. The AI/ML offerings on Azure are already solid. AI/ML is suited for large datasets so cloud companies will benefit the most, it also is very, very costly and this unfortunately keeps it in BigCo or wealthy only arenas for a while. Google Brain and other tech is way more open already than "Open"AI. ChatGPT/OpenAI just front ran the commercial side, but long term they aren't really innovating like Google is on this. They look like a leader from the marketing/pump but they are a follower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TensorFlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TensorFlow [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream
olalonde 4y ago
Genuine question: Is your concern primarily based on principles, or are you sincerely worried that OpenAI having access to your data could lead to practical, tangible negative consequences (beyond principles / psychological effects)?
- imiric 4y ago
  I listed some of my concerns here[1]. It is mostly based on principles, but also on the fact that we don't know what these models will be used for in the future. We can trust OpenAI to do the right thing today, but even if they're not involved in the data broker market, your data is only a bug, breach or subpoena away from 3rd party hands. Also, OpenAI is not the only company in this market anymore. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have competing products, and we know the privacy track record of these companies. I have an extreme take on this, since for me this applies to all "free" proprietary services, which I avoid as much as possible. The difference with AI tools is that they ask for a much deeper insight into your mind, so the profile they build can be far more accurate. This is the same reason I've never used traditional voice assistant tools either. I don't find them more helpful than doing web searches or home automation tasks manually, and I can at least be somewhat in control of my privacy. I might be deluding myself and making my life more difficult for no reason, but I can at least not give them my data voluntarily. This is why I'll always prefer self-hosting open source tools, over using a proprietary service. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304261
coffeefirst 4y ago
Same. I don't need it to write documents or emails for me. It mostly generates filler, which... nobody needs. Most of the energy I put into code is about what it should do and how to make it clear to the next person, not typing. I was able to use it once to look up a complex SQL fix that I was having a hard time Googling the syntax on, but that's it. Perhaps it would be useful if I was working in a language I'm not familiar with, BUT in that scenario I really need it to cite its sources, because that's exactly the case where I wouldn't know when it's making a mistake. There's something useful here, but it's probably more like a library help desk meets a search engine on steroids. It would be pretty cool to run an AI on my laptop that knows my own code and notes where I can ask "I did something like this three years ago, go find it."
OOPMan 4y ago
You're not alone. I can't be bothered to add an extra layer of bullshit into the already bullshit infested realm that is the internet.
namlem 4y ago
You can self-host LLAMA, though it's obviously much worse in terms of performance, it's still good enough to be useful for some things.

by imiric 4y ago

smrtinsert 4y ago

This is 100% why I'm watching Alpaca with more interest. I also keep thinking we're at the mainframe era of AI as a tool. For now its on some remote server, but the power will explode when its on all our devices and casually useful for everthing.

pmoriarty 4y ago

Me neither, but I think before long people like us are going to be left behind. We're like people who insist on continuing to ride horses in the age of the automobile.

imiric 4y ago
I think that time will come, but we'll have self-hosted options before employers start discriminating based on performance with or without AI tools. So I'm not too worried about it.
re-thc 4y ago
Automobile were faster or equivalent to horses (even early 1s). At the moment GPT isn't. Well I hope... I've definitely seen teams and codebases with worse output than GPT so...
- dharmab 4y ago
  > Automobile were faster or equivalent to horses (even early 1s). The automobile was invented in 1885, but didn't replace the horse until the 1910s.
  - re-thc 4y ago
    For the same reasons or different 1s? Could be cost, accessibility and others.
    - dharmab 4y ago
      Largely because of infrastructure. You could get animal feed in places you couldn't get gasoline and oil. And horses don't need smooth roads.
precompute 4y ago
That won't happen, you can't expect to be "left behind" by a tool that's this easy to use. The big downsides of using a LLM will show up long-term, people will be chained to them and won't be able to do simple, trivial things on their own.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  Most people can't change their own oil, replace radiator fluid, or know the difference between a hubcap and a distributor cap. And yet life seemingly goes on...
  - precompute 4y ago
    Sure, but they can read, synthesize information, understand things without it being spoonfed to them. Or at least a certain slice of the population can. But when that slice gets a really simplified interface they're going to be chained to it hopelessly. The day when people need a LLM / ""AI"" to translate real life for them into their personal vocabulary isn't far off. It won't signal the start of some enlightened age, instead, it'll be the end of literacy. These systems feed on the user, and then it gets recursive.

thefz 4y ago

Same! Never even opened ChatGPT page nor used an AI bot.

hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
Good for you! If you don't want to learn new tools, you shouldn't.
- thefz 4y ago
  Tools? Nah. I would not trust that stuff for anything, not even a recipe on how to make plain bread. A good old Google search followed by reasoning on what you have found is still the most valuable tool. Learn to sift through information, filter, ingest.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
    Exactly, because Google search isn't a tool.
mordae 4y ago
Yeah, you really should. Said as someone who waits for the ability to self-host before doubling down on these tools.
- thefz 4y ago
  No, I really shouldn't.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

I don't use them either. I've played around with ChatGPT and Copilot a little, and found that they often are subtly, but very confidently wrong in their output when asked to perform a programming task. Sure you could spend ages refining the prompt etc, but its going to be faster to just write the fucking code yourself in the first place most of the time. Then there's the privacy/security concerns...

imiric 4y ago
I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generated code is valid, and fix it, is negligible compared to the alternative of writing it all manually. Of course, I'm saying this without actually having used it for programming, so I might be way off base, but the feedback from coworkers who rely on even the now basic GitHub Copilot is that it greatly improves their productivity. I'm envious, of course, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my privacy for that.
- fooker 4y ago
  People who are downvoting this: please set up and use GitHub copilot once, maybe for some auxiliary thing not connected to your main task. It is not just a tool for students to write assignments. In experienced hands it can easily double your productivity.
  - applesauce004 4y ago
    I agree with this statement a lot. Using Copilot saves you a lot of tedium if you are comfortable with the language already. If you are new to the language, then it might trip you up a bit (at least in its current incarnation). Here is an example where it helps. I tried to initiate a connection to a Mongodb server using Python. While i have used many databases before, I have never used Python and MongoDB together. So, i knew i would have to have some kind of MongoDB library, a connection Factory and a connection string. I could have googled all of these things. I did the following in VS Code using CoPilot. def get_db(): """Initialise a MongoDB connection to a local database""" It then automatically filled in the rest. db = getattr(g, '_database', None) if db is None: db = g._database = MongoClient('mongodb://localhost:27017/') return db Notice above, that it knew i was using a flask environment and added the line getattr. Why this is a productivity boost is that i did not have to alt-tab to a browser, search for "pythong mongodb tutorial example" and then type it out. I was able to do the whole thing from VS Code and since i use vsvim, i could do this without taking my fingers off of the keyboard. This is the next jump since autocompletion. I like it.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

> I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. Interestingly, my point to The Verge was exactly that. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 Me: > So, imagine it. You'll have a ChatGPT on your laptop -- your very own, that you can use for whatever purposes you want. Personally, I'll be hooking it up to read my emails and let me know if anything comes in that I need to pay attention to, or hook it up to the phone so that it can schedule doctor's appointments for me, or deal with AT&T billing department, or a million other things. The tech exists right now, and I'd be shocked if no one turns it into a startup idea over the next few years. (There's already a service called GhostWrite, where you can let GPT write your emails on your behalf. So having one talk on the phone on your behalf isn't far behind.) The article: > Presser imagines future versions of LLaMA could be hosted on your computer and trained on your emails; able to answer questions about your work schedules, past ideas, to-do lists, and more. This is functionality that startups and tech companies are developing, but for many AI researchers, the idea of local control is far more attractive. (For typical users, tradeoffs in cost and privacy for ease of use will likely swing things the other way.) Notice how they turned the point around from "you can host it yourself" to "but typical users probably won't want that," like this is some esoteric concern that only three people have. So like, it's not just you. If you feel like you're "in the minority" just because you want to run these models yourself, know that even as an AI researcher I, too, feel like an outsider. We're in this together. And I have no idea why things are like this. But I just wanted to at least reassure you that the frustrations exist at the researcher level too.

imiric 4y ago
That's an interesting interview, thanks for sharing. Though I draw the line with using these tools at helping me out with the drudgery of daily work. I don't want them to impersonate me, or write emails on my behalf. I cringe whenever Gmail suggests the next phrase it thinks I want to write. It's akin to someone trying to end your sentences for you. Stop putting words in my mouth! The recent Microsoft 365 Copilot presentation, where the host had it ghost write a speech for their kid's graduation party[1]—complete with cues about where to look(!)—is unbelievably cringey. Do these people really think AI should be assisting with such personal matters? Do they really find doing these things themselves a chore? > And I have no idea why things are like this. Oh, I think it's pretty clear. The amount of resources required to run this on personal machines is still prohibitively high. I saw in one of your posts you mentioned you use 8xA100s. That's a crazy amount of compute unreachable by most people, not to mention the disk space it requires. Once the resource requirements are lowered, and our personal devices are _much_ more powerful, then self-hosting would be feasible. Another, perhaps larger, reason, is that AI tools are still a business advantage for companies, so it's no wonder that they want to keep them to themselves. I think this will change and open source LLMs will be widespread in a few years, but proprietary services will still be more popular. And lastly, most people just don't want/like/know how to self-host _anything_. There's a technical barrier to entry, for sure, but even if that is lowered, most people are entirely willing to give up their personal data for the convenience of using a proprietary service. You can see this today with web, mail, file servers, etc.; self-hosting is still done by a very niche group of privacy-minded tech-literate people. Anyway, thanks for leading the way, and spreading the word about why self-hosting these tools is important. I hope that our vision becomes a reality for many soon. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebls5x-gb0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebls5x-gb0s

Applejinx 4y ago

Likewise, but not over trusting it with my data. I'm capable of getting this stuff running locally: in fact I got a computer specifically with this in mind. I'm not doing the kind of work that lends itself to AI tools, or at least what I've been focussing on hasn't lent itself to such tools. Not yet. The places I'd use it are rough drafting in an area where a community of basic people with more knowledge than me could get the job done. For instance, at one point I got Stable Diffusion to generate a bunch of neat album covers in various styles, like I was an art director. Also asked it to draw toys of certain kinds as starting points for game characters. I wanted some prompts. In my job I quickly get to where I have to start coming up with ideas most people don't think of. That said, I see marketing possibilities: 'this is the category in which I work, tell me what you need out of it'. Then, when you have the thing made, 'this is the thing, why do you want to buy it?' ChatGPT would be able to answer that. It's least capable of coming up with an idea outside the mainstream, but it ought to be real good at tapping the zeitgeist because that's all it is, really! It's a collective unconscious. It's ONLY a collective unconscious. Sometimes what you need to do is surprise that collective unconscious, and AI won't be any better at that than you can be. But sometimes you need to frame something to make sense to the collective unconscious, and AI does that quite easily. If you asked your average person 'what is great art?' they would very likely fall back on something like Greg Rutkowski, rather than say Basquiat. If you ask AI to MAKE art, it can mimic either, but will gravitate towards formulas that express what its collective unconscious approves of. So you get a lot of Rutkowski, and impress a lot of average people.

znpy 4y ago

Me neither. I’m waiting for the whole thing to evolve enough to have self hosted stuff to run at home.

hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago

So, are you using Google search? Your argument of "I don't trust it with my data and won't until you can self host" should apply to google search as well, no? And alternative take is that for whatever reason you've decided you didn't want to use new tools, a posteriori created an argument to justify that, and haven't realized the same argument applies to your old tools.

ornornor 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  This is not whataboutism. GP identifies an action that analogous and holds certain properties as the original action, in the process illuminating how the issues of approach A exist in approach B.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    But it is. "You're concerned about your data when using ChatGPT but you're probably using Google so your concerns are invalid"
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      They are not expressing that the concerns are invalid, they are expressing that one is held onto a higher standard than the other.
      - ornornor 4y ago
        Agree to disagree then.
        hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago

drawkbox 4y ago

I use AI/ML for ideas today. I love the simple input/output of the chat style, it will win for most things just as keyword search is the best for search output. I use it for re-writing content better, writing ideas, simplifying text (legal/verbose -- simplifying terms is a killer feature really) and context even though trust is limited of the output it is helpful. I love the art / computer vision side of AI/ML. Though I only like to do that with tools on my machine than rely on a dataset or company that is very closed, that is harder to do with AI/ML because of the storage/processing needed. I hate blackboxes and magic I don't have access to, though I am a big fan of stable unchanging input/output atomic apis, as long as I have access to the flow. The chat input/output is so simple it will win as it will never really have a breaking change. Until commercial AI/ML GPTs are more open in reality it can't be trusted to not be a trojan horse or trap. What happens when it goes away or the model changes or the terms change? As far as company/commercial, Google seems to be the most open and Google Brain really started this whole thing with transformers. Transformers, the T in GPT was invented at Google during Google Brain [1][2]. They made possible this round of progress. > Transformers were introduced in 2017 by a team at Google Brain and are increasingly the model of choice for NLP problems, replacing RNN models such as long short-term memory (LSTM). The additional training parallelization allows training on larger datasets. This led to the development of pretrained systems such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which were trained with large language datasets, such as the Wikipedia Corpus and Common Crawl, and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Google also gave the public TensorFlow [3] and DeepDream [4] that really started the intense excitement of AI/ML. I was super interested when the AI art / computer vision side started to come up. The GANs for style transfer and stable diffusion are intriguing and euphoric almost in output. In terms of GPT/chat, Bard or some iteration of it, will most likely win long term, though I wish it was just called Google Brain. Bard is a horrible name. ChatGPT basically used Google Brain created AI tech, transformers. These were used to build ClosedGPT. For that reason it is NopeGPT. ChatGPT is really just datasets, which no one knows, these could swap at any time run some misinformation then swap the next day. This is data blackboxing and gaslighting at the up most level. Not only that it is largely funded by private sources and it could be some authoritarian money. Again, blackboxes create distrust. Microsoft is trusting OpenAI and that is a risk. Maybe their goal is embrace, extend, extinguish here but it seems with Google and Apple that Microsoft may be a bit behind on this. Github Co-pilot is great though. Microsoft usually comes along later and make an accessible version. The AI/ML offerings on Azure are already solid. AI/ML is suited for large datasets so cloud companies will benefit the most, it also is very, very costly and this unfortunately keeps it in BigCo or wealthy only arenas for a while. Google Brain and other tech is way more open already than "Open"AI. ChatGPT/OpenAI just front ran the commercial side, but long term they aren't really innovating like Google is on this. They look like a leader from the marketing/pump but they are a follower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TensorFlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TensorFlow [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream

olalonde 4y ago

Genuine question: Is your concern primarily based on principles, or are you sincerely worried that OpenAI having access to your data could lead to practical, tangible negative consequences (beyond principles / psychological effects)?

imiric 4y ago
I listed some of my concerns here[1]. It is mostly based on principles, but also on the fact that we don't know what these models will be used for in the future. We can trust OpenAI to do the right thing today, but even if they're not involved in the data broker market, your data is only a bug, breach or subpoena away from 3rd party hands. Also, OpenAI is not the only company in this market anymore. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have competing products, and we know the privacy track record of these companies. I have an extreme take on this, since for me this applies to all "free" proprietary services, which I avoid as much as possible. The difference with AI tools is that they ask for a much deeper insight into your mind, so the profile they build can be far more accurate. This is the same reason I've never used traditional voice assistant tools either. I don't find them more helpful than doing web searches or home automation tasks manually, and I can at least be somewhat in control of my privacy. I might be deluding myself and making my life more difficult for no reason, but I can at least not give them my data voluntarily. This is why I'll always prefer self-hosting open source tools, over using a proprietary service. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304261

coffeefirst 4y ago

Same. I don't need it to write documents or emails for me. It mostly generates filler, which... nobody needs. Most of the energy I put into code is about what it should do and how to make it clear to the next person, not typing. I was able to use it once to look up a complex SQL fix that I was having a hard time Googling the syntax on, but that's it. Perhaps it would be useful if I was working in a language I'm not familiar with, BUT in that scenario I really need it to cite its sources, because that's exactly the case where I wouldn't know when it's making a mistake. There's something useful here, but it's probably more like a library help desk meets a search engine on steroids. It would be pretty cool to run an AI on my laptop that knows my own code and notes where I can ask "I did something like this three years ago, go find it."

OOPMan 4y ago

You're not alone. I can't be bothered to add an extra layer of bullshit into the already bullshit infested realm that is the internet.

namlem 4y ago

You can self-host LLAMA, though it's obviously much worse in terms of performance, it's still good enough to be useful for some things.