36 ms·

Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?

320 points by EMM_386 4y ago

daneel_w 4y ago
The bigger question is: what can you train it to do in 30 minutes?
netnomad8 4y ago
AI can filter through thousands of Legal case files and court documents to pinpoint exactly what cases are relevant to a current case that a lawyer may be advising on! It took me exactly 30 minutes to go through 428 case files... :)
- bottled_poe 4y ago
  How much better is this than a keyword search across the documents?
  - WoodenChair 4y ago
    And when it’s a probabilistic LLM instead of a keyword search, how do you know you didn’t miss anything?
    - wickoff 4y ago
      Humans miss things all the time. It's okay to make mistakes.
      - WoodenChair 4y ago
        It’s not replacing a human, it’s replacing a keyword search.
    - _puk 4y ago
      As opposed to manually trawling through thousands of documents, based on a keyword that may, or may not, appear in the context of the case file? It's a huge boon, but nothing is perfect. If it's that important that absolutely nothing is missed, maybe try multiple approaches concurrently. Take this as a value add, not a replacement.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      If you don't already grok all the legal jargon, the LLM is probably better than a keyword search. I'm not a lawyer, so when I search British copyright law, I wonder why those forms of words don't result in the staff of search engines and social media sites being arrested and imprisoned: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-property-offences/intellectual-property-offences https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-prop... Although, probably best to ask a lawyer for legal advice even if they end up using GPT-n themselves; they've probably got public liability insurance if they get something wrong.
  - dist-epoch 4y ago
    I've seen people use "code words" exactly to avoid them being find by regulatory keyword searches. AI can figure out from context, a keyword search will miss it. And no, you don't know the "code words".
  - MagicMoonlight 4y ago
    Keyword search doesn’t understand the context of what you’re asking for.
- Jabbles 4y ago
  Can it? Or are you just imagining that it might be able to one day?
- SCdF 4y ago
  Did it? How do you know it didn't confidently miss important documents? My experience so far has just been asking chatgpt questions and then researching it myself to confirm what it says, so maybe I'm missing something. But, it has been confidently wrong on important details a large enough percentage (right now) to make it absolutely not a fire and forget tool. The worst part is the confidence: it's like having a coworker that just straight up lies to your face randomly. Even if it's only 5% of the time you basically can't trust anything they say, and so you need to double check all of it. This doesn't make it useless, but it means it lends itself to "hard to do but easy to verify" tasks. Which afaict your example is not: you can verify the documents it picked out are relevant, but not that the documents that it didn't, weren't.
  - asah 4y ago
    coworkers give me wrong answers a lot more than 5% of the time.
    - hiq 4y ago
      On the other hand I can usually come up with my own estimate of how trustworthy the answer is when a human gave it to me, e.g. thanks to: * their reputation with respect to the question domain (if I ask a basic C++ question to a C++ expert I'll trust them) * their own communicated confidence and how good they are at seeing their own shortcomings (if they say "but don't quote me on that, better ask this other person who knows more" it's fine) 5% of bad answers doesn't matter if 99% of these times I knew I should look further. ChatGPT and others are missing this confidence indicator, and they seem to answer just as confidently no matter what. To be clear I don't see a fundamental reason why LLMs couldn't compute some measure of confidence (which will itself be wrong from time to time but with less impact) so I expect this to be solved eventually.
      - famouswaffles 4y ago
        Base gpt-4 already did this.(confidence about something directly correlated with ability to solve problem/answer questions correctly) You can read the technical paper. But the hammer of alignment(RLHF) took it away.
- copperx 4y ago
  How in the world did you feed GPT those 428 case files? There's nothing in the API to make it ingest that much info.
  - fritzo 4y ago
    I'm guessing the author is computing embeddings https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/embeddings https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/embeddings
archgrove 4y ago
I'm not an AI skeptic (this stuff will change the world), but I'm not as impressed as the author. The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. The LLM isn't demonstrating much more than "Generic templating ability over a large range of templates" in this instance. Whilst that's probably 50% of the jobs in the world, such jobs were already at risk of someone searching for "Basic X template" and expanding the placeholders themselves. I think I could do a similar job in 30 minutes by doing exactly that. LLM's main wins seem to be providing a single unified entry point to all the templates in the universe. It's a "Universal UI", rather than a "Content creator". I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control. The most interesting immediate thing here is the image generation - that's pretty good, and a big saving over scraping through stock images. I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down.
- rybosworld 4y ago
  "I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down" I'm surprised the copyright issues aren't given more attention. It's technically not legal (in the US) to modify copyrighted images without the authors permission. I don't see how it's possible that systems like DALL-E haven't already done that. There's a near 0% chance that they aren't trained on at least one copyrighted image.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Getty's case is active in the court system in multiple jurisdictions, until we get there outcome of that weren't not going to have a resolution of this. Unless countries legislate/decide to allow training on publicly accessible documents, eg as Fair Use/Fair Dealing or whatever. In short, the copyright issues appear to be given a lot of attention? Legal precedent takes time.
arbol 4y ago
It feels like there's going to be a whole lot more marketing content that's not getting read.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  yeah, the end result is boring. I'd rather watch a 2 minute Loom of someone using the product, which would have taken them less time then the AI approach.
  - refactor_master 4y ago
    Perhaps this will only further devalue and misalign the already in-shambles communication between producer and consumer. For example, I’d trust 1 video review over 1000 text reviews, and even then, a family member’s opinion over 1000 video reviews. The number of “agendas” out there is staggering, and it feels naive to assume that most of them would align with mine.
keyle 4y ago
Well there is going to be a lot of geocities style websites coming back as the GPT clients can certainly output valid HTML, without any acquired taste when it comes to web design. Regardless of the role... GPT as a helping tool, absolutely! But as a replacement for the role... You're setting yourself as a joke.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  It's going to raise the bar for people on a lot of fronts. Also, people will get bored with bland, boring fluff pretty quickly. That's always the challenge for marketing people: how do you stand out from the crowd? The generated movie is actually pretty bland and boring. It's mainly impressive because it almost but not quite looks realistic. It's basically a talking head moving its head between 5 or so positions with an expression less bland face narrating some generic marketing pitch. It's not bad. But it's also not very good. It's marketing box ticking "we got to have the talking head thing on the website somewhere" but it's not going to achieve any miracles in terms of engagement. That's the problem with this stuff: it's formulaic, unimaginative, etc. Like a lot of real world marketing. If you look at what companies actually do, it's mostly pretty low quality and bad right now. For every well run marketing campaign there are hundreds of really poorly thought out and cringe worthy campaigns. Trying to imitate what the good ones do. So, AI is going to run circles around that crowd. Just like any competent marketing person would. Except an AI will do it a lot cheaper. This is going to decimate the market for incompetent charlatans and create a new market for effective directors that can work the tools more effectively and cheaply. That kind of is the point. These tools are really effective in the hands of a skilled professional that knows what to ask for and has a notion of what good and bad look like. It's an iterative process of asking and refining and directing that allows them to take a lot of short cuts. Imagine Steven Spielberg directing a movie. But without the actors, camera people, post production, makeup, lights, CGI, and all the rest. That kind of is what this could be. How would somebody like that use AI to produce a movie. Well, he'd be directing and refining and iterating and be getting results a lot quicker than is possible now. Maybe he'd raise the ambition level a little and ask for things that are really hard right now. But in the end they'd produce a movie that is hopefully very entertaining and interesting to watch. Now imagine a young inexperienced director with some vague ambition to be a better director. Would that person be able to produce something with the tools. Sure. And they'd learn a lot in the process. As you iterate, you better yourself. It's not a one way street. The more you engage with some activity, they better you get at it. We'll have a lot of very skilled directors in a few years. And they won't just be directing movies. And now imagine a very cynical third rate director that produces straight to dvd content for the masses. No budget, hilariously bad scripts, actors that don't give a shit and can't act, etc. That guy is going to produce some amazing results. But there will be so much of it that it won't have any value.
scandox 4y ago
When I was young I read a load of books and wrote a bunch of waffle about them (essays). The waffle wasn't much use to anyone except myself because the process of producing the waffle made me do some basic thinking. So much human activity is about structuring our own thoughts so we can ascend to a higher level of activity and insight. I mean everyone knows marketing plans are BS but they're part of a process of group thought. I am genuinely amazed at some of the chats I've had with AI but I hope the outcome will simply be a clarification of what we are all actually doing.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Yes, we risk AI eating the low hanging fruit, meaning humans can't grow the skills to pick off the much harder to reach fruit. This could stilt human growth, whilst causing a large shift of wealth to those with the resources to train large ML-based systems. If we don't share the gains, then overall I see this as possibly being a loss for society.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  A terse bullet list suffices to guide thought. A 5000 word essay is busy work.
rybosworld 4y ago
"Historically, these sorts of disruptions lead to short-term issues, and long-term employment growth" I think the pace of AI advances may turn these disruptions into long-term issues and not lead to employment growth. Yes, ChatGPT can be a multiplier on human productivity. But that's assuming you can learn how to use it correctly. The author here seems to know how to scale the complexity of the prompts in such a way that they get meaningful output (a complete website). That sort of prompting is a skillset in itself. The problem as I see it is: how long is that skillset relevant before an even more advanced LLM comes along, forcing you to re-learn how to interact with it. Now consider that the next advancement need not come from an LLM, but some entirely different system that doesn't work via prompts. That skilled prompter needs a new skillset. Technological innovations of the past have always come slowly enough that people could learn and master them before something new came along. It seems like things are moving so quickly in the AI space that may no longer be true. With all that said, an example that gives me hope is chess. The rise of chess AI's has not killed chess in any sense. The players of the last few years are actually much stronger than pre-AI. Can the best players in the world beat Stockfish or Alpha-Go? Not even close. And so far that hasn't mattered. People still prefer to watch two human players.
- cyclotron3k 4y ago
  I was thinking about the chess analogy too, and I don't think it holds. Chess is a pastime; people do it for fun. Once AI has consumed all our jobs, sure, you can manually tap out some code for fun, but no one is going to pay you for that.
- roca 4y ago
  It's a very important point that the insanely rapid pace of change is itself a huge problem. We're still in the same (northern hemisphere) school year in which ChatGPT was released; teachers and students just started trying to understand its impact; and the underlying model has already been replaced with something much more powerful --- TWICE --- GPT4 and "tool-using" mode.
  - mprovost 4y ago
    We’re just starting the first “performance cycle” at work since ChatGPT came out and I strongly suspect next year’s won’t be based on producing so many written documents (self reflection, peer feedback, etc).
nbzso 4y ago
So, congrats. You "created" something without any aesthetic or marketing value. Yes, LLM's help, but the idea that time to market in competitive reality will give the real value is laughable. And no, when the prompt designer/engineer has no taste or more than average skill, the results will not be mind-bending or guaranteed hit. Force multiplier is not equal to quality multiplier, and the availability of the tools will generate mediocre junk with the speed of the light. Soon we will have to add to our information journeys another blocker for the A.I. generated marketing content.
theden 4y ago
The completed website looks really bad and generic though, I'd argue even with the time saved it's a net loss. Since the generated images and video look uncanny/fake, I'd assume it's a scam website. Not gonna lie, it's kinda fatiguing seeing people hype lazily generated AI content as really good, when it's more often than not mediocre. I don't know if it's because people are intentionally hyping their results, or if they have poor taste/standards. I think the real lesson here is less is more, and I'm afraid with generative AI there's gonna be so much churn of content, we'll all become fatigued.
- greesil 4y ago
  Mediocre was probably better than the the guy's best effort in a domain he didn't understand given a couple of days. That's a net productivity boost for him.
  - theden 4y ago
    I personally wouldn't want to ship mediocre content that looks like that, so for me all he did was waste 30 minutes prompt generating marketing BS and weird looking images. Don't get me wrong, I think AI can definitely be a productivity and inspiration boost in the right hands, but it's going to be being abused so much, I don't know if in the future I'll be able to read a long paragraph on my screen without wondering if it was written by a human (or even read by one prior)
    - greesil 4y ago
      As per Nilay Patel's comments about SEO spam hustlers, the web is going to become a vast(er) ocean of shit. https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/19063562/ai-text-generation-spam-marketing-seo-fractl-grover-google https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/19063562/ai-text-generatio... https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562966/cnet-ai-written-stories-red-ventures-seo-marketing https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562966/cnet-ai-written-...
    - e12e 4y ago
      Would you be better of working off of only the prompts, or the ai poc - if op sent it to you and asked you to improve it for ~ 5 000 or something?
rapiz 4y ago
I found the main content generated, which are the campiagns, plain and too generic to be useful. And I doubt the effort needed to pull out a better result, even with better models. The article does provide some inspiration on what will the AI-enhanced workflow look like, but also shows the weakness. All results look like pretty generic and skeleton and further polishing from pros is needed. IMO, the future will more be like everyone do their job better with the help of AI, instead of that everyone do all the work with AI and no one is really needed.
maxdoop 4y ago
For a supposed smart group of individuals who are good at leaning into the latest innovations, I feel most HN comments as of late are completely , ignorantly dismissive of LLMs simply because LLMs aren’t “amazingly perfect” in their current state . Yet… we are are talking about a tool that came out literally FOUR MONTHS AGO. And the huge advancement on that came out TWO WEEKS AGO. Yet everyone here continues to proclaim, “it’s not even that good , honestly.” As though no progress will ever be made from this current moment in time. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
- rco8786 4y ago
  People are generally very resistant to change. Our minds are literally programmed against it...acknowledging an enormous change happening very quickly triggers all sorts of yucky things in our lizard brains. So we try and rationalize things and fid some way of explaining to ourselves that "no, this isn't actually a big change, my model of the world is still rock solid" as a pure survival mechanism.
  - martindbp 4y ago
    I would have thought filtering people on "being in tech" would have weeded out the people resistant to change, so I'm surprised by the negativity on anything innovative here, whether it's EVs, self driving cars, AI, crypto (although I can forgive this one) or VR.
    - rco8786 4y ago
      People in tech are still just people.
      - 93po 4y ago
        100000% this. HN attracts some smart people but they're still often very flawed people. Myself included.
- ldoughty 4y ago
  I asked Google Bard to tell me a short story about a computer hacker. Here was the result, completely unedited... Blew me away: Sure, here is a short story about a computer hacker: Once upon a time, there was a young hacker named Kevin who loved to explore the world of computers. He was always curious about how things worked, and he loved to find new ways to break into systems. One day, Kevin was exploring a new website when he came across a hidden file. The file contained a list of passwords, and Kevin was curious to see what they were for. He tried a few of the passwords, and to his surprise, they all worked! Kevin had just hacked into a major company's computer system. Kevin was excited about his discovery, but he also knew that he had done something wrong. He had hacked into a system without permission, and he could get in a lot of trouble. But Kevin couldn't help himself. He was too curious about what he could find in the system. He started exploring the files, and he quickly found out that the company was up to some shady business. They were involved in illegal activities, and Kevin knew that he had to do something to stop them. Kevin decided to hack into the company's website and post a warning to their customers. He wanted to let them know that the company was not trustworthy, and that they should avoid doing business with them. Kevin knew that his actions would get him in trouble, but he didn't care. He was doing what he thought was right, and he was willing to face the consequences. The company was furious when they found out what Kevin had done. They threatened to sue him, and they even tried to have him arrested. But Kevin was not afraid. He knew that he had done the right thing, and he was willing to fight for what he believed in. In the end, Kevin was able to expose the company's illegal activities, and he helped to protect the company's customers. He also learned a valuable lesson about the importance of doing what is right, even when it is difficult.
satisfice 4y ago
Mediocrity has never been so easy to achieve!
truthsayer123 4y ago
More like super spam generator. Humans are good at coming with good explanations. There is nothing super human about generating a lot of crap marketing noise in 30 minutes.
- replwoacause 4y ago
  Yep, dead on.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Finally the war has been won. This wunderwaffe will destroy the front-end developers once and for all. “ChatGPT, please update the website to the latest meme framework” And with that they were all obsolete
- 0xb0565e487 4y ago
  I’m not worried. There’s much more to the job than pedantic code reorganizing. As a matter of fact, it seems to be good at what I’d like not to do as a frontend dev.
wokwokwok 4y ago
> I gave myself 30 minutes, and tried to accomplish as much as I could during that time… Have you watched nerdforge? “I spent 1, 10 and 100 hours on X…” Excellent content. High rated. Highly successful. Here’s the thing: yes. Spending 40 seconds clicking on the “generate image” button can indeed produce some random crap. …but, I’ve already seen that. I’ve done it. Here’s a pro tip: any content that takes you 30 minutes to do is something almost no one is interested in. It’s too trivial. So, here my challenge: ok, now go and spend 10 and 100 hours to see how far you can actually take it if you devote real effort to using these tools to actually do something. It might get a few clicks today, but the barrier to spending 30 minutes to generate this kind of stuff has become so low that it’s basically worthless. We get it. You can click on the generate content button. Does it scale? Can it generate prompts for itself when you don’t have time to do it yourself? Can you refine the content so it’s not so bland and generic? …or is that a problem for GPT5?
belter 4y ago
Particularly on the issue of coding with the help of these models, I am specially concerned with Kernighan's law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” After seeing Developers gainfully employed, justifying their horrible SQL as, "I dont know the ORM wrote it". Others mentioning they never heard about transaction isolation levels, the old mantra of "NodeJS never blocks" so your concurrency issues are gone. Even recently and incredibly, having to argue with somebody about a Cloud Architecture design where as surprisingly as it might seem, the argument from the other side at a moment was, "but ChatGPT says..."...Taking all this into account I strongly recommend you keep brushing your skills. I predict Consultants and Developers, able to fix the bugs in these ChatGPT Driven Development Applications, will be rewarded with hourly rates that will make FAANG salaries look like Monopoly money...
- serpix 4y ago
  Experience in software projects plus AI gives a clever consultant a force multiplier that is unheard of. A person who knows how things are made but lacks time can leverage AI to boost their productivity by several multiples. What a time to be alive. It feels like I have been given a new career overnight.
clocker 4y ago
Recently I used chatGPT to “improve” the introduction of my game http://www.squashbyte.com http://www.squashbyte.com. I wrote the initial introduction and asked chatgpt to make it better. I can speak good English but I am not a native English speaker so I was impressed by the outcome. Also I was mind blown to see how chatGPT answered some questions I asked after feeding the initial text to it. But now I think should I keep using chatgpt to do things like this? Will it deteriorate my writing or thinking ability if I keep outsourcing it to AI?
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Seems like the reliability of the output is a big factor. If it is highly reliable then you can learn from the changes and so on.
madsbuch 4y ago
oh the content arms race is tightening! I have seen myself visiting much fewer websites after I incorporated chatgpt in my workflows. why would I visit some random dev blog that promises me an answer, when I don't need to? and now I don't have to be annoyed by that pesky popup asking me to suvscribe. it will be the same with marketing. it might be easier to create the content, but way fewer people will even see it. it is gong to be interesting to see if there will be an implosion of more a fizz out. it is also going to be interesting to see how marketers will target LLMs.
hohg 4y ago
How do you send the emails to willing recipients? I doubt AI can find these recipients and that's the most critical element.
thom 4y ago
Everyone seems to think their particular niche is going to be the last to be commoditised. Yes, you've saved some time marketing your product. But your product is just going to get replaced by equally lazy people who type "write a business simulation to teach my students leadership" into ChatGPT. And then those people are going to get replaced by students not going to business school and just asking ChatGPT for a business curriculum directly. Except those people aren't going to get jobs because all the actual businesses are using ChatGPT instead of employees. Except those businesses' products also just got commoditised so they can't pay their ChatGPT bill. ChatGPT is not a tool with which you can build a bigger moat. Huge amounts of money are going to be made in the short term, but in the long term, I think your work being amenable to aid or replacement by LLMs is an indication you should be looking for higher ground, even if it's just to survive some plausible AI Winter.
- 13years 4y ago
  I agree, most are missing this aspect. If AI progresses as the proponents assume, continually exponential, then this is different than all prior disruptions. It is accelerating technological evolution. Meaning there is no island of stability on the other side. There is no adaption to change and then we move along for a while. It is continuous. What makes this disruption different than all others is AI is not a narrow disruption. It is a disruption for everything because at its core it is a machine for the replication of skill and technology. A concept that has never existed prior with any other technological disruption. I've described this somewhat as the shrinking innovation, disruption and adaption cycles that leave us completely unable to keep up. "Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do." https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
- voiper1 4y ago
  If you use ChatGPT as prescriptive, that it tells you what to do, then you're only as good as what you put in and how good ChatGPT is. But if you use it as a coach/consultant/pair-programmer/R&D exploration/ brainstorming session, then you have instant access to an "expert" in any field. That's something that can supercharge the productive output of any worker. And/or lead to dismissal of most of the team...
lp4vn 4y ago
Don't get me wrong, LLMs are pretty breathtaking. In my opinion, just the way that they parse natural language, "understand" it and can generate a meaningful response is absolutely impressive and would be considered out of reach just some years ago. But I feel underwhelmed everytime I see people coming up with examples about how LLMs are going to revolutionize the job market. Prototypes for sites are something very old, it's not that you have not been able to create a good looking mock site in record time in the last 10 years. The rest of the article is also underwhelming, AI for generating content for a marketing strategy is not impressing honestly, and I guess that similar tools already existed.
nemo44x 4y ago
Of course these aren’t production worthy artifacts. But what if the marketing team sent in their context and the personalized context of the individual they are targeting. Multiplied by millions of people. Custom, on-brand marketing. This is what LLMs are actually good at.
deleted 4y ago
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jschveibinz 4y ago
The current state of AI is amazing and can be a time saver, no doubt. With respect to the ongoing argument about the social and economic disruption of this “tool,” we need to remember this: Over short periods of time, we “feel” like the slope of change is relatively flat. But it’s not. The slope of change is getting steeper and steeper ever day. Technology change and capability is exponential. I have seen a crazy amount of change in my lifetime, and it’s accelerating.
sandworm101 4y ago
A task for me on monday: justify why you just requested 3x laptops speced for 32gb ram. AI answer: More ram is better. Computer go faster with bigger files and less swap. Business needs demand. (Useless answer) What the boss wants: I assess that software X requires 32gb to perform the task we need. We tried with 8, hard fail. We tried with 16 and it crashed every 30min. And we havent asked for new laptops in years so you owe us.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  This might be an issue with your prompt. Here's what I get for "Our software is crashing constantly when run on laptops with 8GB ram and every 30 minutes when run on laptops with 16Gb ram. Further, our laptops are multiple years old and require frequent maintenance. Write a brief email to my boss asking for approval to purchase 3 laptops with 32GB ram." It's a bit more formal-ish than I'd prefer but with a little tweaking it'd probably get the job done. "Dear [Boss's name], I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to request your approval for the purchase of 3 laptops with 32GB RAM. As you are aware, we have been experiencing frequent software crashes, particularly on laptops with 8GB of RAM, and even on those with 16GB of RAM. This is affecting our productivity and causing delays in our work. Additionally, our current laptops are several years old and require frequent maintenance. To address these issues and ensure that we can work efficiently and effectively, I believe it is essential that we invest in new laptops with increased RAM capacity. With 32GB of RAM, we will be able to run our software smoothly and reduce the frequency of crashes. I have researched several options and identified three laptops that meet our requirements and are within our budget. I have attached the details and prices of each laptop for your review. I would appreciate your prompt approval for this purchase so that we can continue to work without interruptions and complete our projects within the given timeline. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Best regards, [Your Name]"
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    That answer would not fly in our organization (military). It reads like someone who isn't part of our organization, making little assumptions about our organizational structure. For instance, we would never "invest". We "acquire" equipment to meet needs. Likewise, nobody would ever talk of something impacting work. Everything is written in terms of operational requirements and missions. Even "approval" isn't appropriate. My boss will "support" my request that will go to another part of the organization for assessment and procurement. If I used language from an AI that did not understand our specific organizational mannerisms, it would be flagged as so odd that my boss would probably drop by my office for an explanation. This is typical of generalize AI. Everything it writes sounds like it comes from a total stranger. It has no internal voice, no distinct style. It sounds like it comes from a child writing an essay ... which is basically what it is.
Damogran6 4y ago
Things will improve, to be sure, and the volume of word vomit is impressive, but much like when laser printers democratized publishing, you're going to initially end up with memos using 24 (all of the available) fonts. I turn on a 'certain kind' of Movie or TV show and it becomes apparent that the scriptwriter really isn't an FBI agent, or Doctor or IT person. They have a feature length story, with amazing CGI, lighting, 4k video and Dolby...but the writing isn't believable and the end product is shit. I'm wondering if this will allow more people do more things, but the things that are turned out will look average, and the people that dedicate the time learning and skill to %product% will still turn out things that stand out. I have a similar old man gripe about CGI and music...the end result is that many more people have the ability to do the thing, and the end result is that the thing becomes commonplace and loses some of the wonder as a result. You have more and more and more people turning out music, and as a result, more and more people can't make a living making music.
dragontamer 4y ago
> (Prompt#2) Pretend you are marketing genius. We are going to launch the Saturn Parable. You should give me a document that oulines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game. Cool, so lets see what Bing spits out. > I’m sorry but I’m not able to create a document that outlines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game. However, I can suggest some steps that you can follow to create an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game. > snip --------- What the hell is up with this? I copy/paste the prompts exactly as outlined in this blogpost, and I get completely different results. I know I'm not the only one having this issue. But it makes me extremely distrustful of these blog posts. If I can't replicate their prompts or how they work, how the hell am I supposed to believe them? And yes, I did start with: "Look up the business simulation market. Look up Wharton Interactive's Saturn Parable" as prompt#1, so that Bing/ChatGPT already had Saturn Parable "in its memory". ------- EDIT: I tried these two prompts in "Creative Bing Chat mode". I got the first sentence out of Bing Chat, but the rest of it failed. There must have been a timeout of some kind, because Bing Chat just hangs and fails.
- andyp-kw 4y ago
  I wonder if some kind of Blockchain proof of work could be used to verify chat results in the future. Especially if the models grow quicker with realtime data.
- Kiro 4y ago
  1000 people using the same prompt will get 1000 different results. LLMs are completely non-deterministic.
  - richk449 4y ago
    Why are they non deterministic? Is randomness intentionally injected? Or intrinsic to the approach?
    - williamstein 4y ago
      Check out the temperature docs in the API reference manual: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/create#completions/create-temperature https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/c...
cowllin 4y ago
Ethan has been an excellent source for keeping up with the advances in AI on his twitter account, through the lens of both academia (he's a professor) and "industry" (he professors in an MBA program). I recommend him as a follow: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1636454151272931337 https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1636454151272931337
easeout 4y ago
Reading this I'm drawn to the idea that, if LLMs are so attractive to us as a productivity boost, and if they do that by synthesizing gobs of similar human output, then we have been asking humans too much for the same output as one another and we're still doing it. Finally, a tool: I no longer have to be the automaton. That's a blessing and an indictment. I don't know if I'll feel the same way tomorrow; just thought it was a perspective worth sharing.
darepublic 4y ago
This is a bunch of fluff. I am sold on the groundbreaking possibilities of AI but not impressed by this.
coldtea 4y ago
The problem is that, business wise, this doesn't increase your ability to do stuff. Superficially it does that, but that would be the case edge-wise if ChatGPT was just available to you. You have no business advantage because of it over anyone else using it. What it does do, is devalue your skills (if you had the skills before to manually create all that material), and devalue the final product. Once, having such online marketing material used to be a great asset, even if it was crudely made by today's standards (think 1996). Later, as there were all kinds of services to help create one (with assets, etc.), more people that could do it for cheaper, template-based website builders and so on, it was far less valuable. Now, with ChatGPT churning good-enough material in 30 minutes, it would be as valuable as spam. In fact, there will be (already is) an entirely huge industry of automated AI spam content, including fake companies with marketing material. Not the hand/template build of today, where someone has made 30-50 slightly different BS companies to e.g. scam or drop-ship. But where every scam artist can have 1000s of them within an hour, and get them be topical on the latest products and trends, complete with "chat support" and everything. And of course any person who has some BS idea, but couldn't even use Wix to make a website before, even less so to write copy for it, now will have one (they'd probably wont be able to use ChatGPT directly, but they'd be able to use a turnkey "make me a website" GPT-powered version of something like Wix. The bussiness advantage of using GPT to boost your productivity is like getting rich by the UN giving everybody on earth 100 billion dollars!
SergeAx 4y ago
> It then proceeded to create the four emails. without me doing anything. I wonder how quickly we gonna put any ML-generated email directly to spam folder? I personally would like to have at least a marking of such content in my inbox.
tsurba 4y ago
Today I spent 2 hours cursing at GPT-4 for not being able to fix a stupid indexing mistake in the code it wrote. Just like code before. It’s helpful and I wouldn’t have the energy to work on this hobby project without GPT. But for now at least, at some point I have to understand every line of non-trivial code eventually.

320 points by EMM_386 4y ago

The bigger question is: what can you train it to do in 30 minutes?

AI can filter through thousands of Legal case files and court documents to pinpoint exactly what cases are relevant to a current case that a lawyer may be advising on! It took me exactly 30 minutes to go through 428 case files... :)

bottled_poe 4y ago
How much better is this than a keyword search across the documents?
- WoodenChair 4y ago
  And when it’s a probabilistic LLM instead of a keyword search, how do you know you didn’t miss anything?
  - wickoff 4y ago
    Humans miss things all the time. It's okay to make mistakes.
    - WoodenChair 4y ago
      It’s not replacing a human, it’s replacing a keyword search.
  - _puk 4y ago
    As opposed to manually trawling through thousands of documents, based on a keyword that may, or may not, appear in the context of the case file? It's a huge boon, but nothing is perfect. If it's that important that absolutely nothing is missed, maybe try multiple approaches concurrently. Take this as a value add, not a replacement.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    If you don't already grok all the legal jargon, the LLM is probably better than a keyword search. I'm not a lawyer, so when I search British copyright law, I wonder why those forms of words don't result in the staff of search engines and social media sites being arrested and imprisoned: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-property-offences/intellectual-property-offences https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-prop... Although, probably best to ask a lawyer for legal advice even if they end up using GPT-n themselves; they've probably got public liability insurance if they get something wrong.
- dist-epoch 4y ago
  I've seen people use "code words" exactly to avoid them being find by regulatory keyword searches. AI can figure out from context, a keyword search will miss it. And no, you don't know the "code words".
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  Keyword search doesn’t understand the context of what you’re asking for.
Jabbles 4y ago
Can it? Or are you just imagining that it might be able to one day?
SCdF 4y ago
Did it? How do you know it didn't confidently miss important documents? My experience so far has just been asking chatgpt questions and then researching it myself to confirm what it says, so maybe I'm missing something. But, it has been confidently wrong on important details a large enough percentage (right now) to make it absolutely not a fire and forget tool. The worst part is the confidence: it's like having a coworker that just straight up lies to your face randomly. Even if it's only 5% of the time you basically can't trust anything they say, and so you need to double check all of it. This doesn't make it useless, but it means it lends itself to "hard to do but easy to verify" tasks. Which afaict your example is not: you can verify the documents it picked out are relevant, but not that the documents that it didn't, weren't.
- asah 4y ago
  coworkers give me wrong answers a lot more than 5% of the time.
  - hiq 4y ago
    On the other hand I can usually come up with my own estimate of how trustworthy the answer is when a human gave it to me, e.g. thanks to: * their reputation with respect to the question domain (if I ask a basic C++ question to a C++ expert I'll trust them) * their own communicated confidence and how good they are at seeing their own shortcomings (if they say "but don't quote me on that, better ask this other person who knows more" it's fine) 5% of bad answers doesn't matter if 99% of these times I knew I should look further. ChatGPT and others are missing this confidence indicator, and they seem to answer just as confidently no matter what. To be clear I don't see a fundamental reason why LLMs couldn't compute some measure of confidence (which will itself be wrong from time to time but with less impact) so I expect this to be solved eventually.
    - famouswaffles 4y ago
      Base gpt-4 already did this.(confidence about something directly correlated with ability to solve problem/answer questions correctly) You can read the technical paper. But the hammer of alignment(RLHF) took it away.
copperx 4y ago
How in the world did you feed GPT those 428 case files? There's nothing in the API to make it ingest that much info.
- fritzo 4y ago
  I'm guessing the author is computing embeddings https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/embeddings https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/embeddings

archgrove 4y ago

I'm not an AI skeptic (this stuff will change the world), but I'm not as impressed as the author. The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. The LLM isn't demonstrating much more than "Generic templating ability over a large range of templates" in this instance. Whilst that's probably 50% of the jobs in the world, such jobs were already at risk of someone searching for "Basic X template" and expanding the placeholders themselves. I think I could do a similar job in 30 minutes by doing exactly that. LLM's main wins seem to be providing a single unified entry point to all the templates in the universe. It's a "Universal UI", rather than a "Content creator". I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control. The most interesting immediate thing here is the image generation - that's pretty good, and a big saving over scraping through stock images. I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down.

rybosworld 4y ago
"I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down" I'm surprised the copyright issues aren't given more attention. It's technically not legal (in the US) to modify copyrighted images without the authors permission. I don't see how it's possible that systems like DALL-E haven't already done that. There's a near 0% chance that they aren't trained on at least one copyrighted image.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Getty's case is active in the court system in multiple jurisdictions, until we get there outcome of that weren't not going to have a resolution of this. Unless countries legislate/decide to allow training on publicly accessible documents, eg as Fair Use/Fair Dealing or whatever. In short, the copyright issues appear to be given a lot of attention? Legal precedent takes time.

arbol 4y ago

It feels like there's going to be a whole lot more marketing content that's not getting read.

mritchie712 4y ago
yeah, the end result is boring. I'd rather watch a 2 minute Loom of someone using the product, which would have taken them less time then the AI approach.
- refactor_master 4y ago
  Perhaps this will only further devalue and misalign the already in-shambles communication between producer and consumer. For example, I’d trust 1 video review over 1000 text reviews, and even then, a family member’s opinion over 1000 video reviews. The number of “agendas” out there is staggering, and it feels naive to assume that most of them would align with mine.

keyle 4y ago

Well there is going to be a lot of geocities style websites coming back as the GPT clients can certainly output valid HTML, without any acquired taste when it comes to web design. Regardless of the role... GPT as a helping tool, absolutely! But as a replacement for the role... You're setting yourself as a joke.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
It's going to raise the bar for people on a lot of fronts. Also, people will get bored with bland, boring fluff pretty quickly. That's always the challenge for marketing people: how do you stand out from the crowd? The generated movie is actually pretty bland and boring. It's mainly impressive because it almost but not quite looks realistic. It's basically a talking head moving its head between 5 or so positions with an expression less bland face narrating some generic marketing pitch. It's not bad. But it's also not very good. It's marketing box ticking "we got to have the talking head thing on the website somewhere" but it's not going to achieve any miracles in terms of engagement. That's the problem with this stuff: it's formulaic, unimaginative, etc. Like a lot of real world marketing. If you look at what companies actually do, it's mostly pretty low quality and bad right now. For every well run marketing campaign there are hundreds of really poorly thought out and cringe worthy campaigns. Trying to imitate what the good ones do. So, AI is going to run circles around that crowd. Just like any competent marketing person would. Except an AI will do it a lot cheaper. This is going to decimate the market for incompetent charlatans and create a new market for effective directors that can work the tools more effectively and cheaply. That kind of is the point. These tools are really effective in the hands of a skilled professional that knows what to ask for and has a notion of what good and bad look like. It's an iterative process of asking and refining and directing that allows them to take a lot of short cuts. Imagine Steven Spielberg directing a movie. But without the actors, camera people, post production, makeup, lights, CGI, and all the rest. That kind of is what this could be. How would somebody like that use AI to produce a movie. Well, he'd be directing and refining and iterating and be getting results a lot quicker than is possible now. Maybe he'd raise the ambition level a little and ask for things that are really hard right now. But in the end they'd produce a movie that is hopefully very entertaining and interesting to watch. Now imagine a young inexperienced director with some vague ambition to be a better director. Would that person be able to produce something with the tools. Sure. And they'd learn a lot in the process. As you iterate, you better yourself. It's not a one way street. The more you engage with some activity, they better you get at it. We'll have a lot of very skilled directors in a few years. And they won't just be directing movies. And now imagine a very cynical third rate director that produces straight to dvd content for the masses. No budget, hilariously bad scripts, actors that don't give a shit and can't act, etc. That guy is going to produce some amazing results. But there will be so much of it that it won't have any value.

scandox 4y ago

When I was young I read a load of books and wrote a bunch of waffle about them (essays). The waffle wasn't much use to anyone except myself because the process of producing the waffle made me do some basic thinking. So much human activity is about structuring our own thoughts so we can ascend to a higher level of activity and insight. I mean everyone knows marketing plans are BS but they're part of a process of group thought. I am genuinely amazed at some of the chats I've had with AI but I hope the outcome will simply be a clarification of what we are all actually doing.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Yes, we risk AI eating the low hanging fruit, meaning humans can't grow the skills to pick off the much harder to reach fruit. This could stilt human growth, whilst causing a large shift of wealth to those with the resources to train large ML-based systems. If we don't share the gains, then overall I see this as possibly being a loss for society.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
A terse bullet list suffices to guide thought. A 5000 word essay is busy work.

rybosworld 4y ago

"Historically, these sorts of disruptions lead to short-term issues, and long-term employment growth" I think the pace of AI advances may turn these disruptions into long-term issues and not lead to employment growth. Yes, ChatGPT can be a multiplier on human productivity. But that's assuming you can learn how to use it correctly. The author here seems to know how to scale the complexity of the prompts in such a way that they get meaningful output (a complete website). That sort of prompting is a skillset in itself. The problem as I see it is: how long is that skillset relevant before an even more advanced LLM comes along, forcing you to re-learn how to interact with it. Now consider that the next advancement need not come from an LLM, but some entirely different system that doesn't work via prompts. That skilled prompter needs a new skillset. Technological innovations of the past have always come slowly enough that people could learn and master them before something new came along. It seems like things are moving so quickly in the AI space that may no longer be true. With all that said, an example that gives me hope is chess. The rise of chess AI's has not killed chess in any sense. The players of the last few years are actually much stronger than pre-AI. Can the best players in the world beat Stockfish or Alpha-Go? Not even close. And so far that hasn't mattered. People still prefer to watch two human players.

cyclotron3k 4y ago
I was thinking about the chess analogy too, and I don't think it holds. Chess is a pastime; people do it for fun. Once AI has consumed all our jobs, sure, you can manually tap out some code for fun, but no one is going to pay you for that.
roca 4y ago
It's a very important point that the insanely rapid pace of change is itself a huge problem. We're still in the same (northern hemisphere) school year in which ChatGPT was released; teachers and students just started trying to understand its impact; and the underlying model has already been replaced with something much more powerful --- TWICE --- GPT4 and "tool-using" mode.
- mprovost 4y ago
  We’re just starting the first “performance cycle” at work since ChatGPT came out and I strongly suspect next year’s won’t be based on producing so many written documents (self reflection, peer feedback, etc).

nbzso 4y ago

So, congrats. You "created" something without any aesthetic or marketing value. Yes, LLM's help, but the idea that time to market in competitive reality will give the real value is laughable. And no, when the prompt designer/engineer has no taste or more than average skill, the results will not be mind-bending or guaranteed hit. Force multiplier is not equal to quality multiplier, and the availability of the tools will generate mediocre junk with the speed of the light. Soon we will have to add to our information journeys another blocker for the A.I. generated marketing content.

theden 4y ago

The completed website looks really bad and generic though, I'd argue even with the time saved it's a net loss. Since the generated images and video look uncanny/fake, I'd assume it's a scam website. Not gonna lie, it's kinda fatiguing seeing people hype lazily generated AI content as really good, when it's more often than not mediocre. I don't know if it's because people are intentionally hyping their results, or if they have poor taste/standards. I think the real lesson here is less is more, and I'm afraid with generative AI there's gonna be so much churn of content, we'll all become fatigued.

greesil 4y ago
Mediocre was probably better than the the guy's best effort in a domain he didn't understand given a couple of days. That's a net productivity boost for him.
- theden 4y ago
  I personally wouldn't want to ship mediocre content that looks like that, so for me all he did was waste 30 minutes prompt generating marketing BS and weird looking images. Don't get me wrong, I think AI can definitely be a productivity and inspiration boost in the right hands, but it's going to be being abused so much, I don't know if in the future I'll be able to read a long paragraph on my screen without wondering if it was written by a human (or even read by one prior)
  - greesil 4y ago
    As per Nilay Patel's comments about SEO spam hustlers, the web is going to become a vast(er) ocean of shit. https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/19063562/ai-text-generation-spam-marketing-seo-fractl-grover-google https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/19063562/ai-text-generatio... https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562966/cnet-ai-written-stories-red-ventures-seo-marketing https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562966/cnet-ai-written-...
  - e12e 4y ago
    Would you be better of working off of only the prompts, or the ai poc - if op sent it to you and asked you to improve it for ~ 5 000 or something?

rapiz 4y ago

I found the main content generated, which are the campiagns, plain and too generic to be useful. And I doubt the effort needed to pull out a better result, even with better models. The article does provide some inspiration on what will the AI-enhanced workflow look like, but also shows the weakness. All results look like pretty generic and skeleton and further polishing from pros is needed. IMO, the future will more be like everyone do their job better with the help of AI, instead of that everyone do all the work with AI and no one is really needed.

maxdoop 4y ago

For a supposed smart group of individuals who are good at leaning into the latest innovations, I feel most HN comments as of late are completely , ignorantly dismissive of LLMs simply because LLMs aren’t “amazingly perfect” in their current state . Yet… we are are talking about a tool that came out literally FOUR MONTHS AGO. And the huge advancement on that came out TWO WEEKS AGO. Yet everyone here continues to proclaim, “it’s not even that good , honestly.” As though no progress will ever be made from this current moment in time. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

rco8786 4y ago
People are generally very resistant to change. Our minds are literally programmed against it...acknowledging an enormous change happening very quickly triggers all sorts of yucky things in our lizard brains. So we try and rationalize things and fid some way of explaining to ourselves that "no, this isn't actually a big change, my model of the world is still rock solid" as a pure survival mechanism.
- martindbp 4y ago
  I would have thought filtering people on "being in tech" would have weeded out the people resistant to change, so I'm surprised by the negativity on anything innovative here, whether it's EVs, self driving cars, AI, crypto (although I can forgive this one) or VR.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    People in tech are still just people.
    - 93po 4y ago
      100000% this. HN attracts some smart people but they're still often very flawed people. Myself included.
ldoughty 4y ago
I asked Google Bard to tell me a short story about a computer hacker. Here was the result, completely unedited... Blew me away: Sure, here is a short story about a computer hacker: Once upon a time, there was a young hacker named Kevin who loved to explore the world of computers. He was always curious about how things worked, and he loved to find new ways to break into systems. One day, Kevin was exploring a new website when he came across a hidden file. The file contained a list of passwords, and Kevin was curious to see what they were for. He tried a few of the passwords, and to his surprise, they all worked! Kevin had just hacked into a major company's computer system. Kevin was excited about his discovery, but he also knew that he had done something wrong. He had hacked into a system without permission, and he could get in a lot of trouble. But Kevin couldn't help himself. He was too curious about what he could find in the system. He started exploring the files, and he quickly found out that the company was up to some shady business. They were involved in illegal activities, and Kevin knew that he had to do something to stop them. Kevin decided to hack into the company's website and post a warning to their customers. He wanted to let them know that the company was not trustworthy, and that they should avoid doing business with them. Kevin knew that his actions would get him in trouble, but he didn't care. He was doing what he thought was right, and he was willing to face the consequences. The company was furious when they found out what Kevin had done. They threatened to sue him, and they even tried to have him arrested. But Kevin was not afraid. He knew that he had done the right thing, and he was willing to fight for what he believed in. In the end, Kevin was able to expose the company's illegal activities, and he helped to protect the company's customers. He also learned a valuable lesson about the importance of doing what is right, even when it is difficult.

satisfice 4y ago

Mediocrity has never been so easy to achieve!

truthsayer123 4y ago

More like super spam generator. Humans are good at coming with good explanations. There is nothing super human about generating a lot of crap marketing noise in 30 minutes.

replwoacause 4y ago
Yep, dead on.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Finally the war has been won. This wunderwaffe will destroy the front-end developers once and for all. “ChatGPT, please update the website to the latest meme framework” And with that they were all obsolete

0xb0565e487 4y ago
I’m not worried. There’s much more to the job than pedantic code reorganizing. As a matter of fact, it seems to be good at what I’d like not to do as a frontend dev.

wokwokwok 4y ago

> I gave myself 30 minutes, and tried to accomplish as much as I could during that time… Have you watched nerdforge? “I spent 1, 10 and 100 hours on X…” Excellent content. High rated. Highly successful. Here’s the thing: yes. Spending 40 seconds clicking on the “generate image” button can indeed produce some random crap. …but, I’ve already seen that. I’ve done it. Here’s a pro tip: any content that takes you 30 minutes to do is something almost no one is interested in. It’s too trivial. So, here my challenge: ok, now go and spend 10 and 100 hours to see how far you can actually take it if you devote real effort to using these tools to actually do something. It might get a few clicks today, but the barrier to spending 30 minutes to generate this kind of stuff has become so low that it’s basically worthless. We get it. You can click on the generate content button. Does it scale? Can it generate prompts for itself when you don’t have time to do it yourself? Can you refine the content so it’s not so bland and generic? …or is that a problem for GPT5?

belter 4y ago

Particularly on the issue of coding with the help of these models, I am specially concerned with Kernighan's law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” After seeing Developers gainfully employed, justifying their horrible SQL as, "I dont know the ORM wrote it". Others mentioning they never heard about transaction isolation levels, the old mantra of "NodeJS never blocks" so your concurrency issues are gone. Even recently and incredibly, having to argue with somebody about a Cloud Architecture design where as surprisingly as it might seem, the argument from the other side at a moment was, "but ChatGPT says..."...Taking all this into account I strongly recommend you keep brushing your skills. I predict Consultants and Developers, able to fix the bugs in these ChatGPT Driven Development Applications, will be rewarded with hourly rates that will make FAANG salaries look like Monopoly money...

serpix 4y ago
Experience in software projects plus AI gives a clever consultant a force multiplier that is unheard of. A person who knows how things are made but lacks time can leverage AI to boost their productivity by several multiples. What a time to be alive. It feels like I have been given a new career overnight.

clocker 4y ago

Recently I used chatGPT to “improve” the introduction of my game http://www.squashbyte.com http://www.squashbyte.com. I wrote the initial introduction and asked chatgpt to make it better. I can speak good English but I am not a native English speaker so I was impressed by the outcome. Also I was mind blown to see how chatGPT answered some questions I asked after feeding the initial text to it. But now I think should I keep using chatgpt to do things like this? Will it deteriorate my writing or thinking ability if I keep outsourcing it to AI?

maxerickson 4y ago
Seems like the reliability of the output is a big factor. If it is highly reliable then you can learn from the changes and so on.

madsbuch 4y ago

oh the content arms race is tightening! I have seen myself visiting much fewer websites after I incorporated chatgpt in my workflows. why would I visit some random dev blog that promises me an answer, when I don't need to? and now I don't have to be annoyed by that pesky popup asking me to suvscribe. it will be the same with marketing. it might be easier to create the content, but way fewer people will even see it. it is gong to be interesting to see if there will be an implosion of more a fizz out. it is also going to be interesting to see how marketers will target LLMs.

hohg 4y ago

How do you send the emails to willing recipients? I doubt AI can find these recipients and that's the most critical element.

thom 4y ago

Everyone seems to think their particular niche is going to be the last to be commoditised. Yes, you've saved some time marketing your product. But your product is just going to get replaced by equally lazy people who type "write a business simulation to teach my students leadership" into ChatGPT. And then those people are going to get replaced by students not going to business school and just asking ChatGPT for a business curriculum directly. Except those people aren't going to get jobs because all the actual businesses are using ChatGPT instead of employees. Except those businesses' products also just got commoditised so they can't pay their ChatGPT bill. ChatGPT is not a tool with which you can build a bigger moat. Huge amounts of money are going to be made in the short term, but in the long term, I think your work being amenable to aid or replacement by LLMs is an indication you should be looking for higher ground, even if it's just to survive some plausible AI Winter.

13years 4y ago
I agree, most are missing this aspect. If AI progresses as the proponents assume, continually exponential, then this is different than all prior disruptions. It is accelerating technological evolution. Meaning there is no island of stability on the other side. There is no adaption to change and then we move along for a while. It is continuous. What makes this disruption different than all others is AI is not a narrow disruption. It is a disruption for everything because at its core it is a machine for the replication of skill and technology. A concept that has never existed prior with any other technological disruption. I've described this somewhat as the shrinking innovation, disruption and adaption cycles that leave us completely unable to keep up. "Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do." https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
voiper1 4y ago
If you use ChatGPT as prescriptive, that it tells you what to do, then you're only as good as what you put in and how good ChatGPT is. But if you use it as a coach/consultant/pair-programmer/R&D exploration/ brainstorming session, then you have instant access to an "expert" in any field. That's something that can supercharge the productive output of any worker. And/or lead to dismissal of most of the team...

lp4vn 4y ago

Don't get me wrong, LLMs are pretty breathtaking. In my opinion, just the way that they parse natural language, "understand" it and can generate a meaningful response is absolutely impressive and would be considered out of reach just some years ago. But I feel underwhelmed everytime I see people coming up with examples about how LLMs are going to revolutionize the job market. Prototypes for sites are something very old, it's not that you have not been able to create a good looking mock site in record time in the last 10 years. The rest of the article is also underwhelming, AI for generating content for a marketing strategy is not impressing honestly, and I guess that similar tools already existed.

nemo44x 4y ago

Of course these aren’t production worthy artifacts. But what if the marketing team sent in their context and the personalized context of the individual they are targeting. Multiplied by millions of people. Custom, on-brand marketing. This is what LLMs are actually good at.

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jschveibinz 4y ago

The current state of AI is amazing and can be a time saver, no doubt. With respect to the ongoing argument about the social and economic disruption of this “tool,” we need to remember this: Over short periods of time, we “feel” like the slope of change is relatively flat. But it’s not. The slope of change is getting steeper and steeper ever day. Technology change and capability is exponential. I have seen a crazy amount of change in my lifetime, and it’s accelerating.

sandworm101 4y ago

A task for me on monday: justify why you just requested 3x laptops speced for 32gb ram. AI answer: More ram is better. Computer go faster with bigger files and less swap. Business needs demand. (Useless answer) What the boss wants: I assess that software X requires 32gb to perform the task we need. We tried with 8, hard fail. We tried with 16 and it crashed every 30min. And we havent asked for new laptops in years so you owe us.

dpkirchner 4y ago
This might be an issue with your prompt. Here's what I get for "Our software is crashing constantly when run on laptops with 8GB ram and every 30 minutes when run on laptops with 16Gb ram. Further, our laptops are multiple years old and require frequent maintenance. Write a brief email to my boss asking for approval to purchase 3 laptops with 32GB ram." It's a bit more formal-ish than I'd prefer but with a little tweaking it'd probably get the job done. "Dear [Boss's name], I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to request your approval for the purchase of 3 laptops with 32GB RAM. As you are aware, we have been experiencing frequent software crashes, particularly on laptops with 8GB of RAM, and even on those with 16GB of RAM. This is affecting our productivity and causing delays in our work. Additionally, our current laptops are several years old and require frequent maintenance. To address these issues and ensure that we can work efficiently and effectively, I believe it is essential that we invest in new laptops with increased RAM capacity. With 32GB of RAM, we will be able to run our software smoothly and reduce the frequency of crashes. I have researched several options and identified three laptops that meet our requirements and are within our budget. I have attached the details and prices of each laptop for your review. I would appreciate your prompt approval for this purchase so that we can continue to work without interruptions and complete our projects within the given timeline. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Best regards, [Your Name]"
- sandworm101 4y ago
  That answer would not fly in our organization (military). It reads like someone who isn't part of our organization, making little assumptions about our organizational structure. For instance, we would never "invest". We "acquire" equipment to meet needs. Likewise, nobody would ever talk of something impacting work. Everything is written in terms of operational requirements and missions. Even "approval" isn't appropriate. My boss will "support" my request that will go to another part of the organization for assessment and procurement. If I used language from an AI that did not understand our specific organizational mannerisms, it would be flagged as so odd that my boss would probably drop by my office for an explanation. This is typical of generalize AI. Everything it writes sounds like it comes from a total stranger. It has no internal voice, no distinct style. It sounds like it comes from a child writing an essay ... which is basically what it is.

Damogran6 4y ago

Things will improve, to be sure, and the volume of word vomit is impressive, but much like when laser printers democratized publishing, you're going to initially end up with memos using 24 (all of the available) fonts. I turn on a 'certain kind' of Movie or TV show and it becomes apparent that the scriptwriter really isn't an FBI agent, or Doctor or IT person. They have a feature length story, with amazing CGI, lighting, 4k video and Dolby...but the writing isn't believable and the end product is shit. I'm wondering if this will allow more people do more things, but the things that are turned out will look average, and the people that dedicate the time learning and skill to %product% will still turn out things that stand out. I have a similar old man gripe about CGI and music...the end result is that many more people have the ability to do the thing, and the end result is that the thing becomes commonplace and loses some of the wonder as a result. You have more and more and more people turning out music, and as a result, more and more people can't make a living making music.

dragontamer 4y ago

> (Prompt#2) Pretend you are marketing genius. We are going to launch the Saturn Parable. You should give me a document that oulines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game. Cool, so lets see what Bing spits out. > I’m sorry but I’m not able to create a document that outlines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game. However, I can suggest some steps that you can follow to create an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game. > snip --------- What the hell is up with this? I copy/paste the prompts exactly as outlined in this blogpost, and I get completely different results. I know I'm not the only one having this issue. But it makes me extremely distrustful of these blog posts. If I can't replicate their prompts or how they work, how the hell am I supposed to believe them? And yes, I did start with: "Look up the business simulation market. Look up Wharton Interactive's Saturn Parable" as prompt#1, so that Bing/ChatGPT already had Saturn Parable "in its memory". ------- EDIT: I tried these two prompts in "Creative Bing Chat mode". I got the first sentence out of Bing Chat, but the rest of it failed. There must have been a timeout of some kind, because Bing Chat just hangs and fails.

andyp-kw 4y ago
I wonder if some kind of Blockchain proof of work could be used to verify chat results in the future. Especially if the models grow quicker with realtime data.
Kiro 4y ago
1000 people using the same prompt will get 1000 different results. LLMs are completely non-deterministic.
- richk449 4y ago
  Why are they non deterministic? Is randomness intentionally injected? Or intrinsic to the approach?
  - williamstein 4y ago
    Check out the temperature docs in the API reference manual: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/create#completions/create-temperature https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/c...

cowllin 4y ago

Ethan has been an excellent source for keeping up with the advances in AI on his twitter account, through the lens of both academia (he's a professor) and "industry" (he professors in an MBA program). I recommend him as a follow: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1636454151272931337 https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1636454151272931337

easeout 4y ago

Reading this I'm drawn to the idea that, if LLMs are so attractive to us as a productivity boost, and if they do that by synthesizing gobs of similar human output, then we have been asking humans too much for the same output as one another and we're still doing it. Finally, a tool: I no longer have to be the automaton. That's a blessing and an indictment. I don't know if I'll feel the same way tomorrow; just thought it was a perspective worth sharing.

darepublic 4y ago

This is a bunch of fluff. I am sold on the groundbreaking possibilities of AI but not impressed by this.

coldtea 4y ago

The problem is that, business wise, this doesn't increase your ability to do stuff. Superficially it does that, but that would be the case edge-wise if ChatGPT was just available to you. You have no business advantage because of it over anyone else using it. What it does do, is devalue your skills (if you had the skills before to manually create all that material), and devalue the final product. Once, having such online marketing material used to be a great asset, even if it was crudely made by today's standards (think 1996). Later, as there were all kinds of services to help create one (with assets, etc.), more people that could do it for cheaper, template-based website builders and so on, it was far less valuable. Now, with ChatGPT churning good-enough material in 30 minutes, it would be as valuable as spam. In fact, there will be (already is) an entirely huge industry of automated AI spam content, including fake companies with marketing material. Not the hand/template build of today, where someone has made 30-50 slightly different BS companies to e.g. scam or drop-ship. But where every scam artist can have 1000s of them within an hour, and get them be topical on the latest products and trends, complete with "chat support" and everything. And of course any person who has some BS idea, but couldn't even use Wix to make a website before, even less so to write copy for it, now will have one (they'd probably wont be able to use ChatGPT directly, but they'd be able to use a turnkey "make me a website" GPT-powered version of something like Wix. The bussiness advantage of using GPT to boost your productivity is like getting rich by the UN giving everybody on earth 100 billion dollars!

SergeAx 4y ago

> It then proceeded to create the four emails. without me doing anything. I wonder how quickly we gonna put any ML-generated email directly to spam folder? I personally would like to have at least a marking of such content in my inbox.

tsurba 4y ago

Today I spent 2 hours cursing at GPT-4 for not being able to fix a stupid indexing mistake in the code it wrote. Just like code before. It’s helpful and I wouldn’t have the energy to work on this hobby project without GPT. But for now at least, at some point I have to understand every line of non-trivial code eventually.