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And here’s an exchange about how he validated the data was correct - which to me seems like the most important part: > Out of curiosity, are you sure that GPT

And here’s an exchange about how he validated the data was correct - which to me seems like the most important part: > Out of curiosity, are you sure that GPT did it correctly? If yes, is it because you were able to "spot check" it in a few places? Or have you used GPT enough that you trust it with a task like this? Or is this for some kind of internal use where a few small errors is unimportant, and you only need the broad strokes to be correct? > Yes, yes, and yes. (There were some obvious checksums, for instance by computing the total number of speakers several different ways.) Still cool, but the circumstances above aren’t always true. In fact, in a lot of meaningful work, none of them probably are. If GPT is like an assistant whose work you always have to double check in order to be sure of the validity of the results, that seems to be a pretty big caveat to me. In that case it’s probably better to just write a script whose output you know to be deterministic, even if it takes slightly longer (and the bigger your dataset to verify, the more likely it is that it’ll take less time to write a script than to validate results one by one). The scary part is if/when companies/bureaucracies/governments/etc start using GPT for all sorts of Important Tasks and skip the validation part because they assume the machine will always get it right.

humanistbot 4y ago
> If GPT is like an assistant whose work you always have to double check in order to be sure of the validity of the results, that seems to be a pretty big caveat to me. Sounds like every junior developer fresh out of college I've had to work with. Interns are even worse. Even senior devs mess up from time to time. That's why we do code review and other QA. Trust no one.
- belugacat 4y ago
  True, but one obvious difference is that a senior contributor can typically validate the work of a more junior one in less time than it took them to produce, that’s why the overall equation works. And if you decide to keep the more junior person, it’s probably because you feel like they’re improving and becoming more trustworthy over time. Another key difference is that a deterministic script that has determined to be valid will be valid for all subsequent runs, regardless of input size. That is not the case for ChatGPT, which might be correct on some runs and not others, or do well on small input sizes but start messing up when thousands (or more) of data items are involved. Again, I still think ChatGPT is really cool, but thinking about all these nuances about the nature of the work that is actually being done when you use ChatGPT vs writing a script vs handing it off to an intern seems crucial to the debate.

humanistbot 4y ago

> If GPT is like an assistant whose work you always have to double check in order to be sure of the validity of the results, that seems to be a pretty big caveat to me. Sounds like every junior developer fresh out of college I've had to work with. Interns are even worse. Even senior devs mess up from time to time. That's why we do code review and other QA. Trust no one.

belugacat 4y ago
True, but one obvious difference is that a senior contributor can typically validate the work of a more junior one in less time than it took them to produce, that’s why the overall equation works. And if you decide to keep the more junior person, it’s probably because you feel like they’re improving and becoming more trustworthy over time. Another key difference is that a deterministic script that has determined to be valid will be valid for all subsequent runs, regardless of input size. That is not the case for ChatGPT, which might be correct on some runs and not others, or do well on small input sizes but start messing up when thousands (or more) of data items are involved. Again, I still think ChatGPT is really cool, but thinking about all these nuances about the nature of the work that is actually being done when you use ChatGPT vs writing a script vs handing it off to an intern seems crucial to the debate.