6 ms·

What is a business problem you solved with LLMs that you couldn't solve as efficiently without them?

capableweb 3y ago
Not sure what counts as a "business problem" for you, but personally I couldn't have gotten as far as I've come with game development without it, as I really struggle with the math and I don't know many people locally who develop games that I could get help from. GPT4 have been instrumental in helping me understand concepts I've tried to learn before but couldn't, and helps me implement algorithms I don't really understand the inner workings of, but I understand the value of the specific algorithm and how to use it. In the end, it sometimes requires extensive testing as things are wrong in subtle ways, but the same goes for the code I write myself too. I'm happy to just get further than have been possible for the last ~20 years I've tried to do it on my own. Ultimately, I want to finish games and sell them, so for me this is a "business problem", but I could totally understand that for others it isn't.
- moonchrome 3y ago
  Sound like you need to learn to search. There's tons of resources on game dev. I can sort of see the value of using GPT here but have you tried using it in an area you're an expert in ? The rate of convincing bullshit vs correct answers is astonishing. It gets better with Phind/Bing but then it's a roulette that it will hit valid answers in the index fast enough. My point is - learning with GPT at this point sounds like setting yourself up for failure - you won't know when it's bullshiting you and you're missing out on learning how to actually learn. By the time LLMs are reliable enough to teach you, whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    With respect to writing I've used it for things I know enough to write--and will have to look up some quotes, data, etc. in any case. GPT gives me a sort of 0th draft that saves me some time but I don't need to check every assertion to see if it's right or reasonable because I already know. But it doesn't really solve a business problem for me. Just saves some time and gives me a starting point. Though on-the-fly spellchecking and, to a lesser degree grammar checking, help me a lot too--especially if I'm not going to ultimately be copyedited.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > Sound like you need to learn to search Sounds like you need to not be condescending :) Of course I've searched and tried countless of avenues to pick up this, I'm not saying it's absolutely not possible without GPT, just that I found it the easiest way of learning. And it's not "Write a function that does X" but more employing the Socratic method to help me further understand a subject, that I can then dive deeper into myself. But having a rubber duck is infinitive worth, if you happen to a programmer, you probably can see the value in this. > have you tried using it in an area you're an expert in ? The rate of convincing bullshit vs correct answers is astonishing. It gets better with Phind/Bing but then it's a roulette that it will hit valid answers in the index fast enough. Yes, programming is my expertise, and I use it daily for programming and it's doing fine for me (GPT4 that is, GPT3.5 and models before are basically trash). Bing is probably one of the worst implementations of GPT I've seen in the wild, so it seems like our experience already differs quite a bit. > you won't know when it's bullshiting you and you're missing out on learning how to actually learn. Yeah, you can tell relatively easy if it's bullshitting and making things up, if you're paying any sort of attention to what it tells you. > By the time LLMs are reliable enough to teach you, whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM. Disagree, I'm not learning in order to generate more money for myself or whatever, I'm learning because the process of learning is fun, and I want to be able to build games myself. A LLM will never be able to replace that, as part of the fun is that I'm the one doing it.
    - ohmahjong 3y ago
      I have personally found the rubber-ducking to be really helpful, especially for more exploratory work. I find myself typing "So if I understand correctly, the code does this this and this because of this" and usually get some helpful feedback. It feels a bit like pair programming with someone who knows 90% of the documentation for an older version of a relevant library - definitely more helpful than me by myself, and with somewhat less communication overhead that actually pairing with a human.
    - moonchrome 3y ago
      >Yeah, you can tell relatively easy if it's bullshitting and making things up, if you're paying any sort of attention to what it tells you. It's trained on generating the most likely completion to some text, it's not at all easy to tell if it's bullshitting you if you're a newbie. Agreed that I was condescending and dismissive in my reply, been dealing with people trying to use ChatGPT to get free lunch without understanding the problem recently so I just assume at this point, my bad.
  - space_fountain 3y ago
    > By the time LLMs are reliable enough to teach you, whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM. For solving the really common problem of working in a new area LLMs being unreliable isn't actually a big deal. If I just need to know what some math is called or understand how to use an equation, it's often very easy to verify an answer, but can be hard to find it through google. I might not know the right terms to search or my options might be hard to locate documentation or SEO spam
    - moonchrome 3y ago
      This is fair, using it as a starting point to learning could be useful if you're ready/able to do the rest of the process. Maybe I was too dismissive because it read to me like OP couldn't do that and thought he found the magic trick to skip that part.
  - nicetryguy 3y ago
    > Sound like you need to learn to search. There's tons of resources on game dev. I have been making games since / in Flash, HTML5, Unity, and classic consoles using ASM such as NES / SNES / Gameboy: Tons of resources are WRONG, tutorials are incomplete, engines are buggy, answers you find on stackoverflow are outdated, even official documentation can be littered with gaping holes and unmentioned gotcha's. I have found GPT incredibly valuable when it comes to spitting out exact syntax and tons of lines that i otherwise would have spent hours and hours to write combing through dodgy forum posts, arrogant SO douchebags, and the questionable word salad that is the "official documentation"; and it just does it instantly. What a godsend! > you won't know when it's bullshiting you and you're missing out on learning how to actually learn. Have you tried ...compiling it? You can challenge, question, and iterate with GPT at a speed that you cannot with other resources: i doubt you are better off combing pages and pages of Ctrl+F'ing PDFs / giant repositories or getting Just The Right Google Query to get exactly what you need on page 4. GPT isn't perfect but god damn it is a hell of alot better and faster than anything that has ever existed before. > whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM. Not true. It still makes mistakes (as of Apr '23) and still needs a decent bit of hand holding. Can / should you take what it says as fact? No. But my experience says i can say that about any resource honestly.
    - moonchrome 3y ago
      >I have found GPT incredibly valuable when it comes to spitting out exact syntax and tons of lines that i otherwise would have spent hours and hours to write combing through dodgy forum posts, arrogant SO douchebags, and the questionable word salad that is the "official documentation"; and it just does it instantly. What a godsend! IMO if you're learning from GPT you have to double check it's answers, and then you have to go through the same song and dance. For problems that are well documented you might as well start with those. If you're struggling with something how do you know it's not bullshitting you ? Especially for learning, I can see "copy paste and test if it works" flying if you need a quick fix but for learning I've seen it give right answers with wrong reasoning and wrong answers with right reasoning. I'm not disagreeing with you on code part, my no.1 use case right now is bash scripting/short scripts/tedious model translations - where it's easy to provide all the context and easy to verify the solution. I'd disagree on the fastest tool part, part of the reason I'm not using it more is because it's so slow (and responses are full of pointless fluff that eats tokens even when you ask it to be concise or give code only). Iterating on nontrivial solutions is usually slower than writing them out on my own (depending on the problem).
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Funny enough, I’d been wanting to learn some assembly for my M1 MacBook but had given up after attempts at googling for help as I ran into really basic issues and since I was just messing around and had plenty of actually productive things to work on. A few sessions with ChatGPT sorted out various platform specific things and within tens of minutes I was popping stacks and conditionally jumping to my heart’s delight.
    - erichocean 3y ago
      Yup, ChatGPT is, paradoxically, MOST USEFUL in areas you already know something about. It's easy to nudge it (chat) towards the actual answers you're looking for. GP is way off base IMO.
      - moonchrome 3y ago
        After trying to use it as such so far : Nontrivial problem solutions are wishful thinking hallucinations, eg. I ask it for some way to use AWS service X and it comes up with a perfect solution - that I spend 10 minutes desperately trying to uncover - and find out that it doesn't exist and I've wasted 15 minutes of my life. "Nudging it" with followups how it's described solutions violate some common patterns on the platform, it doubles down on it's bullshit by inventing other features that would support the functionality. It's the worst when what you're trying to do can't really be done with constraints specified. It gives out bullshit reasoning and code, eg. I wanted it to shorten some function I spitballed and it made the code both subtly wrong (by switching to unordered collection) and slower (switching from list to hash map with no benefit). And then even claims it's solution is faster because it avoids allocations ! (where my solution was adding new KeyValuePair to the list, which is a value type and doesn't actually allocate anything). I can easily see a newbie absorbing this BS - you need background knowledge to break it down. Or another example I wanted to check the rationale behind some lint warning, not only was it off base but it even said some blatantly wrong facts in the process (like default equality comparison in C# being ordinal ignore case ???). In my experience working with junior/mid members the amount of half assed/seemingly working solutions that I had to PR in last couple of months has increased and a lot (along with "shrug ChatGPT wrote it"). Maybe in some areas like ASM for a specific machine there's not a lot of newbie friendly material and ChatGPT can grok it correctly (or it's easy to tweak the outputs because you know what it should look like) - but that's not the case for gamedev. Like there are multiple books titled "math for game developers" (OP use case).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- lamontcg 3y ago
  I don't particularly have a big problem with math at the level that AIs tend to be useful for, and find that it tends to hallucinate if you ask it anything which is moderately difficult. There's sort of a narrow area where if you ask it for something fairly common but moderately complicated like a translation matrix that it usually can come up with it, and can write it in the language that you specify. But guarding against hallucinations is almost as much trouble as looking it up on wikipedia or something and writing it yourself. The language model really needs to be combined with the hard rules of arithmetic/algebra/calculus/dimensional-analysis/etc in a way that it can't violate them and just mash up some equations that its been trained on even though the result is absolute nonsense.
- klabb3 3y ago
  This vibes with my experience as well. In terms of actual long term value, this kind of educational exploration is promising. It acts, in a way, as a domain expert who understands your language and can help you orient yourself in a domain which is otherwise difficult to penetrate. I also am happy that language-as-gate-keeping, which is plaguing so many fields both in academia and business, is going to quickly be “democratized”, in the best sense of the word. LLMs can help you decipher text written in eg law speak, and it also can translate your own words into a form that will get grand poobah to take you seriously. Kind of like a spell/grammar checker on steroids.
Fordec 3y ago
Name one business problem solved with any tool that can only be solved by that tool and nothing else. It's not about uniqueness, the name of the game is efficiency/scaling already solvable problems by multiple or skilled humans and reducing one of those dimensions.
- cloudking 3y ago
  Fair, edited to include "as efficiently". I'm cutting through the noise to find some signals for how people are using these APIs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
potatoman22 3y ago
Named entity recognition - extracting structured data from text
- rolisz 3y ago
  But there are fairly good models for doing NER that are not LLMs. Models that are open source and you can even run on a CPU, with parameter counts in the hundred of millions, not billions.
  - billythemaniam 3y ago
    While true, GPT-4 kinda just gets a lot of the classic NLP tasks, such as NER, right with zero fine-tuning or minimal prompt engineering (or whatever you want to call it). I haven't done an extensive study, but I do NLP daily as part of my current job. I often reach for GPT-4 now, and so far it does a better job than any other pretrained models or ones I've trained/fine-tuned, at least for data I work on.
    - rolisz 3y ago
      But what about cost? There was a recent article saying that Doordash makes 40 billion predictions per day, which would result in 40 million dollars per day if using GPT4. Sure, GPT4 is great for experimenting with and I often try it out, but at the end of the day, for deploying a widely used model, the cost benefit analysis will favor bespoke models a lot of the time.
      - travisjungroth 3y ago
        It’s not hard to find a case where GPT4 is a bad fit.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    GPT-4 generally performs better than expert human workers on NLP tasks, nevermind bespoke models. https://www.artisana.ai/articles/gpt-4-outperforms-elite-crowdworkers-saving-researchers-usd500-000-and-20#:~:text=Item%204-,GPT%2D4%20Outperforms%20Elite%20Crowdworkers%2C%20Saving%20Researchers%20%24500%2C000%20and%2020%2C000,about%20the%20future%20of%20crowdworking https://www.artisana.ai/articles/gpt-4-outperforms-elite-cro....
jstx1 3y ago
ChatGPT with GPT4 has made me much better and faster at solving programming problems, both at work and for working on personal projects. Many people are still sleeping on how useful LLMs are. There's a lot of related things to be skeptical about (big promises, general AI, does it replace jobs, all the new startups that are basically dressed up API calls...) but if you do any kind of knowledge work, there's a good chance that you could it much better if you also used an LLM.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  The parent is asking for a specific example use case.
  - hayksaakian 3y ago
    I can't speak for OP, but for me I literally never use stack overflow any more, and I spend about 90% less time on Google
    - styfle 3y ago
      Curious if that’s because AI provides better answers? It’s certainly not quicker answers, right?
    - 8organicbits 3y ago
      Are you not fact checking chatgpt? I've seen wrong info, especially subtle things. It seemed reckless to use as-is.
      - blowski 3y ago
        Both ChatGPT and StackOverflow suffer from content becoming outdated. So some highly-upvoted answer on StackOverflow has been out of date since 2011, and now ChatGPT is trained on it. I see the future as writing test cases (perhaps also with ChatGPT), and separately using ChatGPT to write the implementation. Perhaps we will just give it a bunch of test cases and it will return code (or submit a PR) that passes those tests.
nomel 3y ago
Documentation of old undocumented code bases. Feed in the functions, with a little context, and it works surprisingly well.
- ukuina 3y ago
  FYI, GitHub Copilot Labs (codebrushes) does this, as well.
  - nomel 3y ago
    As any coding AI should. GPT allows me to add some detailed context, with some chain of thought back and forth, to make sure the comments are "on topic". I can give more detailed instructions, especially about things like type hints, and when they should be avoided.
drc500free 3y ago
Writing emails that I had been putting off for weeks.
H8crilA 3y ago
Translation, GPT-4 put to dust other translation tools like DeepL or Google Translate. At a much higher cost, of course.
CSMastermind 3y ago
It speeds up one off throw away software work that I need to do. Here's a concrete example from work recently: > I need help writing a SQL statement. I'm using Postgresql and the database has a table called `<name>` with dozens of columns such as: `..._id`, `..._id`, `..._id`, `..._id`, etc. The columns are of type uuid. Separately I also have a list of thousands of uuids and I want to check if any values in my list are used in any of the fields on the `<name>` table. Is there a compact SQL statement that allows me to do this? I would like to avoid listing out all the columns by name. GPT-4 responed: > Yes, you can achieve this by querying the information_schema.columns to get the list of columns dynamically and then use a combination of string_agg, EXECUTE, and FORMAT functions to build and execute the SQL query. Here's an example: I ran it as written and it worked great! Could I have done this on my own? Sure, but it would have taken a few google searches, reading, trial and error to build up the query, probably 30 or 40 minutes more than just asking GPT-4 to write the query. Actually that model seems particularly good at writing SQL queries FYI, I could totally see a chat layer on top of a relational database writing all the SQL with no humans in the loop, just natural language --> LLM --> SQL.
toss1 3y ago
The most actually useful results I've gotten from ChatGPT4 is essentially a replacement for calling software or hardware tech support. E.g., in a CAD system with which I'm already familiar with the system & searching it's docs, I still find it helpful to ask obscure or complicated situations such as 'I remember reading it can do something like X, what is that and what is the command?' or 'what is a way to find and repair this kind of failure?' — the sorts of things for which I'd call tech support (if it didn't involve long hold times, etc.). ChatGPT4 has saved me already a number of long multi-dead-end hunts for finding the correct obscure command or operation name, or for building a sequence to debug and repair a model issue. Sometimes the ChatGPT4 answer is just another BS hallucinated waste of time, but it often enough does point me in the right direction far more quickly than I would have on my own.

Not sure what counts as a "business problem" for you, but personally I couldn't have gotten as far as I've come with game development without it, as I really struggle with the math and I don't know many people locally who develop games that I could get help from. GPT4 have been instrumental in helping me understand concepts I've tried to learn before but couldn't, and helps me implement algorithms I don't really understand the inner workings of, but I understand the value of the specific algorithm and how to use it. In the end, it sometimes requires extensive testing as things are wrong in subtle ways, but the same goes for the code I write myself too. I'm happy to just get further than have been possible for the last ~20 years I've tried to do it on my own. Ultimately, I want to finish games and sell them, so for me this is a "business problem", but I could totally understand that for others it isn't.

moonchrome 3y ago
Sound like you need to learn to search. There's tons of resources on game dev. I can sort of see the value of using GPT here but have you tried using it in an area you're an expert in ? The rate of convincing bullshit vs correct answers is astonishing. It gets better with Phind/Bing but then it's a roulette that it will hit valid answers in the index fast enough. My point is - learning with GPT at this point sounds like setting yourself up for failure - you won't know when it's bullshiting you and you're missing out on learning how to actually learn. By the time LLMs are reliable enough to teach you, whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM.
- ghaff 3y ago
  With respect to writing I've used it for things I know enough to write--and will have to look up some quotes, data, etc. in any case. GPT gives me a sort of 0th draft that saves me some time but I don't need to check every assertion to see if it's right or reasonable because I already know. But it doesn't really solve a business problem for me. Just saves some time and gives me a starting point. Though on-the-fly spellchecking and, to a lesser degree grammar checking, help me a lot too--especially if I'm not going to ultimately be copyedited.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > Sound like you need to learn to search Sounds like you need to not be condescending :) Of course I've searched and tried countless of avenues to pick up this, I'm not saying it's absolutely not possible without GPT, just that I found it the easiest way of learning. And it's not "Write a function that does X" but more employing the Socratic method to help me further understand a subject, that I can then dive deeper into myself. But having a rubber duck is infinitive worth, if you happen to a programmer, you probably can see the value in this. > have you tried using it in an area you're an expert in ? The rate of convincing bullshit vs correct answers is astonishing. It gets better with Phind/Bing but then it's a roulette that it will hit valid answers in the index fast enough. Yes, programming is my expertise, and I use it daily for programming and it's doing fine for me (GPT4 that is, GPT3.5 and models before are basically trash). Bing is probably one of the worst implementations of GPT I've seen in the wild, so it seems like our experience already differs quite a bit. > you won't know when it's bullshiting you and you're missing out on learning how to actually learn. Yeah, you can tell relatively easy if it's bullshitting and making things up, if you're paying any sort of attention to what it tells you. > By the time LLMs are reliable enough to teach you, whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM. Disagree, I'm not learning in order to generate more money for myself or whatever, I'm learning because the process of learning is fun, and I want to be able to build games myself. A LLM will never be able to replace that, as part of the fun is that I'm the one doing it.
  - ohmahjong 3y ago
    I have personally found the rubber-ducking to be really helpful, especially for more exploratory work. I find myself typing "So if I understand correctly, the code does this this and this because of this" and usually get some helpful feedback. It feels a bit like pair programming with someone who knows 90% of the documentation for an older version of a relevant library - definitely more helpful than me by myself, and with somewhat less communication overhead that actually pairing with a human.
  - moonchrome 3y ago
    >Yeah, you can tell relatively easy if it's bullshitting and making things up, if you're paying any sort of attention to what it tells you. It's trained on generating the most likely completion to some text, it's not at all easy to tell if it's bullshitting you if you're a newbie. Agreed that I was condescending and dismissive in my reply, been dealing with people trying to use ChatGPT to get free lunch without understanding the problem recently so I just assume at this point, my bad.
- space_fountain 3y ago
  > By the time LLMs are reliable enough to teach you, whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM. For solving the really common problem of working in a new area LLMs being unreliable isn't actually a big deal. If I just need to know what some math is called or understand how to use an equation, it's often very easy to verify an answer, but can be hard to find it through google. I might not know the right terms to search or my options might be hard to locate documentation or SEO spam
  - moonchrome 3y ago
    This is fair, using it as a starting point to learning could be useful if you're ready/able to do the rest of the process. Maybe I was too dismissive because it read to me like OP couldn't do that and thought he found the magic trick to skip that part.
- nicetryguy 3y ago
  > Sound like you need to learn to search. There's tons of resources on game dev. I have been making games since / in Flash, HTML5, Unity, and classic consoles using ASM such as NES / SNES / Gameboy: Tons of resources are WRONG, tutorials are incomplete, engines are buggy, answers you find on stackoverflow are outdated, even official documentation can be littered with gaping holes and unmentioned gotcha's. I have found GPT incredibly valuable when it comes to spitting out exact syntax and tons of lines that i otherwise would have spent hours and hours to write combing through dodgy forum posts, arrogant SO douchebags, and the questionable word salad that is the "official documentation"; and it just does it instantly. What a godsend! > you won't know when it's bullshiting you and you're missing out on learning how to actually learn. Have you tried ...compiling it? You can challenge, question, and iterate with GPT at a speed that you cannot with other resources: i doubt you are better off combing pages and pages of Ctrl+F'ing PDFs / giant repositories or getting Just The Right Google Query to get exactly what you need on page 4. GPT isn't perfect but god damn it is a hell of alot better and faster than anything that has ever existed before. > whatever you're learning is probably irrelevant since it can be solved better by LLM. Not true. It still makes mistakes (as of Apr '23) and still needs a decent bit of hand holding. Can / should you take what it says as fact? No. But my experience says i can say that about any resource honestly.
  - moonchrome 3y ago
    >I have found GPT incredibly valuable when it comes to spitting out exact syntax and tons of lines that i otherwise would have spent hours and hours to write combing through dodgy forum posts, arrogant SO douchebags, and the questionable word salad that is the "official documentation"; and it just does it instantly. What a godsend! IMO if you're learning from GPT you have to double check it's answers, and then you have to go through the same song and dance. For problems that are well documented you might as well start with those. If you're struggling with something how do you know it's not bullshitting you ? Especially for learning, I can see "copy paste and test if it works" flying if you need a quick fix but for learning I've seen it give right answers with wrong reasoning and wrong answers with right reasoning. I'm not disagreeing with you on code part, my no.1 use case right now is bash scripting/short scripts/tedious model translations - where it's easy to provide all the context and easy to verify the solution. I'd disagree on the fastest tool part, part of the reason I'm not using it more is because it's so slow (and responses are full of pointless fluff that eats tokens even when you ask it to be concise or give code only). Iterating on nontrivial solutions is usually slower than writing them out on my own (depending on the problem).
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Funny enough, I’d been wanting to learn some assembly for my M1 MacBook but had given up after attempts at googling for help as I ran into really basic issues and since I was just messing around and had plenty of actually productive things to work on. A few sessions with ChatGPT sorted out various platform specific things and within tens of minutes I was popping stacks and conditionally jumping to my heart’s delight.
  - erichocean 3y ago
    Yup, ChatGPT is, paradoxically, MOST USEFUL in areas you already know something about. It's easy to nudge it (chat) towards the actual answers you're looking for. GP is way off base IMO.
    - moonchrome 3y ago
      After trying to use it as such so far : Nontrivial problem solutions are wishful thinking hallucinations, eg. I ask it for some way to use AWS service X and it comes up with a perfect solution - that I spend 10 minutes desperately trying to uncover - and find out that it doesn't exist and I've wasted 15 minutes of my life. "Nudging it" with followups how it's described solutions violate some common patterns on the platform, it doubles down on it's bullshit by inventing other features that would support the functionality. It's the worst when what you're trying to do can't really be done with constraints specified. It gives out bullshit reasoning and code, eg. I wanted it to shorten some function I spitballed and it made the code both subtly wrong (by switching to unordered collection) and slower (switching from list to hash map with no benefit). And then even claims it's solution is faster because it avoids allocations ! (where my solution was adding new KeyValuePair to the list, which is a value type and doesn't actually allocate anything). I can easily see a newbie absorbing this BS - you need background knowledge to break it down. Or another example I wanted to check the rationale behind some lint warning, not only was it off base but it even said some blatantly wrong facts in the process (like default equality comparison in C# being ordinal ignore case ???). In my experience working with junior/mid members the amount of half assed/seemingly working solutions that I had to PR in last couple of months has increased and a lot (along with "shrug ChatGPT wrote it"). Maybe in some areas like ASM for a specific machine there's not a lot of newbie friendly material and ChatGPT can grok it correctly (or it's easy to tweak the outputs because you know what it should look like) - but that's not the case for gamedev. Like there are multiple books titled "math for game developers" (OP use case).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lamontcg 3y ago
I don't particularly have a big problem with math at the level that AIs tend to be useful for, and find that it tends to hallucinate if you ask it anything which is moderately difficult. There's sort of a narrow area where if you ask it for something fairly common but moderately complicated like a translation matrix that it usually can come up with it, and can write it in the language that you specify. But guarding against hallucinations is almost as much trouble as looking it up on wikipedia or something and writing it yourself. The language model really needs to be combined with the hard rules of arithmetic/algebra/calculus/dimensional-analysis/etc in a way that it can't violate them and just mash up some equations that its been trained on even though the result is absolute nonsense.
klabb3 3y ago
This vibes with my experience as well. In terms of actual long term value, this kind of educational exploration is promising. It acts, in a way, as a domain expert who understands your language and can help you orient yourself in a domain which is otherwise difficult to penetrate. I also am happy that language-as-gate-keeping, which is plaguing so many fields both in academia and business, is going to quickly be “democratized”, in the best sense of the word. LLMs can help you decipher text written in eg law speak, and it also can translate your own words into a form that will get grand poobah to take you seriously. Kind of like a spell/grammar checker on steroids.

Fordec 3y ago

Name one business problem solved with any tool that can only be solved by that tool and nothing else. It's not about uniqueness, the name of the game is efficiency/scaling already solvable problems by multiple or skilled humans and reducing one of those dimensions.

cloudking 3y ago
Fair, edited to include "as efficiently". I'm cutting through the noise to find some signals for how people are using these APIs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

potatoman22 3y ago

Named entity recognition - extracting structured data from text

rolisz 3y ago
But there are fairly good models for doing NER that are not LLMs. Models that are open source and you can even run on a CPU, with parameter counts in the hundred of millions, not billions.
- billythemaniam 3y ago
  While true, GPT-4 kinda just gets a lot of the classic NLP tasks, such as NER, right with zero fine-tuning or minimal prompt engineering (or whatever you want to call it). I haven't done an extensive study, but I do NLP daily as part of my current job. I often reach for GPT-4 now, and so far it does a better job than any other pretrained models or ones I've trained/fine-tuned, at least for data I work on.
  - rolisz 3y ago
    But what about cost? There was a recent article saying that Doordash makes 40 billion predictions per day, which would result in 40 million dollars per day if using GPT4. Sure, GPT4 is great for experimenting with and I often try it out, but at the end of the day, for deploying a widely used model, the cost benefit analysis will favor bespoke models a lot of the time.
    - travisjungroth 3y ago
      It’s not hard to find a case where GPT4 is a bad fit.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  GPT-4 generally performs better than expert human workers on NLP tasks, nevermind bespoke models. https://www.artisana.ai/articles/gpt-4-outperforms-elite-crowdworkers-saving-researchers-usd500-000-and-20#:~:text=Item%204-,GPT%2D4%20Outperforms%20Elite%20Crowdworkers%2C%20Saving%20Researchers%20%24500%2C000%20and%2020%2C000,about%20the%20future%20of%20crowdworking https://www.artisana.ai/articles/gpt-4-outperforms-elite-cro....

jstx1 3y ago

ChatGPT with GPT4 has made me much better and faster at solving programming problems, both at work and for working on personal projects. Many people are still sleeping on how useful LLMs are. There's a lot of related things to be skeptical about (big promises, general AI, does it replace jobs, all the new startups that are basically dressed up API calls...) but if you do any kind of knowledge work, there's a good chance that you could it much better if you also used an LLM.

jabradoodle 3y ago
The parent is asking for a specific example use case.
- hayksaakian 3y ago
  I can't speak for OP, but for me I literally never use stack overflow any more, and I spend about 90% less time on Google
  - styfle 3y ago
    Curious if that’s because AI provides better answers? It’s certainly not quicker answers, right?
  - 8organicbits 3y ago
    Are you not fact checking chatgpt? I've seen wrong info, especially subtle things. It seemed reckless to use as-is.
    - blowski 3y ago
      Both ChatGPT and StackOverflow suffer from content becoming outdated. So some highly-upvoted answer on StackOverflow has been out of date since 2011, and now ChatGPT is trained on it. I see the future as writing test cases (perhaps also with ChatGPT), and separately using ChatGPT to write the implementation. Perhaps we will just give it a bunch of test cases and it will return code (or submit a PR) that passes those tests.

nomel 3y ago

Documentation of old undocumented code bases. Feed in the functions, with a little context, and it works surprisingly well.

ukuina 3y ago
FYI, GitHub Copilot Labs (codebrushes) does this, as well.
- nomel 3y ago
  As any coding AI should. GPT allows me to add some detailed context, with some chain of thought back and forth, to make sure the comments are "on topic". I can give more detailed instructions, especially about things like type hints, and when they should be avoided.

drc500free 3y ago

Writing emails that I had been putting off for weeks.

H8crilA 3y ago

Translation, GPT-4 put to dust other translation tools like DeepL or Google Translate. At a much higher cost, of course.

CSMastermind 3y ago

It speeds up one off throw away software work that I need to do. Here's a concrete example from work recently: > I need help writing a SQL statement. I'm using Postgresql and the database has a table called `<name>` with dozens of columns such as: `..._id`, `..._id`, `..._id`, `..._id`, etc. The columns are of type uuid. Separately I also have a list of thousands of uuids and I want to check if any values in my list are used in any of the fields on the `<name>` table. Is there a compact SQL statement that allows me to do this? I would like to avoid listing out all the columns by name. GPT-4 responed: > Yes, you can achieve this by querying the information_schema.columns to get the list of columns dynamically and then use a combination of string_agg, EXECUTE, and FORMAT functions to build and execute the SQL query. Here's an example: I ran it as written and it worked great! Could I have done this on my own? Sure, but it would have taken a few google searches, reading, trial and error to build up the query, probably 30 or 40 minutes more than just asking GPT-4 to write the query. Actually that model seems particularly good at writing SQL queries FYI, I could totally see a chat layer on top of a relational database writing all the SQL with no humans in the loop, just natural language --> LLM --> SQL.

toss1 3y ago

The most actually useful results I've gotten from ChatGPT4 is essentially a replacement for calling software or hardware tech support. E.g., in a CAD system with which I'm already familiar with the system & searching it's docs, I still find it helpful to ask obscure or complicated situations such as 'I remember reading it can do something like X, what is that and what is the command?' or 'what is a way to find and repair this kind of failure?' — the sorts of things for which I'd call tech support (if it didn't involve long hold times, etc.). ChatGPT4 has saved me already a number of long multi-dead-end hunts for finding the correct obscure command or operation name, or for building a sequence to debug and repair a model issue. Sometimes the ChatGPT4 answer is just another BS hallucinated waste of time, but it often enough does point me in the right direction far more quickly than I would have on my own.