12 ms·

Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

97 points by absolute100 3y ago

jonwinstanley 3y ago
Sure, anyone that uses ChatGPT knows it's currently not perfect. But there's a presumption that these tools are going to keep improving over time. Which is presumably why the AI hype is so strong. Whether AI ends up displacing people from their jobs in the long term, well, that's impossible to know. Just because no technological advancement has ever done that in the past doesn't mean it will never happen in the future.
- mbgerring 3y ago
  As long as the accuracy of an LLM’s output is unknowable, there’s going to be a pretty hard limit on the kinds of jobs these tools can “replace”. And its not at all clear that this fundamental problem can be fixed at all with the current approach.
  - adam_arthur 3y ago
    A tool doesn't have to obviate a worker's contributions 1:1 to replace them. If one person can now do the work of 1.5 people, then the number of people needed for a profession shrinks, all else equal. For example, a professional translator may be able to do 2x the work by leveraging LLM/other AI, even though you still need them to validate the results. If productivity doubles, then only half the people are required to meet current needs.
  - mediaman 3y ago
    The mistake is in believing that LLM's output should be deterministic to be useful. Human output is not deterministic. Fields with text-heavy output are already being upended by this. Being able to summarize long legal briefs, identify contract problems, do classification of discovery documents, or even write first drafts of common legal forms is already upending the legal discipline. Chat-based customer support agents are seeing 25% productivity improvements based on two-year-old models for new employees, according to a study published in NBER. Things like BabyAGI and other sequential "do anything" tools appear to be close to useless now, and unfortunately that is what is catching a lot of hype on Twitter. But actual industry applications are much quieter (often NDA) and much more impactful.
    - danaris 3y ago
      It's not about being deterministic. It's about the LLM itself having any way to determine whether what it says is true.
      - mediaman 3y ago
        Not understanding why this is an issue for LLMs but not humans. This is a simple commercial decision to make governed by three factors. 1. What is the cost of making an error? 2. What is the cost of the human doing the work? 3. What is the likelihood of the human making an error? It's just evaluating how much more likely AI is to make an error than a human, by the cost of that error, set against the savings by using fewer humans. Look at the legal profession. Sometimes the cost of an error is high, but usually it is not. There are already tons of little errors in contracts and discovery, and today they're all human. And people are very expensive. There is a giant swath of legal work that looks very attractive to automate at less than 100% accuracy. Customer service: people offer poor customer service all the time, and usually the cost of that error is low. Human customer service isn't as expensive as legal work, but it's still relatively expensive. Very attractive to automate at less than 100% accuracy.
        danaris 3y ago
        > Not understanding why this is an issue for LLMs but not humans. Because humans have the capability to understand where their information comes from, and thus give enough meta-information to evaluate an accuracy rating, even if not all of them are good at it all the time. I understand that there has been some effort to build this capability into LLMs, and that it works a little bit for some of them, but it is not something that most of them are fundamentally capable of.
        feanix 3y ago
        I have met many a human that, despite having that capability, will just choose not to use it to the point of getting violently emotional to protect their ignorance and viewpoints. Whereas, even though their capabilities are lacking, as someone who is disabled, I've found working with LLM to be much more effective. I've had the medical community gaslight me and actively use processes that make things worse. I've had the educational community restrict me from accessing education. I've had the legal community weaves webs of "yes the policy states that we must comply but that's actually a suggestion." Even when it comes to interacting with people socially, my experience has been one of violence and trauma. So, in the face of everything it can't do, I'd much rather place my bets there than with humans. I myself am human. What human do you know would spend effort asserting that? One who is constantly dehumanized by society. And I think there is a lot of opportunity for disabled people to use this tech to be accepted as humans? Or to at least gaslight society back into thinking we are? People won't be able to maintain "The Status Quo" and, frankly, I can't wait.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    Humans can make mistakes and lie, and we've been able to deal with it by checking their work, giving feedback to help them improve, placing less trust in those who habitually lie, etc.. LLMs making mistakes and "hallucinating" can be dealt with in similar ways, and as this is an open area of research with lots of proposed solutions and probably many more in the years to come, we do/will have plenty of other ways to deal with it too.
- ska 3y ago
  It’s not the first time we’ve been here , either, with AI although t this time it’s a bit more in the public , ie retail sphere. There are people who will confidently tell you that LLM are the next transistor level invention, and people who will tell you it’s more incremental, like eg an electric pressure cooker - improvement in some ways over what came before, got lots of people using them, but not fundamental. I’m sure there is a better example. Anyway, the truth is nobody actually knows at this point .
jostmey 3y ago
This critique asserts that ChatGPT propagates inaccuracies. While there may be instances where this holds true, the given example does not substantiate this claim. The article alleges that ChatGPT stated Russia has launched bears into space, an assertion that is evidently false. However, my own interaction with ChatGPT 4.0 contradicts this. When I posed the same question, the AI unequivocally responded that no nation has, in fact, sent bears to space. Thus, in this instance, the claims of the article are unfounded. This response was also written using chat GTP
- kgwxd 3y ago
  Maybe the conversation history lead to "bear" having a less mainstream definition and made the response contextually correct.
- beambot 3y ago
  Water Bears (tardigrades) have gone to space: https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space
  - classified 3y ago
    We've known that since Star Trek Discovery.
- mepuji 3y ago
  Most articles like this are comparing older versions of chatgpt and pointing out flaws. ChatGPT-3.5 for example still states Russia has sent bears into space.
- danaris 3y ago
  This comment seems to be perpetuating another misunderstanding about how LLMs like ChatGPT work: the idea that they have a "model of the world" that is consistent, but sometimes incorrect. They do not. There is no reason why two different people, asking the same question of ChatGPT, would necessarily get the same inaccurate answer. There is also no reason why they would get similar correct answers. What they will get is answers that are statistically likely based on the text in ChatGPT's training data.
substation13 3y ago
It's really easy to get an LLM to hallucinate by asking an open ended question - the type typically answered by a Google search or checking Wikiedpia. However, this is not the best application of LLMs. This criticism is getting old. LLMs are great at: - Text synthesis given all of the facts in a prompt (expand these bullet points) - Summarization (condense this text) - Data extraction (fit this data into this schema) - Fiction (virtual characters, scripts, etc.) They will dramatically change these industries.
- morelisp 3y ago
  > However, this is not the best application of LLMs It is, however, the commercial application everyone - including search engines! - is implementing.
  - substation13 3y ago
    I can see LLMs as a novel front-end for a traditional search engine.
    - morelisp 3y ago
      However, this is not the best application of LLMs.
  - iamjackg 3y ago
    To be fair, the ones I've seen use a form of point 1 (giving all facts in the prompt) by allowing for searching the web, which becomes a version of point 2 (summarization).
- soperj 3y ago
  > - Fiction (virtual characters, scripts, etc.) I've found it bad for this, does not generate something I'd actually read.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    It seems to do ok at coming up with starting points or give you options if you're stuck. But the quality of the prose it comes up with is indeed awful. It gets a bit better if you ask it to write in the style of a specific author, but marginally so. I guess maybe it gets to mediocre fan fiction level. That's still pretty impressive, but not very usable for creative writing yet.
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
Between Vice going bankrupt and AI Salon has to be sweating.
bumbledraven 3y ago
This is yet another article about "ChatGPT" that doesn't contain the strings "GPT-4" or "GPT4".
- modernpink 3y ago
  I tried two of the "failure mode" examples given: The Russian bears in space, and walking across a river with an average depth of 3 feet. The examples fail in GPT-3.5 while GPT-4 gives the "correct" response. The article is already out of date.
  - bumbledraven 3y ago
    The article was out of date when it was published on March 19. GPT-4 was released on March 14.
    - modernpink 3y ago
      Yes, that was my point.
      - bumbledraven 3y ago
        If that was your point, then you expressed it poorly. You wrote: "The article is already out of date." (emphasis added). That implies that the article was out of date as of the time you wrote your comment, or at some unspecified point prior to that, but, in fact a stronger and more specific claim is true, namely, that the article was out of date as of the time of its publication, approximately 2 months ago.
didip 3y ago
Meh, every tool when they are young sucks. HTTP in 1995 was awful. But that didn’t stop the explosion of industries following behind it.
cl42 3y ago
The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse. The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines. So it goes. I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing things with it. Unions are already pushing back on AI (truckers, federal employees in Canada, writers in Hollywood) and maybe rightly so. At the same time, dismissing these technologies because they don't meet your high standards yet is probably foolish.
- wnevets 3y ago
  A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 3y ago
    What? Safari on your phone was mind blowing and immediately useful. Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.
    - iforgotpassword 3y ago
      I... Think they were? I kinda remember having ICQ on it, but maybe that was already the iPhone 2. Or I'm hallucinating.
      - jrmg 3y ago
        There were only built-in apps on release. Third party apps and the App Store came in the iPhoneOS 2.0 update.
    - wnevets 3y ago
      > Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone. So it was even worse than I remember.
gyudin 3y ago
The have completely no idea what they are writing about But maybe this is a good part. We’ll have less uneducated journalists and more opinions of actual specialists. Making those articles sound fresh, interesting, and easy to read with the help of LLMs.
05bmckay 3y ago
14 Reasons why ChatGPT is only the beginning of AI. ...Twitter right now
- visarga 3y ago
  I banned 2-3 of these twisticles (twitter listicles) from my feed. The fact that I follow the AI researches doesn't mean I want this spam.
teawrecks 3y ago
is there anyone claiming ChatGPT is the "holy grail" of AI research? it's pretty cool. it's an important step. it's far from the holy grail.
- gfody 3y ago
  AGI has long been consisdered the holy grail of AI research and GPT-4 is basically an AGI so..
- JieJie 3y ago
  Modern headline algorithms follow this formula: Scenario I Made Up? Doesn't It Stress You Out? Click for Relief!
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Morons, maybe? Thing is, there will always be morons. LLMs are just the latest thing to be moronic about. That's why I really don't appreciate these downer articles very much. I think LLMs are awesome and they've now become a part of my everyday life, but it's a little much to say they're the "holy grail." At the same time, ChatGPT does deserve hype. It's an achievement that we've essentially invented the ship's computer from Star Trek, and have it available for free or at an affordable price to everyone. When people reduce ChatGPT down to little more than statistics, I don't think they actually understand the technology or cognition at even a basic level, and a lot of the critiques towards ChatGPT come off as butthurtedness.
galaxytachyon 3y ago
As the hype phase has passed (probably), now we will see a bit of overcorrection with these dismissive articles. Sure, LLMs as they are now aren't anywhere close to true AGI and even Microsoft admitted it. But its potential is not something anyone can ignore. The capabilities of LLMs has already been successfully used by millions of people and startups. It is a groundbreaking improvement that makes at least one field of study nearly obsolete (NLP). It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less. With the multimodal models coming next and still exabytes of videos, games, sound, musics, etc. data to train them, we aren't peaking yet. Sure, it isn't the holy grail. But it is a really valuable treasure that only a few exist, to use the same analogy. To view it so dismissively because of some drawbacks, which are entirely obvious and can be accounted for, is just arrogance.
- ARandumGuy 3y ago
  > It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less. Corporations and governments have thrown tons of money into technologies that ended up going nowhere. We're only a few years out from everyone dumping their money into "blockchain solutions", which turned out to go nowhere. Investors and government stakeholders are easily swayed by hype. Sometimes this hype is well placed, but often the hype results in throwing money at projects that don't produce anything of value. Hype just isn't a good measure of a technology's long term viability.
  - galaxytachyon 3y ago
    When only a few of them followed the hype, yes, it can possibly go nowhere. But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real. An easy example is the first iPhone. Another more negative example is bitcoin which even though it is probably a scam, its values and influence on society has massively grown more than what it was 1 year after released. Even though it has been a disappointment technologically.
ARandumGuy 3y ago
This reminds of all the hype for self-driving cars a few years back. Self-driving systems performed well for 95% of driving, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the last 5% was ironed out. Turns out, the last 5% was both extremely difficult, and extremely important. It turns out that a self driving car that randomly makes dangerous maneuvers isn't desirable. Similarly, a LLM that occasionally outputs plausible sounding bullshit quickly turns from a useful tool to something actively harmful.
- Heliosmaster 3y ago
  As far as I understand, LLMs with 95% correct answers are much more useful than a car that doesn't crash 95% of times (if you need to pay attention to correct mistakes, you may well be driving). A 95% correct LLM might be utter garbage in some areas but nearly flawless (thus reliable) in other, menial and time consuming tasks, such as summarization, rewording, providing new ideas, etc.
  - elfleco 3y ago
    Also a 95% correct LLM is arguably the same or better than a human doing a similar task.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Yesterday, I had a sticky Swift/iOS issue. Checked SO, Apple Discussions, etc. Then, on a whim, I asked ChatGPT for a suggestion. > They are also prone to confident assertions of statements that are blatantly false. It suggested something that referenced a nonexistent property of a standard UIKit class. It wouldn't even compile. It was quite positive that this would fix my issue. After refreshing a couple of times (and also mentioning the first one sucked), it finally gave me something that still didn't work, but gave me an avenue that I could explore, and that finally yielded the solution. I suspect that the reason for the confident assertion that included an illegal property, was because it was trained on Swift code that was extended (I do that a lot, myself. In fact, I ended up creating my own extension that added the nonexistent property). Modern programming languages allow you to extend even language primitive types, and JavaScript has allowed that kind of thing for many years. It may be a while before we can entirely trust ChatGPT to give us all the answers. To be fair, however, it did help me to land upon the correct solution, but I still had to fire up some candlepower of my own.
- TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  GPT4 is significantly better at code fyi, not sure if you used default ChatGPT (which is 3.5turbo). Premium ChatGPT gives you access to GPT4, but the API gives you even more access with the ability to edit the "system" prompt which Sam Altman's said is very important and which I can attest to from my testing.
  - arlcode 3y ago
    I did and do try it with GPT4 and the API and a custom prompt to help me in rust. Expecting only knowledge from 2021 it is hit and miss. Helped me to write some scripts but still fails to recognize tasks that are not possible in the language and halluciantes a plausible solution. It tends to suggest non non compiling and (after being asked to do so) "corrects" bugs (some real some imaginary) and sometimes gets stuck. Helpful yes, but not yet the invincible overlord some people imagine it to be.
    - TheCaptain4815 3y ago
simonw 3y ago
This article is from March 2023, which in LLM terms is pretty old! The "How many bears have the Russians sent into space?" question still returns hallucinations with ChatGPT 3.5 but, unsurprisingly, gets a correct answer from GPT-4.
- nottorp 3y ago
  But is it because GPT-4 is better, or because the owners have hand tuned the public embarrassing examples out by hand?
  - simonw 3y ago
    It's definitely because GPT-4 is better - I've seen this kind of improvement across all kinds of prompts I've tried myself as well.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
strangescript 3y ago
There were literally articles like this about the internet in 1999
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  FFS, once more for those in the back since people who don't understand how logic works keep pushing this dumb "point" on this board for various things: "Successful technology was once argued against" is not evidence that "any technology that is argued against will be successful". That should not be a hard concept to grasp, yet it seems to elude so many. A -> B does not mean B -> A. That's literally like day two of any class on formal logic, and only because the first day was spent discussing the syllabus.
idopmstuff 3y ago
I'm surprised this article is getting upvoted - it feels like very lazy journalism to me. > The discomforting reality is that, while Altman and his ilk have been predicting an exponential acceleration of productivity, we have been experiencing a deceleration. This is a very big claim, and there is absolutely nothing to back it up. The only specific reference to productivity is about an MIT paper that showed increases in worker productivity (but the authors of this just wave that aside as unimportant because they didn't think the work it was doing was important). > More dangerously, ChatGPT can make authoritative statements that sound believable but turn out to be false if investigated closely. We get it! We know! But look, this is a bad use case for GPT. If you pretend that it only has a single use case, and you pick the use case that it's worst at, you will think it's bad. This is just so, so lazy. No references to summarizing docs or writing code/SQL queries/Excel formulas or any of the other things that it's genuinely useful at. > At best, LLMs can be used for rough first drafts of low-value writing tasks with humans filling in the details and checking for rants and lies. Rants? Come on - GPT hallucinates, but it's not an unhinged lunatic that goes ranting about stuff. Also, again, this is not all they can be used for - it just ignores all of the better use cases. > What about Altman's vision of humans appreciating art and nature while most of the world's goods and services are produced by AI? We have a lot more respect for the work that people do than for the usefulness of LLMs. Huh? It's great that you respect the work people do, but that has nothing to do with whether they'll affect society. > ChatGPT is entertaining but it is, at most, a baby step towards an AI revolution and, at worst, a very expensive detour away from the holy grail of artificial general intelligence. What? This is the closing to the article and it just throws out this enormous claim, which is backed up by absolutely nothing. It's demonstrably a big step towards an AI revolution - if nothing else, it's brought a ton of money and interest into the space, which is certainly important for a revolution. But to say it's a detour away from AGI and then give absolutely no explanation of why that is or what direction AI research should be going? This is very poor journalism.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  > This is very poor journalism Then be the change you want to see. Write a counterargument and submit it. Better yet, use an LLM to write the article and state the prompts used.
ftxbro 3y ago
My takeaway from the article is how bad mainstream takes were on LLMs just two months ago.
akisej 3y ago
This feels like classic Hype Cycle content: the higher we peak on Inflated Expectations the lower we'll find ourselves on the Trough of Disillusionment.
Last5Digits 3y ago
Using ChatGPT to get facts is like going to a restaurant to buy your groceries. Sure, you could pick out slices of tomato and scrape the salt off of your steak, bring it all home and cook a meal - but the supermarket next door can offer the same ingredients without the hassle. Just as the point of a restaurant is to process and cook the ingredients for you, the point of ChatGPT is the preprocessing of facts and information. If you just want fresh, unprepared facts, go to Google or Wikipedia; if you want an informational meal, go to ChatGPT.
Mizoguchi 3y ago
The author of the article judges the future of LLMs and AI using the current state of affairs, as is these technologies are not evolving very quickly. GPT3 and GPT4 are only 3 years apart, yet GPT4 is a completely different beast. And we are talking only about LLMs, we haven't yet seen what's coming in vision for example. Also I have not heard OpenAI or any serious AI visionary say ChatGPT is the holy grail of AI research. It is undoubtedly one of the best consumer ready technologies we have seen in the field to date but it just a tiny little piece of a massive infrastructure that is still in its very early stages. It's like saying HTML was the holy grail of the Internet. It was an important component of it but without fiber optics, microchips, radio, smartphones, algorithms, etc the Internet would not have been possible the way we know it today.
methodical 3y ago
I think a lot of people on here are for some reason believers in the idea that if a technology has detractors, then it must be another case of the steam engine, human flight, or some other technology that had doubters before completely revolutionizing our world. In reality, there is no such law of the universe that says that some technology will be wildly successful because it is heavily controversial, and, in some cases, it turns out that a lot people were correct in predicting a technology's short/long term uselessness (crypto, web3, AR). Every time some article is posted highlighting AI's shortcomings in relation to its posited ubiquity in professional settings about 10 people wax poetic about how the internet/cars/etc. were doubted heavily, when they clearly are not similar in nearly any regard. I wish we could appreciate new technology without blowing its applications out of proportion and then being disappointed when it falls short of an impossible bar, which is my main gripe with both AI doomers and people who are entirely dismissive of the technology (despite basically nobody saying anything of the sort).
- sharemywin 3y ago
  a couple observations in favor of AGI getting here quicker than we anticipate: ChatGPT isn't an LLM it's a product(blackbox) with one part being an LLM. Go, Chess, Dota 2 would be better examples of things that AI mastered. "NVIDIA GPU computing has given the industry a path forward -- and will provide a 1,000X speed-up by 2025" LLM agents do seem to work better than LLMs on their own.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > I think a lot of people on here are for some reason believers in the idea that if a technology has detractors, then it must be another case of the steam engine, human flight, or some other technology that had doubters before completely revolutionizing our world. I think that's a misinterpretation - I don't think that it's a revolutionary technology because it has detractors or because it's controversial; I think it's revolutionary because of its capabilities. Those comparisons just serve to point out that there are plenty of historical examples of people criticizing things that turned out to be revolutionary, and the same may well turn out to be the case here.
- tim333 3y ago
ck2 3y ago
I'm trying to imagine a few next generations from now. Then imagine full voice recognition and voice synthesis attached to it, on every phone, every watch, every car. The news, the headlines, on every page you visit is going to be custom re-written by AI for every bit of data they can get on you, even your IP address if they have nothing else. Any job not replaced by AI is going to be AI-assisted, it is inevitable. Wendy's is already replacing order-takers with AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888362
keskival 3y ago
Large Language Models aren't a silver bullet – they don't solve all your problems. But they are a holy grail – as a universal common sense module they give IT systems a capability they never had before, a capability which has been sought after from since computers became a thing, a capacity for common sense. We now have that capacity and that alone will revolutionize the world. The chatbots aren't about chat, they are about common sense. Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential. We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI.
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  Wait until they can watch TV to learn (I am serious). If you imbue them with competitive play, oh boy. We just gotta figure out what they think funny is.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1696/ https://xkcd.com/1696/
  - belter 3y ago
    "Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04501 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04501
    - nerpderp82 3y ago
      Neat! https://github.com/facebookresearch/lavila https://github.com/facebookresearch/lavila
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  > Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential. > We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI. There’s an important difference between exponential and sigmoidal curves. The early stages are indistinguishable, and not enough time has passed to judge. Personally, I don’t think AGI is possible with current techniques. You say all that’s needed is self play or RLHF. This is categorically not true. It doesn’t even guarantee that AIs will ever care whether they’re alive, a fundamental property of sentience.
stuaxo 3y ago
Anyone that uses it will realise it quickly.
TheDudeMan 3y ago
Who claimed it was the holy grail?
steve76 3y ago
[dead]

97 points by absolute100 3y ago

Sure, anyone that uses ChatGPT knows it's currently not perfect. But there's a presumption that these tools are going to keep improving over time. Which is presumably why the AI hype is so strong. Whether AI ends up displacing people from their jobs in the long term, well, that's impossible to know. Just because no technological advancement has ever done that in the past doesn't mean it will never happen in the future.

mbgerring 3y ago
As long as the accuracy of an LLM’s output is unknowable, there’s going to be a pretty hard limit on the kinds of jobs these tools can “replace”. And its not at all clear that this fundamental problem can be fixed at all with the current approach.
- adam_arthur 3y ago
  A tool doesn't have to obviate a worker's contributions 1:1 to replace them. If one person can now do the work of 1.5 people, then the number of people needed for a profession shrinks, all else equal. For example, a professional translator may be able to do 2x the work by leveraging LLM/other AI, even though you still need them to validate the results. If productivity doubles, then only half the people are required to meet current needs.
- mediaman 3y ago
  The mistake is in believing that LLM's output should be deterministic to be useful. Human output is not deterministic. Fields with text-heavy output are already being upended by this. Being able to summarize long legal briefs, identify contract problems, do classification of discovery documents, or even write first drafts of common legal forms is already upending the legal discipline. Chat-based customer support agents are seeing 25% productivity improvements based on two-year-old models for new employees, according to a study published in NBER. Things like BabyAGI and other sequential "do anything" tools appear to be close to useless now, and unfortunately that is what is catching a lot of hype on Twitter. But actual industry applications are much quieter (often NDA) and much more impactful.
  - danaris 3y ago
    It's not about being deterministic. It's about the LLM itself having any way to determine whether what it says is true.
    - mediaman 3y ago
      Not understanding why this is an issue for LLMs but not humans. This is a simple commercial decision to make governed by three factors. 1. What is the cost of making an error? 2. What is the cost of the human doing the work? 3. What is the likelihood of the human making an error? It's just evaluating how much more likely AI is to make an error than a human, by the cost of that error, set against the savings by using fewer humans. Look at the legal profession. Sometimes the cost of an error is high, but usually it is not. There are already tons of little errors in contracts and discovery, and today they're all human. And people are very expensive. There is a giant swath of legal work that looks very attractive to automate at less than 100% accuracy. Customer service: people offer poor customer service all the time, and usually the cost of that error is low. Human customer service isn't as expensive as legal work, but it's still relatively expensive. Very attractive to automate at less than 100% accuracy.
      - danaris 3y ago
        > Not understanding why this is an issue for LLMs but not humans. Because humans have the capability to understand where their information comes from, and thus give enough meta-information to evaluate an accuracy rating, even if not all of them are good at it all the time. I understand that there has been some effort to build this capability into LLMs, and that it works a little bit for some of them, but it is not something that most of them are fundamentally capable of.
        feanix 3y ago
        I have met many a human that, despite having that capability, will just choose not to use it to the point of getting violently emotional to protect their ignorance and viewpoints. Whereas, even though their capabilities are lacking, as someone who is disabled, I've found working with LLM to be much more effective. I've had the medical community gaslight me and actively use processes that make things worse. I've had the educational community restrict me from accessing education. I've had the legal community weaves webs of "yes the policy states that we must comply but that's actually a suggestion." Even when it comes to interacting with people socially, my experience has been one of violence and trauma. So, in the face of everything it can't do, I'd much rather place my bets there than with humans. I myself am human. What human do you know would spend effort asserting that? One who is constantly dehumanized by society. And I think there is a lot of opportunity for disabled people to use this tech to be accepted as humans? Or to at least gaslight society back into thinking we are? People won't be able to maintain "The Status Quo" and, frankly, I can't wait.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Humans can make mistakes and lie, and we've been able to deal with it by checking their work, giving feedback to help them improve, placing less trust in those who habitually lie, etc.. LLMs making mistakes and "hallucinating" can be dealt with in similar ways, and as this is an open area of research with lots of proposed solutions and probably many more in the years to come, we do/will have plenty of other ways to deal with it too.
ska 3y ago
It’s not the first time we’ve been here , either, with AI although t this time it’s a bit more in the public , ie retail sphere. There are people who will confidently tell you that LLM are the next transistor level invention, and people who will tell you it’s more incremental, like eg an electric pressure cooker - improvement in some ways over what came before, got lots of people using them, but not fundamental. I’m sure there is a better example. Anyway, the truth is nobody actually knows at this point .

jostmey 3y ago

This critique asserts that ChatGPT propagates inaccuracies. While there may be instances where this holds true, the given example does not substantiate this claim. The article alleges that ChatGPT stated Russia has launched bears into space, an assertion that is evidently false. However, my own interaction with ChatGPT 4.0 contradicts this. When I posed the same question, the AI unequivocally responded that no nation has, in fact, sent bears to space. Thus, in this instance, the claims of the article are unfounded. This response was also written using chat GTP

kgwxd 3y ago
Maybe the conversation history lead to "bear" having a less mainstream definition and made the response contextually correct.
beambot 3y ago
Water Bears (tardigrades) have gone to space: https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space
- classified 3y ago
  We've known that since Star Trek Discovery.
mepuji 3y ago
Most articles like this are comparing older versions of chatgpt and pointing out flaws. ChatGPT-3.5 for example still states Russia has sent bears into space.
danaris 3y ago
This comment seems to be perpetuating another misunderstanding about how LLMs like ChatGPT work: the idea that they have a "model of the world" that is consistent, but sometimes incorrect. They do not. There is no reason why two different people, asking the same question of ChatGPT, would necessarily get the same inaccurate answer. There is also no reason why they would get similar correct answers. What they will get is answers that are statistically likely based on the text in ChatGPT's training data.

substation13 3y ago

It's really easy to get an LLM to hallucinate by asking an open ended question - the type typically answered by a Google search or checking Wikiedpia. However, this is not the best application of LLMs. This criticism is getting old. LLMs are great at: - Text synthesis given all of the facts in a prompt (expand these bullet points) - Summarization (condense this text) - Data extraction (fit this data into this schema) - Fiction (virtual characters, scripts, etc.) They will dramatically change these industries.

morelisp 3y ago
> However, this is not the best application of LLMs It is, however, the commercial application everyone - including search engines! - is implementing.
- substation13 3y ago
  I can see LLMs as a novel front-end for a traditional search engine.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    However, this is not the best application of LLMs.
- iamjackg 3y ago
  To be fair, the ones I've seen use a form of point 1 (giving all facts in the prompt) by allowing for searching the web, which becomes a version of point 2 (summarization).
soperj 3y ago
> - Fiction (virtual characters, scripts, etc.) I've found it bad for this, does not generate something I'd actually read.
- vidarh 3y ago
  It seems to do ok at coming up with starting points or give you options if you're stuck. But the quality of the prose it comes up with is indeed awful. It gets a bit better if you ask it to write in the style of a specific author, but marginally so. I guess maybe it gets to mediocre fan fiction level. That's still pretty impressive, but not very usable for creative writing yet.

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

Between Vice going bankrupt and AI Salon has to be sweating.

bumbledraven 3y ago

This is yet another article about "ChatGPT" that doesn't contain the strings "GPT-4" or "GPT4".

modernpink 3y ago
I tried two of the "failure mode" examples given: The Russian bears in space, and walking across a river with an average depth of 3 feet. The examples fail in GPT-3.5 while GPT-4 gives the "correct" response. The article is already out of date.
- bumbledraven 3y ago
  The article was out of date when it was published on March 19. GPT-4 was released on March 14.
  - modernpink 3y ago
    Yes, that was my point.
    - bumbledraven 3y ago
      If that was your point, then you expressed it poorly. You wrote: "The article is already out of date." (emphasis added). That implies that the article was out of date as of the time you wrote your comment, or at some unspecified point prior to that, but, in fact a stronger and more specific claim is true, namely, that the article was out of date as of the time of its publication, approximately 2 months ago.

didip 3y ago

Meh, every tool when they are young sucks. HTTP in 1995 was awful. But that didn’t stop the explosion of industries following behind it.

cl42 3y ago

The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse. The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines. So it goes. I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing things with it. Unions are already pushing back on AI (truckers, federal employees in Canada, writers in Hollywood) and maybe rightly so. At the same time, dismissing these technologies because they don't meet your high standards yet is probably foolish.

wnevets 3y ago
A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 3y ago
  What? Safari on your phone was mind blowing and immediately useful. Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I... Think they were? I kinda remember having ICQ on it, but maybe that was already the iPhone 2. Or I'm hallucinating.
    - jrmg 3y ago
      There were only built-in apps on release. Third party apps and the App Store came in the iPhoneOS 2.0 update.
  - wnevets 3y ago
    > Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone. So it was even worse than I remember.

gyudin 3y ago

The have completely no idea what they are writing about But maybe this is a good part. We’ll have less uneducated journalists and more opinions of actual specialists. Making those articles sound fresh, interesting, and easy to read with the help of LLMs.

05bmckay 3y ago

14 Reasons why ChatGPT is only the beginning of AI. ...Twitter right now

visarga 3y ago
I banned 2-3 of these twisticles (twitter listicles) from my feed. The fact that I follow the AI researches doesn't mean I want this spam.

teawrecks 3y ago

is there anyone claiming ChatGPT is the "holy grail" of AI research? it's pretty cool. it's an important step. it's far from the holy grail.

gfody 3y ago
AGI has long been consisdered the holy grail of AI research and GPT-4 is basically an AGI so..
JieJie 3y ago
Modern headline algorithms follow this formula: Scenario I Made Up? Doesn't It Stress You Out? Click for Relief!
ravenstine 3y ago
Morons, maybe? Thing is, there will always be morons. LLMs are just the latest thing to be moronic about. That's why I really don't appreciate these downer articles very much. I think LLMs are awesome and they've now become a part of my everyday life, but it's a little much to say they're the "holy grail." At the same time, ChatGPT does deserve hype. It's an achievement that we've essentially invented the ship's computer from Star Trek, and have it available for free or at an affordable price to everyone. When people reduce ChatGPT down to little more than statistics, I don't think they actually understand the technology or cognition at even a basic level, and a lot of the critiques towards ChatGPT come off as butthurtedness.

galaxytachyon 3y ago

As the hype phase has passed (probably), now we will see a bit of overcorrection with these dismissive articles. Sure, LLMs as they are now aren't anywhere close to true AGI and even Microsoft admitted it. But its potential is not something anyone can ignore. The capabilities of LLMs has already been successfully used by millions of people and startups. It is a groundbreaking improvement that makes at least one field of study nearly obsolete (NLP). It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less. With the multimodal models coming next and still exabytes of videos, games, sound, musics, etc. data to train them, we aren't peaking yet. Sure, it isn't the holy grail. But it is a really valuable treasure that only a few exist, to use the same analogy. To view it so dismissively because of some drawbacks, which are entirely obvious and can be accounted for, is just arrogance.

ARandumGuy 3y ago
> It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less. Corporations and governments have thrown tons of money into technologies that ended up going nowhere. We're only a few years out from everyone dumping their money into "blockchain solutions", which turned out to go nowhere. Investors and government stakeholders are easily swayed by hype. Sometimes this hype is well placed, but often the hype results in throwing money at projects that don't produce anything of value. Hype just isn't a good measure of a technology's long term viability.
- galaxytachyon 3y ago
  When only a few of them followed the hype, yes, it can possibly go nowhere. But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real. An easy example is the first iPhone. Another more negative example is bitcoin which even though it is probably a scam, its values and influence on society has massively grown more than what it was 1 year after released. Even though it has been a disappointment technologically.

ARandumGuy 3y ago

This reminds of all the hype for self-driving cars a few years back. Self-driving systems performed well for 95% of driving, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the last 5% was ironed out. Turns out, the last 5% was both extremely difficult, and extremely important. It turns out that a self driving car that randomly makes dangerous maneuvers isn't desirable. Similarly, a LLM that occasionally outputs plausible sounding bullshit quickly turns from a useful tool to something actively harmful.

Heliosmaster 3y ago
As far as I understand, LLMs with 95% correct answers are much more useful than a car that doesn't crash 95% of times (if you need to pay attention to correct mistakes, you may well be driving). A 95% correct LLM might be utter garbage in some areas but nearly flawless (thus reliable) in other, menial and time consuming tasks, such as summarization, rewording, providing new ideas, etc.
- elfleco 3y ago
  Also a 95% correct LLM is arguably the same or better than a human doing a similar task.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

Yesterday, I had a sticky Swift/iOS issue. Checked SO, Apple Discussions, etc. Then, on a whim, I asked ChatGPT for a suggestion. > They are also prone to confident assertions of statements that are blatantly false. It suggested something that referenced a nonexistent property of a standard UIKit class. It wouldn't even compile. It was quite positive that this would fix my issue. After refreshing a couple of times (and also mentioning the first one sucked), it finally gave me something that still didn't work, but gave me an avenue that I could explore, and that finally yielded the solution. I suspect that the reason for the confident assertion that included an illegal property, was because it was trained on Swift code that was extended (I do that a lot, myself. In fact, I ended up creating my own extension that added the nonexistent property). Modern programming languages allow you to extend even language primitive types, and JavaScript has allowed that kind of thing for many years. It may be a while before we can entirely trust ChatGPT to give us all the answers. To be fair, however, it did help me to land upon the correct solution, but I still had to fire up some candlepower of my own.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago
GPT4 is significantly better at code fyi, not sure if you used default ChatGPT (which is 3.5turbo). Premium ChatGPT gives you access to GPT4, but the API gives you even more access with the ability to edit the "system" prompt which Sam Altman's said is very important and which I can attest to from my testing.
- arlcode 3y ago
  I did and do try it with GPT4 and the API and a custom prompt to help me in rust. Expecting only knowledge from 2021 it is hit and miss. Helped me to write some scripts but still fails to recognize tasks that are not possible in the language and halluciantes a plausible solution. It tends to suggest non non compiling and (after being asked to do so) "corrects" bugs (some real some imaginary) and sometimes gets stuck. Helpful yes, but not yet the invincible overlord some people imagine it to be.
  - TheCaptain4815 3y ago

simonw 3y ago

This article is from March 2023, which in LLM terms is pretty old! The "How many bears have the Russians sent into space?" question still returns hallucinations with ChatGPT 3.5 but, unsurprisingly, gets a correct answer from GPT-4.

nottorp 3y ago
But is it because GPT-4 is better, or because the owners have hand tuned the public embarrassing examples out by hand?
- simonw 3y ago
  It's definitely because GPT-4 is better - I've seen this kind of improvement across all kinds of prompts I've tried myself as well.

deleted 3y ago

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strangescript 3y ago

There were literally articles like this about the internet in 1999

mrguyorama 3y ago
FFS, once more for those in the back since people who don't understand how logic works keep pushing this dumb "point" on this board for various things: "Successful technology was once argued against" is not evidence that "any technology that is argued against will be successful". That should not be a hard concept to grasp, yet it seems to elude so many. A -> B does not mean B -> A. That's literally like day two of any class on formal logic, and only because the first day was spent discussing the syllabus.

idopmstuff 3y ago

I'm surprised this article is getting upvoted - it feels like very lazy journalism to me. > The discomforting reality is that, while Altman and his ilk have been predicting an exponential acceleration of productivity, we have been experiencing a deceleration. This is a very big claim, and there is absolutely nothing to back it up. The only specific reference to productivity is about an MIT paper that showed increases in worker productivity (but the authors of this just wave that aside as unimportant because they didn't think the work it was doing was important). > More dangerously, ChatGPT can make authoritative statements that sound believable but turn out to be false if investigated closely. We get it! We know! But look, this is a bad use case for GPT. If you pretend that it only has a single use case, and you pick the use case that it's worst at, you will think it's bad. This is just so, so lazy. No references to summarizing docs or writing code/SQL queries/Excel formulas or any of the other things that it's genuinely useful at. > At best, LLMs can be used for rough first drafts of low-value writing tasks with humans filling in the details and checking for rants and lies. Rants? Come on - GPT hallucinates, but it's not an unhinged lunatic that goes ranting about stuff. Also, again, this is not all they can be used for - it just ignores all of the better use cases. > What about Altman's vision of humans appreciating art and nature while most of the world's goods and services are produced by AI? We have a lot more respect for the work that people do than for the usefulness of LLMs. Huh? It's great that you respect the work people do, but that has nothing to do with whether they'll affect society. > ChatGPT is entertaining but it is, at most, a baby step towards an AI revolution and, at worst, a very expensive detour away from the holy grail of artificial general intelligence. What? This is the closing to the article and it just throws out this enormous claim, which is backed up by absolutely nothing. It's demonstrably a big step towards an AI revolution - if nothing else, it's brought a ton of money and interest into the space, which is certainly important for a revolution. But to say it's a detour away from AGI and then give absolutely no explanation of why that is or what direction AI research should be going? This is very poor journalism.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
> This is very poor journalism Then be the change you want to see. Write a counterargument and submit it. Better yet, use an LLM to write the article and state the prompts used.

ftxbro 3y ago

My takeaway from the article is how bad mainstream takes were on LLMs just two months ago.

akisej 3y ago

This feels like classic Hype Cycle content: the higher we peak on Inflated Expectations the lower we'll find ourselves on the Trough of Disillusionment.

Last5Digits 3y ago

Using ChatGPT to get facts is like going to a restaurant to buy your groceries. Sure, you could pick out slices of tomato and scrape the salt off of your steak, bring it all home and cook a meal - but the supermarket next door can offer the same ingredients without the hassle. Just as the point of a restaurant is to process and cook the ingredients for you, the point of ChatGPT is the preprocessing of facts and information. If you just want fresh, unprepared facts, go to Google or Wikipedia; if you want an informational meal, go to ChatGPT.

Mizoguchi 3y ago

The author of the article judges the future of LLMs and AI using the current state of affairs, as is these technologies are not evolving very quickly. GPT3 and GPT4 are only 3 years apart, yet GPT4 is a completely different beast. And we are talking only about LLMs, we haven't yet seen what's coming in vision for example. Also I have not heard OpenAI or any serious AI visionary say ChatGPT is the holy grail of AI research. It is undoubtedly one of the best consumer ready technologies we have seen in the field to date but it just a tiny little piece of a massive infrastructure that is still in its very early stages. It's like saying HTML was the holy grail of the Internet. It was an important component of it but without fiber optics, microchips, radio, smartphones, algorithms, etc the Internet would not have been possible the way we know it today.

methodical 3y ago

I think a lot of people on here are for some reason believers in the idea that if a technology has detractors, then it must be another case of the steam engine, human flight, or some other technology that had doubters before completely revolutionizing our world. In reality, there is no such law of the universe that says that some technology will be wildly successful because it is heavily controversial, and, in some cases, it turns out that a lot people were correct in predicting a technology's short/long term uselessness (crypto, web3, AR). Every time some article is posted highlighting AI's shortcomings in relation to its posited ubiquity in professional settings about 10 people wax poetic about how the internet/cars/etc. were doubted heavily, when they clearly are not similar in nearly any regard. I wish we could appreciate new technology without blowing its applications out of proportion and then being disappointed when it falls short of an impossible bar, which is my main gripe with both AI doomers and people who are entirely dismissive of the technology (despite basically nobody saying anything of the sort).

sharemywin 3y ago
a couple observations in favor of AGI getting here quicker than we anticipate: ChatGPT isn't an LLM it's a product(blackbox) with one part being an LLM. Go, Chess, Dota 2 would be better examples of things that AI mastered. "NVIDIA GPU computing has given the industry a path forward -- and will provide a 1,000X speed-up by 2025" LLM agents do seem to work better than LLMs on their own.
idopmstuff 3y ago
> I think a lot of people on here are for some reason believers in the idea that if a technology has detractors, then it must be another case of the steam engine, human flight, or some other technology that had doubters before completely revolutionizing our world. I think that's a misinterpretation - I don't think that it's a revolutionary technology because it has detractors or because it's controversial; I think it's revolutionary because of its capabilities. Those comparisons just serve to point out that there are plenty of historical examples of people criticizing things that turned out to be revolutionary, and the same may well turn out to be the case here.
tim333 3y ago

ck2 3y ago

I'm trying to imagine a few next generations from now. Then imagine full voice recognition and voice synthesis attached to it, on every phone, every watch, every car. The news, the headlines, on every page you visit is going to be custom re-written by AI for every bit of data they can get on you, even your IP address if they have nothing else. Any job not replaced by AI is going to be AI-assisted, it is inevitable. Wendy's is already replacing order-takers with AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888362

keskival 3y ago

Large Language Models aren't a silver bullet – they don't solve all your problems. But they are a holy grail – as a universal common sense module they give IT systems a capability they never had before, a capability which has been sought after from since computers became a thing, a capacity for common sense. We now have that capacity and that alone will revolutionize the world. The chatbots aren't about chat, they are about common sense. Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential. We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI.

nerpderp82 3y ago
Wait until they can watch TV to learn (I am serious). If you imbue them with competitive play, oh boy. We just gotta figure out what they think funny is.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1696/ https://xkcd.com/1696/
- belter 3y ago
  "Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04501 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04501
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    Neat! https://github.com/facebookresearch/lavila https://github.com/facebookresearch/lavila
sillysaurusx 3y ago
> Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential. > We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI. There’s an important difference between exponential and sigmoidal curves. The early stages are indistinguishable, and not enough time has passed to judge. Personally, I don’t think AGI is possible with current techniques. You say all that’s needed is self play or RLHF. This is categorically not true. It doesn’t even guarantee that AIs will ever care whether they’re alive, a fundamental property of sentience.

stuaxo 3y ago

Anyone that uses it will realise it quickly.

TheDudeMan 3y ago

Who claimed it was the holy grail?

steve76 3y ago

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