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Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned. Every "AI" related business idea I've seen prop up recently is people just hooking up a textbox to ChatGPT's API and pretending they're doing something novel or impressive, presumably to cash in on VC money ASAP. The Notion AI is an absolute fucking joke of epic proportions in its uselessness yet they keep pushing it in every newsletter And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

digitalsushi 3y ago
Many people lose their incredulity once more than a few sentences have been read. By the time someone has read a second paragraph, they have internalized what was at the beginning, and to be told that those two paragraphs were fiction is now to attack the reader instead of the text. As though reading were so laborious, there's a sunk cost fallacy.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  wtf? Who is this true for?
RayVR 3y ago
I think there’s a meaningful difference between sota LLM tech and crypto. I’ve not yet seen a real problem which was better solved by crypto beyond just being not official money. I’ve already used the openai api to automate several genuinely difficult things for myself. Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output. I do agree it is massively overhyped and there will be an inevitable sentiment correction.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output. Can I ask what exactly that means/does?
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    "Give me a JSON document when the keys are countries in the G20 and the values are their GDP for the year 2020" With the Wolfram plug-in, this works and provides good data! It stops three short of the goal probably due to rate limiting, but I think you can get the point: https://chat.openai.com/share/9d6695a9-5ba8-44d8-9ec8-11fcba9b0430 https://chat.openai.com/share/9d6695a9-5ba8-44d8-9ec8-11fcba... This same kind of query works with any reasonable structured data format.
    - ape4 3y ago
      That sounds like something Wolfram could do without chatGPT. It accepts natural language input.
      - fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
        You could have tested this easily. It doesn't look like you can get JSON directly out of it, nor any other type of data that meets the criteria of the query. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Give+me+a+JSON+document+when+the+keys+are+countries+in+the+G20+and+the+values+are+their+GDP+for+the+year+2020 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Give+me+a+JSON+document...
        sensanaty 3y ago
        It's a paid feature but you can, in more formats than JSON too. If you click the little Data icon it expands and gives you a bunch of options.
        Karunamon 3y ago
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts. A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.
- simpli 3y ago
  Increased efficiency doesn't translate to increased time off, just increased expectations from our bosses :)
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    There are ways to get way faster at completing tasks without increasing the expectations with no change in pay.
    - moneywoes 3y ago
      Could you elaborate
      - Marrand 3y ago
        I think he means that you just don't tell anyone that you now only work 6 hours a day instead of the 7.5 hours you used to. If your productivity is approximately the same no one will be able to tell. Requires you to be in a position where you are not strictly supervised of course.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      Right, but none of those are likely to get you said five weeks off, unless you're planning on pretending to be remote working while actually on vacation. Which is... risky.
      - throwaway202351 3y ago
        Sounds like something out of "The Four Hour Workweek"
sdflhasjd 3y ago
> And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more. My team raised a support issue with one of our suppliers due to some unexpected API behaviour and got an unusually flowery reply that completely contradicted the API documentation... fairly sure that was ChatGPT. Honestly not that bothered about LLMs as they could be helpful in customer support particularly when agents might not be fluent English speakers (or just help when you're trying to be polite in adverse circumstances), but some basic proofreading would help. And don't let it hallucinate APIs.
- EricMausler 3y ago
  "I'm sorry, Dave. As an AI language model, there are many situations where I am unable to do something you want me to do. Please consult with a specialist in your problem area for more advice"
DebtDeflation 3y ago
>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population. Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.
ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
As someone that did use the original cleverbot, every time I use chatgpt I'm blown away.
MailleQuiMaille 3y ago
Funny. As someone within the crypto community, you could switch « AI » with « Crypto » and the meaning would be the same to me. There’s even a worse sentiment, well deserved at this time, regarding cryptocurrencies. And the answers below, reducing the industry to « drugs » go in the same vein. Stuff like Chainlink working with Swift is not common knowledge and even if it is, it is considered as another nothingburger.
bigger_inside 3y ago
I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now". Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated. The moment a sentence like "it's crucial to remember" pops up, I know what this is. Then, there's also the element that it always sounds like it's speaking to a child, and it avoids actually saying things unequivocally without some sort of disclaimer, as the legal department's CYA filter will ensure. I remain thoroughly unimpressed by the entire venture. If this is Skynet 1.0, we're all safe for centuries to come.
- wefarrell 3y ago
  GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning and it's possible to mitigate the obvious giveaways by prompting it to write in the style of a particular author. Students who pay the $20 a month for it and are aware of its limitations will absolutely use it and it won't be obvious.
  - plutonorm 3y ago
    Agree. hacker news is in hard cope mode.
- rmorey 3y ago
  Don't you have to believe there could be GPT submissions still flying under your radar? The obvious ones are obvious, and with subtle giveaways you probably catch most. But how could you know you aren't missing any?
  - bigger_inside 3y ago
    If they're pruned and curated enough to not be immediately recognizable, let them have their chatGPT papers. Bad cheating is just a sign of not caring, but good cheating takes effort and smarts...
- 3y ago
DonHopkins 3y ago
Comparing AI with religion is ridiculous. Doesn't the next coming of Christ involve Rapture and Armageddon, if you take the people who believe in him seriously, which I wouldn't recommend? And for that matter, aren't the people who believe in Christ all living in a delusional bubble inside a hermetically sealed reality denying echo chamber of over-promised and under-delivered miracles, which has been going on for thousands of years? Can you name any AI companies who are doing anything as outrageous as declaring crackers are flesh and wine is blood, and that eating them will save your eternal soul (while calling for refusing to save the souls of anyone who supports gay marriage or abortion), and who even invented a special word "Transubstantiation" that tries to explain why you shouldn't trust your own lying eyes, and instead unquestioningly believe their unsubstantiated unscientific easily disproven claptrap, dogma, and brutally violent fairy tales? https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3764086-same-sex-marriage-bill-pits-biden-against-catholic-bishops-again/ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3764086-same-sex... >Conservative Catholic bishops had called for the church not to offer communion to Biden or other pro-abortion rights politicians, but, in November of last year, the USCCB signaled an end to the debate by issuing a document on communion without mentioning the president or other politicians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation >Transubstantiation (Latin: transubstantiatio; Greek: μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, "the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of the Blood of Christ". This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit. However, "the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the 'eucharistic species', remain unaltered". In this teaching, the notions of "substance" and "transubstantiation" are not linked with any particular theory of metaphysics. At least the AI echo chamber isn't literally over-promising salvation and eternal life like religion has for millinia, and hasn't been perpetuated by governments and wars and crusades and inquisition for thousands of years, like religion inflicts on society. AI has got a LONG LONG way to go and a shitload more people to torture and kill before it sinks to the level of religion and promises of the second coming of Christ, and it's already delivering a hell of a lot more useful tangible benefits than any religion ever did or ever will.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
It's not the current implementations that have us wigging out, it's the rate of improvement. We have no idea where we are on the 'S curve', but if it keeps getting exponentially better, this [and alpha, etc] has the potential to greatly* change society
codegeek 3y ago
My worry with AI is that even though it is very impressive and useful in many ways for real world applications, the Hype may end up making it another crypto. Crypto was a great promise when it was invented and one can make the argument that it could have so many real world uses but it failed to live upto that expectation and one of the reasons is that it was over hyped way too quickly and ultimately became a tool for get rich quick, speculation, scams, dark web payments etc. AI is already much better with its use BUT the hype is dangerous and we need to be careful. I see a lot of people starting "X-GPT.com" apps and touting 10K MRR in 2 months and what not. THis is what worries me. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is starting yet another AI tool. It can't be because they are so excited. It is because they see it as the new Crypto to get rich quick. Overall, I think that AI is the new Crypto unfortunately not because it has no real world application (it does and is lot better than crypto) but because of the hype and everyone trying to cash in on it.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I use ChatGPT to help me quickly write simple AWS SDK based helper scripts. I’ve also recently been involved in designing a DevOps /Docker deployment pipeline for a customer. They use Java and I haven’t used Java in decades. Before I would have just done my POC using a Python or Node container and rely on the fact that they knew Java well enough to get the concepts. But I used Java and started the chain of questions “answer all question based on talking to someone who doesn’t know Java. Explain everything step by step.” In both cases, ChatGPT will usually get me 99% there. But I have to keep trying things and giving it the error messages and iterating. Of course there is the hallucination issue. On the other hand, I’ve done a lot of work professionally with old school chatbots integrated with web pages and call centers where the only intelligent component is that we could parse out parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) and only search on those. I would never recommend putting an LLM style chatbot in front of a customer. When I work with customers - especially in the government - the questions and answers are heavily vetted before being put in production. They would never take a chance that either the customer could jailbreak the chatbot and have it say something and trigger a political argument about “bias” or that it would give incorrect information about a government benefit.
cookiengineer 3y ago
There's a reason why most of the former web3 scammers now have "AI inventor" or "ChatGPT expert" in their profile tagline. They gonna ruin even this technology with their hype marketing bullshit. The issue I have with all the hype is not the technology itself, it will stay in one form or the other as a better interface for generalized instruction communications, but rather the scams and frauds that come with it. Empty marketing promises where everybody advanced enough realizes that it cannot be true, and as a concept GPT is just throwing more averaged neurons to the problem instead of training more specialized expert transformers for multiple knowledge categories. Anybody remember IBM watson? Why I always say that I don't do AI work is because people tend to think that sensorics (and neural nets that reduce a min/max problem space) already is AI. And I think it isn't. AI is where the bayesian approach is the bare minimum to deal with strategical decision making processes. (Which probably makes this comment go to hell with downvotes but who cares :D)
Roark66 3y ago
To be fair, commenting on your customer support anecdote, you can get very good quality answers from chatgpt on common knowledge items. You just have to craft the prompt correctly. I don't even start talking to it without the first instruction being "answer all following questions in the shortest form possible" This cuts out 90% of the useless output such models generate.
deleted 3y ago
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spacemadness 3y ago
I also don’t get what’s so great about putting another layer on top of ChatGPT and calling it a business plan. It seems like the lowest effort possible and you’ve done next to nothing interesting technically. Some of these projects don’t even seem to do what they say they’ll do well, and that’s probably because they really have no control over the data provider. Maybe this is my Dropbox HN moment, but it just seems lame.
kkielhofner 3y ago
The issue now is that for many people LLM = AI and AI = LLM. Meanwhile, there are tons of applications you use everyday (and have for YEARS) using “AI”/ML for document search, text suggestion, NLP/NLU, intent recognition, STT/TTS, image similarity/classification/search and a myriad of other tasks. LLMs have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and there are tons of “AI” companies/“engineers” now who have never even heard of any of these and are doing all kinds of bizarre (wrong) things to wedge these tasks into LLMs. I cringe when I see people all of a sudden jumping on the “AI” hype train thinking an LLM (or even the ML approaches I listed) is a universal solution to everything. They are interesting and have use cases but please stop.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
> anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. I wonder if this is a regional thing, because traveling between the US Northeast and West coast I've found entirely the opposite. I've had non-technical friends reach out to me in a panic worried that AI will disrupt humanity in just a few years, and even my 90-year non-technical grandmother recently remarked about her fears about what AI would bring in the next 5 years. And among technical people: ever since I posted getting an AI related role my linked in I've been bombarded with old acquaintances trying to get ahead of the AI boom. The funny thing is that I personally think that "AI" is useful but wildly over hyped right now. I do think it has some uses, but they aren't going to change the world in any fundamental way (but hey, if I'm wrong at least I'm in the right field).
thewarrior 3y ago
I have friends in academia who use GPT-4 to help with with research level code. TikTok just released an app where you can hum a song it will generate a full instrumental backing track. This stuff can already do impressive things and its only getting better. Douglas Hofstadter and Geoffrey Hinton both think that we are on the path to humans eventually being surpassed. I would urge everyone to hold back their instinctive reaction to the usual SV hype and go and try GPT-4,Claude+, Mid Journey, RunwayML for a few weeks and come to their own conclusions.
Spooky23 3y ago
It’s funny you say that, once you see a bit of of gpt content, it stands out. One thing I will say is that it is a decent editor. If you feed it a document, it will produce pretty good suggestions about improvements etc.
ben_w 3y ago
> I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned. Fair. I'm definitely big on where it will be in the future (Iain M. Banks quote about Minds being the next thing to gods and on the other side), but there are a lot of grifters who are easy to spot with the following thought experiment: If ChatGPT could actually, to use an example I've seen, "write a best selling novel", why is OpenAI selling you access to the API instead of writing all those books and selling them directly?
- enigmurl 3y ago
  You could argue that for any service provider then. Why is Intel selling CPUs when it could be making profit from the cloud data centers themselves?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    It seems like you think I'm accusing OpenAI of being the grifters — I'm not; OpenAI are very open and clear about the limitations of their models. The grifters say things like "buy my guide to learn how to use ChatGPT to write a book for you", overselling the capabilities of ChatGPT by a large margin. Anytime someone says "buy my guide to becoming rich", that should set off warning signs. I've only heard it being true once ever, but even that might just be a case of a random dice roll we wouldn't have heard about if it had lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual That said, one obvious difference between OpenAI and Intel is that OpenAI has full control of both the model and all the hardware the model is running on.
    - enigmurl 3y ago
      Ah I see, fair point then I would agree.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Yeah, the people who know the most about AI are also the people who are least impressed with its capabilities. It's supposed to be the other way around.
- 6510 3y ago
  We will have general AI when we find someone simple minded enough to understand their own thoughts.
- tim333 3y ago
  Dunno. Geoffrey Hinton's impressed. My mum's not interested. (Hinton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Sgp7y178k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Sgp7y178k) Wikipedia on Hinton: >Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award (often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing"), together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning" Is there anyone at the Turing Award for AI level who's not impressed I wonder?
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    By "impressed" I mean the guys perpetuating the hype cycle and itching to be "disrupted". The story of 2023 is the CEO or another C-level boss rushing to their ML team and excitedly telling them to scrap all their plans because they need to integrate ChatGPT AI "yesterday", while the ML team roll their eyes and laugh behind his back. I'm sure it happened to you too.
nelox 3y ago
> I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) We're still waiting ...
namaria 3y ago
I parted ways with a team last year because I couldn't take the over complicated, jumble mess of "micro service" they were pushing. Redemption by pipeline and all that. A c-suite started gushing about ChatGPT by late 2022 and that was a red flag to me. A few months after I left they launched an "AI product". I looked into it. It was just a wrapper around OpenAI API. Lol. Glad I left.

digitalsushi 3y ago

Many people lose their incredulity once more than a few sentences have been read. By the time someone has read a second paragraph, they have internalized what was at the beginning, and to be told that those two paragraphs were fiction is now to attack the reader instead of the text. As though reading were so laborious, there's a sunk cost fallacy.

throwuwu 3y ago
wtf? Who is this true for?

RayVR 3y ago

I think there’s a meaningful difference between sota LLM tech and crypto. I’ve not yet seen a real problem which was better solved by crypto beyond just being not official money. I’ve already used the openai api to automate several genuinely difficult things for myself. Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output. I do agree it is massively overhyped and there will be an inevitable sentiment correction.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output. Can I ask what exactly that means/does?
- Karunamon 3y ago
  "Give me a JSON document when the keys are countries in the G20 and the values are their GDP for the year 2020" With the Wolfram plug-in, this works and provides good data! It stops three short of the goal probably due to rate limiting, but I think you can get the point: https://chat.openai.com/share/9d6695a9-5ba8-44d8-9ec8-11fcba9b0430 https://chat.openai.com/share/9d6695a9-5ba8-44d8-9ec8-11fcba... This same kind of query works with any reasonable structured data format.
  - ape4 3y ago
    That sounds like something Wolfram could do without chatGPT. It accepts natural language input.
    - fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
      You could have tested this easily. It doesn't look like you can get JSON directly out of it, nor any other type of data that meets the criteria of the query. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Give+me+a+JSON+document+when+the+keys+are+countries+in+the+G20+and+the+values+are+their+GDP+for+the+year+2020 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Give+me+a+JSON+document...
      - sensanaty 3y ago
        It's a paid feature but you can, in more formats than JSON too. If you click the little Data icon it expands and gives you a bunch of options.
        Karunamon 3y ago

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts. A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.

simpli 3y ago
Increased efficiency doesn't translate to increased time off, just increased expectations from our bosses :)
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  There are ways to get way faster at completing tasks without increasing the expectations with no change in pay.
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    Could you elaborate
    - Marrand 3y ago
      I think he means that you just don't tell anyone that you now only work 6 hours a day instead of the 7.5 hours you used to. If your productivity is approximately the same no one will be able to tell. Requires you to be in a position where you are not strictly supervised of course.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Right, but none of those are likely to get you said five weeks off, unless you're planning on pretending to be remote working while actually on vacation. Which is... risky.
    - throwaway202351 3y ago
      Sounds like something out of "The Four Hour Workweek"

sdflhasjd 3y ago

> And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more. My team raised a support issue with one of our suppliers due to some unexpected API behaviour and got an unusually flowery reply that completely contradicted the API documentation... fairly sure that was ChatGPT. Honestly not that bothered about LLMs as they could be helpful in customer support particularly when agents might not be fluent English speakers (or just help when you're trying to be polite in adverse circumstances), but some basic proofreading would help. And don't let it hallucinate APIs.

EricMausler 3y ago
"I'm sorry, Dave. As an AI language model, there are many situations where I am unable to do something you want me to do. Please consult with a specialist in your problem area for more advice"

DebtDeflation 3y ago

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

blitz_skull 3y ago
This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population. Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.

ThrowawayTestr 3y ago

As someone that did use the original cleverbot, every time I use chatgpt I'm blown away.

MailleQuiMaille 3y ago

Funny. As someone within the crypto community, you could switch « AI » with « Crypto » and the meaning would be the same to me. There’s even a worse sentiment, well deserved at this time, regarding cryptocurrencies. And the answers below, reducing the industry to « drugs » go in the same vein. Stuff like Chainlink working with Swift is not common knowledge and even if it is, it is considered as another nothingburger.

bigger_inside 3y ago

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now". Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated. The moment a sentence like "it's crucial to remember" pops up, I know what this is. Then, there's also the element that it always sounds like it's speaking to a child, and it avoids actually saying things unequivocally without some sort of disclaimer, as the legal department's CYA filter will ensure. I remain thoroughly unimpressed by the entire venture. If this is Skynet 1.0, we're all safe for centuries to come.

wefarrell 3y ago
GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning and it's possible to mitigate the obvious giveaways by prompting it to write in the style of a particular author. Students who pay the $20 a month for it and are aware of its limitations will absolutely use it and it won't be obvious.
- plutonorm 3y ago
  Agree. hacker news is in hard cope mode.
rmorey 3y ago
Don't you have to believe there could be GPT submissions still flying under your radar? The obvious ones are obvious, and with subtle giveaways you probably catch most. But how could you know you aren't missing any?
- bigger_inside 3y ago
  If they're pruned and curated enough to not be immediately recognizable, let them have their chatGPT papers. Bad cheating is just a sign of not caring, but good cheating takes effort and smarts...
3y ago

DonHopkins 3y ago

Comparing AI with religion is ridiculous. Doesn't the next coming of Christ involve Rapture and Armageddon, if you take the people who believe in him seriously, which I wouldn't recommend? And for that matter, aren't the people who believe in Christ all living in a delusional bubble inside a hermetically sealed reality denying echo chamber of over-promised and under-delivered miracles, which has been going on for thousands of years? Can you name any AI companies who are doing anything as outrageous as declaring crackers are flesh and wine is blood, and that eating them will save your eternal soul (while calling for refusing to save the souls of anyone who supports gay marriage or abortion), and who even invented a special word "Transubstantiation" that tries to explain why you shouldn't trust your own lying eyes, and instead unquestioningly believe their unsubstantiated unscientific easily disproven claptrap, dogma, and brutally violent fairy tales? https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3764086-same-sex-marriage-bill-pits-biden-against-catholic-bishops-again/ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3764086-same-sex... >Conservative Catholic bishops had called for the church not to offer communion to Biden or other pro-abortion rights politicians, but, in November of last year, the USCCB signaled an end to the debate by issuing a document on communion without mentioning the president or other politicians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation >Transubstantiation (Latin: transubstantiatio; Greek: μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, "the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of the Blood of Christ". This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit. However, "the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the 'eucharistic species', remain unaltered". In this teaching, the notions of "substance" and "transubstantiation" are not linked with any particular theory of metaphysics. At least the AI echo chamber isn't literally over-promising salvation and eternal life like religion has for millinia, and hasn't been perpetuated by governments and wars and crusades and inquisition for thousands of years, like religion inflicts on society. AI has got a LONG LONG way to go and a shitload more people to torture and kill before it sinks to the level of religion and promises of the second coming of Christ, and it's already delivering a hell of a lot more useful tangible benefits than any religion ever did or ever will.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

It's not the current implementations that have us wigging out, it's the rate of improvement. We have no idea where we are on the 'S curve', but if it keeps getting exponentially better, this [and alpha, etc] has the potential to greatly* change society

codegeek 3y ago

My worry with AI is that even though it is very impressive and useful in many ways for real world applications, the Hype may end up making it another crypto. Crypto was a great promise when it was invented and one can make the argument that it could have so many real world uses but it failed to live upto that expectation and one of the reasons is that it was over hyped way too quickly and ultimately became a tool for get rich quick, speculation, scams, dark web payments etc. AI is already much better with its use BUT the hype is dangerous and we need to be careful. I see a lot of people starting "X-GPT.com" apps and touting 10K MRR in 2 months and what not. THis is what worries me. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is starting yet another AI tool. It can't be because they are so excited. It is because they see it as the new Crypto to get rich quick. Overall, I think that AI is the new Crypto unfortunately not because it has no real world application (it does and is lot better than crypto) but because of the hype and everyone trying to cash in on it.

scarface_74 3y ago
I use ChatGPT to help me quickly write simple AWS SDK based helper scripts. I’ve also recently been involved in designing a DevOps /Docker deployment pipeline for a customer. They use Java and I haven’t used Java in decades. Before I would have just done my POC using a Python or Node container and rely on the fact that they knew Java well enough to get the concepts. But I used Java and started the chain of questions “answer all question based on talking to someone who doesn’t know Java. Explain everything step by step.” In both cases, ChatGPT will usually get me 99% there. But I have to keep trying things and giving it the error messages and iterating. Of course there is the hallucination issue. On the other hand, I’ve done a lot of work professionally with old school chatbots integrated with web pages and call centers where the only intelligent component is that we could parse out parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) and only search on those. I would never recommend putting an LLM style chatbot in front of a customer. When I work with customers - especially in the government - the questions and answers are heavily vetted before being put in production. They would never take a chance that either the customer could jailbreak the chatbot and have it say something and trigger a political argument about “bias” or that it would give incorrect information about a government benefit.

cookiengineer 3y ago

There's a reason why most of the former web3 scammers now have "AI inventor" or "ChatGPT expert" in their profile tagline. They gonna ruin even this technology with their hype marketing bullshit. The issue I have with all the hype is not the technology itself, it will stay in one form or the other as a better interface for generalized instruction communications, but rather the scams and frauds that come with it. Empty marketing promises where everybody advanced enough realizes that it cannot be true, and as a concept GPT is just throwing more averaged neurons to the problem instead of training more specialized expert transformers for multiple knowledge categories. Anybody remember IBM watson? Why I always say that I don't do AI work is because people tend to think that sensorics (and neural nets that reduce a min/max problem space) already is AI. And I think it isn't. AI is where the bayesian approach is the bare minimum to deal with strategical decision making processes. (Which probably makes this comment go to hell with downvotes but who cares :D)

Roark66 3y ago

To be fair, commenting on your customer support anecdote, you can get very good quality answers from chatgpt on common knowledge items. You just have to craft the prompt correctly. I don't even start talking to it without the first instruction being "answer all following questions in the shortest form possible" This cuts out 90% of the useless output such models generate.

deleted 3y ago

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spacemadness 3y ago

I also don’t get what’s so great about putting another layer on top of ChatGPT and calling it a business plan. It seems like the lowest effort possible and you’ve done next to nothing interesting technically. Some of these projects don’t even seem to do what they say they’ll do well, and that’s probably because they really have no control over the data provider. Maybe this is my Dropbox HN moment, but it just seems lame.

kkielhofner 3y ago

The issue now is that for many people LLM = AI and AI = LLM. Meanwhile, there are tons of applications you use everyday (and have for YEARS) using “AI”/ML for document search, text suggestion, NLP/NLU, intent recognition, STT/TTS, image similarity/classification/search and a myriad of other tasks. LLMs have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and there are tons of “AI” companies/“engineers” now who have never even heard of any of these and are doing all kinds of bizarre (wrong) things to wedge these tasks into LLMs. I cringe when I see people all of a sudden jumping on the “AI” hype train thinking an LLM (or even the ML approaches I listed) is a universal solution to everything. They are interesting and have use cases but please stop.

PheonixPharts 3y ago

> anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. I wonder if this is a regional thing, because traveling between the US Northeast and West coast I've found entirely the opposite. I've had non-technical friends reach out to me in a panic worried that AI will disrupt humanity in just a few years, and even my 90-year non-technical grandmother recently remarked about her fears about what AI would bring in the next 5 years. And among technical people: ever since I posted getting an AI related role my linked in I've been bombarded with old acquaintances trying to get ahead of the AI boom. The funny thing is that I personally think that "AI" is useful but wildly over hyped right now. I do think it has some uses, but they aren't going to change the world in any fundamental way (but hey, if I'm wrong at least I'm in the right field).

thewarrior 3y ago

I have friends in academia who use GPT-4 to help with with research level code. TikTok just released an app where you can hum a song it will generate a full instrumental backing track. This stuff can already do impressive things and its only getting better. Douglas Hofstadter and Geoffrey Hinton both think that we are on the path to humans eventually being surpassed. I would urge everyone to hold back their instinctive reaction to the usual SV hype and go and try GPT-4,Claude+, Mid Journey, RunwayML for a few weeks and come to their own conclusions.

Spooky23 3y ago

It’s funny you say that, once you see a bit of of gpt content, it stands out. One thing I will say is that it is a decent editor. If you feed it a document, it will produce pretty good suggestions about improvements etc.

ben_w 3y ago

> I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned. Fair. I'm definitely big on where it will be in the future (Iain M. Banks quote about Minds being the next thing to gods and on the other side), but there are a lot of grifters who are easy to spot with the following thought experiment: If ChatGPT could actually, to use an example I've seen, "write a best selling novel", why is OpenAI selling you access to the API instead of writing all those books and selling them directly?

enigmurl 3y ago
You could argue that for any service provider then. Why is Intel selling CPUs when it could be making profit from the cloud data centers themselves?
- ben_w 3y ago
  It seems like you think I'm accusing OpenAI of being the grifters — I'm not; OpenAI are very open and clear about the limitations of their models. The grifters say things like "buy my guide to learn how to use ChatGPT to write a book for you", overselling the capabilities of ChatGPT by a large margin. Anytime someone says "buy my guide to becoming rich", that should set off warning signs. I've only heard it being true once ever, but even that might just be a case of a random dice roll we wouldn't have heard about if it had lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual That said, one obvious difference between OpenAI and Intel is that OpenAI has full control of both the model and all the hardware the model is running on.
  - enigmurl 3y ago
    Ah I see, fair point then I would agree.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

Yeah, the people who know the most about AI are also the people who are least impressed with its capabilities. It's supposed to be the other way around.

6510 3y ago
We will have general AI when we find someone simple minded enough to understand their own thoughts.
tim333 3y ago
Dunno. Geoffrey Hinton's impressed. My mum's not interested. (Hinton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Sgp7y178k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Sgp7y178k) Wikipedia on Hinton: >Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award (often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing"), together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning" Is there anyone at the Turing Award for AI level who's not impressed I wonder?
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  By "impressed" I mean the guys perpetuating the hype cycle and itching to be "disrupted". The story of 2023 is the CEO or another C-level boss rushing to their ML team and excitedly telling them to scrap all their plans because they need to integrate ChatGPT AI "yesterday", while the ML team roll their eyes and laugh behind his back. I'm sure it happened to you too.

nelox 3y ago

> I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) We're still waiting ...

namaria 3y ago

I parted ways with a team last year because I couldn't take the over complicated, jumble mess of "micro service" they were pushing. Redemption by pipeline and all that. A c-suite started gushing about ChatGPT by late 2022 and that was a red flag to me. A few months after I left they launched an "AI product". I looked into it. It was just a wrapper around OpenAI API. Lol. Glad I left.