8 ms·

Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

18 points by hayksaakian 3y ago

injb 3y ago
Can't read the article. Does he mean it's a problem in search of a solution then? Or does he mean it's "the exact opposite of a solution, in search of a problem" (in other words, a problem in search of a problem)?
- hayksaakian 3y ago
  I think what he's trying to say is it's capable of solving more problems than we think.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    That is implying that we haven’t actually found the problems for it to solve yet, which would make it a solution in search of a problem where PG is optimistic about the outcome of the search. What I think he is trying to say is that it is a solution that addresses a broad range of problems that are clear now but weren’t envisioned by its creators, which is both impossible given the early claims (its creators already billed it as a general solution with easentially no limits) and, even if you ignore those claims and reduce it to a question of it being broadly applicable as a solution, generally premature (most of the more specific things it is billed as a solution for it hasn’t solved, though some people might have ideas, not yet proven jn practice, of how it can be a component of a solution).
- TSiege 3y ago
  Here's a link to the full quote on xitter. "AI is the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem. It's the solution to far more problems than its developers even knew existed." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1689874390442561536 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1689874390442561536
- saltcured 3y ago
  The exact opposite could be a non-solution trying to evade all problems. ;-) And that's why I personally don't have much faith in the LLM approach. Natural language is too full of ambiguity to pretend it delivers meaning. It makes oblique references to meaning, based on awful assumptions about the audience and presumed mental context. I see enough absurd miscommunication and word salad between native speakers. I really don't want a magic box to vaguely emulate this.
FrankWilhoit 3y ago
He seems to think that what we need (and want) is something to hand off to. We're tired. We don't want to do it any more -- for any value of "it". Actually we can't do it any more; we've reduced everything to performance, so it doesn't matter who carries the torch. AI may as well carry it; even if it drops it, it may do so amusingly, and what more could we ask?
medler 3y ago
It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tracerbulletx 3y ago
  I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just what it's useful for today.
  - bsder 3y ago
    > If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today. We used to just call that "a search engine". Remember that? Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got. It was the ad-ification of search engines that killed that. So, AI allows us to go back to the Internet circa 2000? That's a big innovation? I mean, I'll take it, but that's a pretty low bar ...
    - tracerbulletx 3y ago
      I am having good conversations with the thing about books as I read them and having it summarize parts I want to keep notes on and make knowledge graphs, and construct new worked examples and diving into specific topics and having significantly enhanced learning experiences with it as a partner literally every day for the last few months. So you're entitled to your opinion but it's simply not the same thing as a search engine.
bsder 3y ago
Marketers gonna market. Anybody remember all the "big data" hype? ChatGPT and its ilk don't enable me to do something today that I couldn't do yesterday. Nor do they enable me to do something an order of magnitude faster than I could do yesterday. Contrast this to when microprocessors hit. Suddenly, things like industrial control went from the size of multiple refrigerators to a PC board. When the price dropped (things like the 6502), engineers went absolutely bonkers building amazing things.
- noncoml 3y ago
  Give it some time. How long was it from the day iPhone was introduced until Uber?
  - macartain 3y ago
    [dead]
kristianp 3y ago
https://archive.is/Kvs3l https://archive.is/Kvs3l
kristianp 3y ago
> the supply chain and procurement industry need this badly Anyone have examples of how GPT can help there?
- simne 3y ago
  I'm not sure about GPT, because this is visual task. Good examples are typical courier service, or FedEX. Or companies like Amazon make their own delivery services. They usually have standard boxes/envelopes with standard barcode markings for correspondence. All these boxes/envelopes gathered from sending offices and concentrated into sort facility, where machine vision could sort them, to separate container for each destination branch office, or for some places, big central office have it's own container. Than containers load to big truck and run to destination city, where unload at destination branch office. In destination branch office next sorting distribute packages to containers of small offices. Then smaller truck deliver containers to small offices. Similar thing happen on returns, just in target office created new mark and placed over old mark. What could be wrong? - Some delivery companies allow containers of free form, not just rectangular or envelopes, just limiting weight and sum of sizes, so you for example could send car body kit, or skis, not inside rectangular container. For human, handling such things is trivial task, but for machine it is nightmare. But if this thing will see something like GPT-4, which claimed multimodal, possible it will detect it right and understand how to handle it.
Johnny_Q_Public 3y ago
[dead]
nunez 3y ago
How much money does pg have on OpenAI?
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  Ownership in OpenAI LP appears to be (mostly?) the missus' department. The cap table is moot in the near-term because of the profit precedence structure.
omscs99 3y ago
Hell, I doubt most businesses even have a functional full text search for internal documents. My job certainly doesn’t, but the SVP feels the need to make noises about LLMs and throw the word “revolution” around It’s like nobody wants to talk about reasonable solutions that incrementally make things better, everything has to be some meme “revolution”
fargle 3y ago
what I parsed it as is: [(The exact opposite of a solution) in search of a problem] => a non-solution in search of a problem what he actually said: [The exact opposite of (a solution in search of a problem)] => naive translation (a problem in search of a solution) but what he meant is: a solution in search of a problem that ended up finding far more problems than anyone suspected. "problem in search of solution" => bad. exact opposite of bad => good. what it really is? I think closer to the first one. why do they talk in such gobbledygook
simne 3y ago
I could agree with Paul Graham only in one - current AI systems use too much energy when doing really interest tasks, and make too little value. For others his words, they are against Capitalism, because this is it's typical way - Pareto's principle, use new tool on 20% cases, where you could make 80% profit, and don't wait, until tool will handle 100% cases. If mankind lived against Capitalism, we would not have cars and planes, we would still use steam engines.

18 points by hayksaakian 3y ago

injb 3y ago

Can't read the article. Does he mean it's a problem in search of a solution then? Or does he mean it's "the exact opposite of a solution, in search of a problem" (in other words, a problem in search of a problem)?

hayksaakian 3y ago
I think what he's trying to say is it's capable of solving more problems than we think.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  That is implying that we haven’t actually found the problems for it to solve yet, which would make it a solution in search of a problem where PG is optimistic about the outcome of the search. What I think he is trying to say is that it is a solution that addresses a broad range of problems that are clear now but weren’t envisioned by its creators, which is both impossible given the early claims (its creators already billed it as a general solution with easentially no limits) and, even if you ignore those claims and reduce it to a question of it being broadly applicable as a solution, generally premature (most of the more specific things it is billed as a solution for it hasn’t solved, though some people might have ideas, not yet proven jn practice, of how it can be a component of a solution).
TSiege 3y ago
Here's a link to the full quote on xitter. "AI is the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem. It's the solution to far more problems than its developers even knew existed." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1689874390442561536 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1689874390442561536
saltcured 3y ago
The exact opposite could be a non-solution trying to evade all problems. ;-) And that's why I personally don't have much faith in the LLM approach. Natural language is too full of ambiguity to pretend it delivers meaning. It makes oblique references to meaning, based on awful assumptions about the audience and presumed mental context. I see enough absurd miscommunication and word salad between native speakers. I really don't want a magic box to vaguely emulate this.

FrankWilhoit 3y ago

He seems to think that what we need (and want) is something to hand off to. We're tired. We don't want to do it any more -- for any value of "it". Actually we can't do it any more; we've reduced everything to performance, so it doesn't matter who carries the torch. AI may as well carry it; even if it drops it, it may do so amusingly, and what more could we ask?

medler 3y ago

It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tracerbulletx 3y ago
I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just what it's useful for today.
- bsder 3y ago
  > If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today. We used to just call that "a search engine". Remember that? Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got. It was the ad-ification of search engines that killed that. So, AI allows us to go back to the Internet circa 2000? That's a big innovation? I mean, I'll take it, but that's a pretty low bar ...
  - tracerbulletx 3y ago
    I am having good conversations with the thing about books as I read them and having it summarize parts I want to keep notes on and make knowledge graphs, and construct new worked examples and diving into specific topics and having significantly enhanced learning experiences with it as a partner literally every day for the last few months. So you're entitled to your opinion but it's simply not the same thing as a search engine.

bsder 3y ago

Marketers gonna market. Anybody remember all the "big data" hype? ChatGPT and its ilk don't enable me to do something today that I couldn't do yesterday. Nor do they enable me to do something an order of magnitude faster than I could do yesterday. Contrast this to when microprocessors hit. Suddenly, things like industrial control went from the size of multiple refrigerators to a PC board. When the price dropped (things like the 6502), engineers went absolutely bonkers building amazing things.

noncoml 3y ago
Give it some time. How long was it from the day iPhone was introduced until Uber?
- macartain 3y ago
  [dead]

kristianp 3y ago

https://archive.is/Kvs3l https://archive.is/Kvs3l

kristianp 3y ago

> the supply chain and procurement industry need this badly Anyone have examples of how GPT can help there?

simne 3y ago
I'm not sure about GPT, because this is visual task. Good examples are typical courier service, or FedEX. Or companies like Amazon make their own delivery services. They usually have standard boxes/envelopes with standard barcode markings for correspondence. All these boxes/envelopes gathered from sending offices and concentrated into sort facility, where machine vision could sort them, to separate container for each destination branch office, or for some places, big central office have it's own container. Than containers load to big truck and run to destination city, where unload at destination branch office. In destination branch office next sorting distribute packages to containers of small offices. Then smaller truck deliver containers to small offices. Similar thing happen on returns, just in target office created new mark and placed over old mark. What could be wrong? - Some delivery companies allow containers of free form, not just rectangular or envelopes, just limiting weight and sum of sizes, so you for example could send car body kit, or skis, not inside rectangular container. For human, handling such things is trivial task, but for machine it is nightmare. But if this thing will see something like GPT-4, which claimed multimodal, possible it will detect it right and understand how to handle it.

Johnny_Q_Public 3y ago

[dead]

nunez 3y ago

How much money does pg have on OpenAI?

sacnoradhq 3y ago
Ownership in OpenAI LP appears to be (mostly?) the missus' department. The cap table is moot in the near-term because of the profit precedence structure.

omscs99 3y ago

Hell, I doubt most businesses even have a functional full text search for internal documents. My job certainly doesn’t, but the SVP feels the need to make noises about LLMs and throw the word “revolution” around It’s like nobody wants to talk about reasonable solutions that incrementally make things better, everything has to be some meme “revolution”

fargle 3y ago

what I parsed it as is: [(The exact opposite of a solution) in search of a problem] => a non-solution in search of a problem what he actually said: [The exact opposite of (a solution in search of a problem)] => naive translation (a problem in search of a solution) but what he meant is: a solution in search of a problem that ended up finding far more problems than anyone suspected. "problem in search of solution" => bad. exact opposite of bad => good. what it really is? I think closer to the first one. why do they talk in such gobbledygook

simne 3y ago

I could agree with Paul Graham only in one - current AI systems use too much energy when doing really interest tasks, and make too little value. For others his words, they are against Capitalism, because this is it's typical way - Pareto's principle, use new tool on 20% cases, where you could make 80% profit, and don't wait, until tool will handle 100% cases. If mankind lived against Capitalism, we would not have cars and planes, we would still use steam engines.