5 ms·

Let's not do this again, please

29 points by passwordoops 3y ago

munchler 3y ago
> It’s not that Sora is generating new and amazing scenes based on the words you’re typing — it’s automating the act of stitching together renderings of extant video and images. I think this is untrue. Sora is doing way more than stitching existing videos and images together. The relentless underhyping of AI is almost as annoying as the overhyping. ChatGPT, for example, is a non-human entity that speaks fluent English. This is an amazing achievement, no matter how many people try to downplay it.
- EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  What do you mean by speak? That word is doing a lot of work. Chatgpt can respond to a prompt, but speak seems a bridge too far. It performs statistical analysis. [edit] I'm not sure what i would call its actions, if not speech though. It does not think independently, but it does pass information. I guess it computes an answer.
  - munchler 3y ago
    I mean you can have a conversation with it in English. You can use slang, idioms, misspellings, invalid grammar, and it will track you just fine. This was a sci-fi dream a decade ago and now it’s reality.
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
      The dream is for intelligence, not just a parrot.
      - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        If intelligence is your personal dream, that's fine. The statement -however- was "it speaks fluent English." I think several LLMs have sufficiently demonstrated the ability to communicate concepts using natural language to be able to say that the statement is true. If you tie an LLM to underlying software (and thus also ultimately hardware, if desired), it can take your instructions in natural language, translate them into a form suitable for the software to process, and then take the output and render that back into intelligible natural language. On that basis, I would argue that the statement "it speaks fluent English" is essentially correct. If you assert "but that has nothing to do with intelligence", you may or may not be correct, but -combining personal empirical observation with your world model- , intelligence would then appear to be orthogonal to the ability to speak English. Either that, or there is a flaw in your world model. Whatever the case may be, LLMs are quite evidently capable of communicating in English.
        EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        Yes, and I don't disagree it communicates. I even went so far as to look up the definition of the word speak, and there are two that are relevant. One is a mechanical interpretation, producing english words, and the other is about feelings and thoughts. gpts qualify under the mechanical definition, but not the thoughts and feelings one. [Edit] And the dream isn't one of mine, the parent references "sci fi dream."
        Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        Ok, if we agree it communicates in natural language, we're pretty much in agreement. Are we still arguing whether "able to speak english" is or is not a subset of "able to communicate in natural language", or are we in agreement in our entirety now? And there are many "sci fi dream"s of course, one of which is/was for computers to be able to communicate in natural language. (See eg: star trek, iron man)
        EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        There's a third option! We agree gpts do speak in the mechanical sense, but not in the sense of sharing thoughts or feelings. I often think of the "Fool's Choice" from "Crucial Conversations:" saying nothing, or being emotional, when the best path is the middle ground, a thoughtful response. Something I am still working on!
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    It communicates in English. It can literally "speak" if connected to a voice interface, of course. Are you trying to miss the point, or do you not believe that ChatGPT can fluently communicate in English without requiring additional input modes for communication? You clearly have a point you'd like to make, but I don't think claiming that ChatGPT can't "speak" English is a effective way to make it. It can.
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
      To me speaking requires independent thought and motive, which gpt's do not have. If I as a human want to express myself, I am capable of that. Gpt's only respond with a series of plausible tokens. Someone mentioned in fine arts they make a distinction between craft and art, which is an excellent point. [Edit] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423510 [Edit] If all it takes to "speak" is vocalizing sounds, does text to speech count? [Edit] I guess it's in the name, text to "speech." Again, gpts do not have independent agency.
      - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        What word would you to describe what ChatGPT is doing then? Would "mimic-ing speech" suffice, for you? GPT responds in a "series of plausible tokens" that would pass as fluent English if generated by a human. Let's put aside the vocalization point, that's a distraction.
        EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        I think compute is a more appropriate term, but your right it's certainly an awkward phrase. It pains me when people compare gpts to humans - we're incredibly more complex and advanced.
        mvdtnz 3y ago
        It generates text.
        3y ago
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    "Cells are not alive, they just execute chemical reactions" "Computers can't actually do calculations, they're just a bunch of circuits" "Cars don't actually move, they're just a heat engine" "Chat GPT doesn't speak and understand natural language, it just performs statistical analysis" - Eppur si muove. - We define cells as being alive. We use computers to do maths. Cars are used to travel from A to B. And an LLM can accept instructions in a natural language, carry them out, and report back in natural language.
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
      Maybe the word is technically accurate. [Edit] Alive is also a word with a lot of ambiguity associated. I'm not sure we have a clear definition. If "I think therefore I am" is the requirement, gpts do not qualify, as they do not act independently. [Edit] Definition 1) To produce words by means of sounds; talk. - gpt passes Definition 2) To express thoughts or feelings to convey information in speech or writing. - gpt fails [Edit] You used quotes, but I never said most of those things.
      - moshun 3y ago
        The best kind of accurate
        EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        Except not really.
      - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        If you lazily googled it the same way I did, you would have also found: Definition 3) To convey information or ideas in text. (gpt passes this one) By the way, dictionary definitions are often very fuzzy, so this is not really any sort of great evidence for anything. More me returning your lackadaisical volley with the same vim and vigor as I received it. ;-) I bet you can do better!
        3y ago
- xetplan 3y ago
  I will reserve judgement on Sora until I actually get to use it. Anything less than Midjourney for video will be hugely disappointing. I still love chatGPT but my use is so limited compared to what it was 9 months ago. Then I think about how a language model could help with basically anything I have ever been paid to do and the reality is I don't think it would be much help. Then if we go back to college/school I wouldn't have used it to learn more. I would have used it to do less work and probably learned less.
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
The problem is people in charge think they can replace people with ai, and a lot of times they can, with much worse results.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  And, as we are seeing with companies like Air Canada, it bites them in the ass. It may not have been a huge punishment, having to pay out $500~ to someone, but I continuously hope that each instance of that kind of thing happening decreases peoples' chances of just tossing a half-assed chatgpt chatbot on their site.
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    They'll continue to toss a half-assed chatbot on their site but add a disclaimer that the chatbot's decisions can be overruled. Replacing human labor at scale will take a generation to work out and this is day one. They'll be happy to go through pain points like this for the next decade in order to learn how to make it work.
throwuwu 3y ago
Yuck. So many half truths and outright lies. This is straight up propaganda. Look into any of the assertions given here and you’ll see what I mean. Designed to fool headline readers only.
- EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  I'm curious what the outright lies are.
mvdtnz 3y ago
I think that because the results of these generative "AI" models is so surprising and "novel" (in the sense of a novelty toy) we are seeing a large disconnect between the hype around the technology and its actual usefulness. I have seen few cases where "AI" can make a substantial dent in productivity (coding, drafting documents and a few others). Just like crypto "currency" before it we have an interesting technology that hasn't translated into a real game changing product, despite the breathless excitement.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  I've always thought of it as the Minority Report fallacy. It looks cool to see someone in a movie wave their arms around to control a computer. People ask all the time why we don't have that yet. They don't stop to think that their arms would get tired quickly and that resting arms on a table, having the tactile feedback of a keyboard and mouse, there's a reason we've stuck with those. People see something that looks cool on the surface and don't substantively think it through.
- jjjjj55555 3y ago
  Something that I've noticed is that all of the killer examples of AI doing amazing stuff are not really easily reproducible by normal users. If someone spent countless hours crafting prompts to generate a really cool image or something, then that's much less impressive. It's kind of like the sales demo vs. the actual product you receive.
- Gairgrg 3y ago
  I'm using copilot and chatgpt regularly and it is helpful. Transcripting and summarizing meetings was never that easy. It is already a game changing technology.. I'm lost on how you dismiss this. Crypto on the other hand has not solved any problem and most peo still don't get it or even used it. And very often we get new great ai things. Nearly my whole family tried chatgpt.
Gairgrg 3y ago
Really not sure what his problem is? It's an impressive demo which got viral for much better reasons than a lot of other things before. And I really don't mind at all if super rich people invest with even more money into it.
junon 3y ago
Was interested until it mentioned stitching. Sora isn't doing that. At least understand something before you slam it.
urbandw311er 3y ago
> For just about anyone else, it all happened so rapidly we really had a chance to ask: Is this something we actually want? Surely this is a typo - it should be “rarely” had a chance to ask.

29 points by passwordoops 3y ago

> It’s not that Sora is generating new and amazing scenes based on the words you’re typing — it’s automating the act of stitching together renderings of extant video and images. I think this is untrue. Sora is doing way more than stitching existing videos and images together. The relentless underhyping of AI is almost as annoying as the overhyping. ChatGPT, for example, is a non-human entity that speaks fluent English. This is an amazing achievement, no matter how many people try to downplay it.

EchoChamberMan 3y ago
What do you mean by speak? That word is doing a lot of work. Chatgpt can respond to a prompt, but speak seems a bridge too far. It performs statistical analysis. [edit] I'm not sure what i would call its actions, if not speech though. It does not think independently, but it does pass information. I guess it computes an answer.
- munchler 3y ago
  I mean you can have a conversation with it in English. You can use slang, idioms, misspellings, invalid grammar, and it will track you just fine. This was a sci-fi dream a decade ago and now it’s reality.
  - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
    The dream is for intelligence, not just a parrot.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      If intelligence is your personal dream, that's fine. The statement -however- was "it speaks fluent English." I think several LLMs have sufficiently demonstrated the ability to communicate concepts using natural language to be able to say that the statement is true. If you tie an LLM to underlying software (and thus also ultimately hardware, if desired), it can take your instructions in natural language, translate them into a form suitable for the software to process, and then take the output and render that back into intelligible natural language. On that basis, I would argue that the statement "it speaks fluent English" is essentially correct. If you assert "but that has nothing to do with intelligence", you may or may not be correct, but -combining personal empirical observation with your world model- , intelligence would then appear to be orthogonal to the ability to speak English. Either that, or there is a flaw in your world model. Whatever the case may be, LLMs are quite evidently capable of communicating in English.
      - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        Yes, and I don't disagree it communicates. I even went so far as to look up the definition of the word speak, and there are two that are relevant. One is a mechanical interpretation, producing english words, and the other is about feelings and thoughts. gpts qualify under the mechanical definition, but not the thoughts and feelings one. [Edit] And the dream isn't one of mine, the parent references "sci fi dream."
        Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        Ok, if we agree it communicates in natural language, we're pretty much in agreement. Are we still arguing whether "able to speak english" is or is not a subset of "able to communicate in natural language", or are we in agreement in our entirety now? And there are many "sci fi dream"s of course, one of which is/was for computers to be able to communicate in natural language. (See eg: star trek, iron man)
        EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        There's a third option! We agree gpts do speak in the mechanical sense, but not in the sense of sharing thoughts or feelings. I often think of the "Fool's Choice" from "Crucial Conversations:" saying nothing, or being emotional, when the best path is the middle ground, a thoughtful response. Something I am still working on!
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  It communicates in English. It can literally "speak" if connected to a voice interface, of course. Are you trying to miss the point, or do you not believe that ChatGPT can fluently communicate in English without requiring additional input modes for communication? You clearly have a point you'd like to make, but I don't think claiming that ChatGPT can't "speak" English is a effective way to make it. It can.
  - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
    To me speaking requires independent thought and motive, which gpt's do not have. If I as a human want to express myself, I am capable of that. Gpt's only respond with a series of plausible tokens. Someone mentioned in fine arts they make a distinction between craft and art, which is an excellent point. [Edit] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423510 [Edit] If all it takes to "speak" is vocalizing sounds, does text to speech count? [Edit] I guess it's in the name, text to "speech." Again, gpts do not have independent agency.
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      What word would you to describe what ChatGPT is doing then? Would "mimic-ing speech" suffice, for you? GPT responds in a "series of plausible tokens" that would pass as fluent English if generated by a human. Let's put aside the vocalization point, that's a distraction.
      - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        I think compute is a more appropriate term, but your right it's certainly an awkward phrase. It pains me when people compare gpts to humans - we're incredibly more complex and advanced.
      - mvdtnz 3y ago
        It generates text.
        3y ago
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  "Cells are not alive, they just execute chemical reactions" "Computers can't actually do calculations, they're just a bunch of circuits" "Cars don't actually move, they're just a heat engine" "Chat GPT doesn't speak and understand natural language, it just performs statistical analysis" - Eppur si muove. - We define cells as being alive. We use computers to do maths. Cars are used to travel from A to B. And an LLM can accept instructions in a natural language, carry them out, and report back in natural language.
  - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
    Maybe the word is technically accurate. [Edit] Alive is also a word with a lot of ambiguity associated. I'm not sure we have a clear definition. If "I think therefore I am" is the requirement, gpts do not qualify, as they do not act independently. [Edit] Definition 1) To produce words by means of sounds; talk. - gpt passes Definition 2) To express thoughts or feelings to convey information in speech or writing. - gpt fails [Edit] You used quotes, but I never said most of those things.
    - moshun 3y ago
      The best kind of accurate
      - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        Except not really.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      If you lazily googled it the same way I did, you would have also found: Definition 3) To convey information or ideas in text. (gpt passes this one) By the way, dictionary definitions are often very fuzzy, so this is not really any sort of great evidence for anything. More me returning your lackadaisical volley with the same vim and vigor as I received it. ;-) I bet you can do better!
      - 3y ago
xetplan 3y ago
I will reserve judgement on Sora until I actually get to use it. Anything less than Midjourney for video will be hugely disappointing. I still love chatGPT but my use is so limited compared to what it was 9 months ago. Then I think about how a language model could help with basically anything I have ever been paid to do and the reality is I don't think it would be much help. Then if we go back to college/school I wouldn't have used it to learn more. I would have used it to do less work and probably learned less.

EchoChamberMan 3y ago

The problem is people in charge think they can replace people with ai, and a lot of times they can, with much worse results.

chankstein38 3y ago
And, as we are seeing with companies like Air Canada, it bites them in the ass. It may not have been a huge punishment, having to pay out $500~ to someone, but I continuously hope that each instance of that kind of thing happening decreases peoples' chances of just tossing a half-assed chatgpt chatbot on their site.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  They'll continue to toss a half-assed chatbot on their site but add a disclaimer that the chatbot's decisions can be overruled. Replacing human labor at scale will take a generation to work out and this is day one. They'll be happy to go through pain points like this for the next decade in order to learn how to make it work.

throwuwu 3y ago

Yuck. So many half truths and outright lies. This is straight up propaganda. Look into any of the assertions given here and you’ll see what I mean. Designed to fool headline readers only.

EchoChamberMan 3y ago
I'm curious what the outright lies are.

mvdtnz 3y ago

I think that because the results of these generative "AI" models is so surprising and "novel" (in the sense of a novelty toy) we are seeing a large disconnect between the hype around the technology and its actual usefulness. I have seen few cases where "AI" can make a substantial dent in productivity (coding, drafting documents and a few others). Just like crypto "currency" before it we have an interesting technology that hasn't translated into a real game changing product, despite the breathless excitement.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
I've always thought of it as the Minority Report fallacy. It looks cool to see someone in a movie wave their arms around to control a computer. People ask all the time why we don't have that yet. They don't stop to think that their arms would get tired quickly and that resting arms on a table, having the tactile feedback of a keyboard and mouse, there's a reason we've stuck with those. People see something that looks cool on the surface and don't substantively think it through.
jjjjj55555 3y ago
Something that I've noticed is that all of the killer examples of AI doing amazing stuff are not really easily reproducible by normal users. If someone spent countless hours crafting prompts to generate a really cool image or something, then that's much less impressive. It's kind of like the sales demo vs. the actual product you receive.
Gairgrg 3y ago
I'm using copilot and chatgpt regularly and it is helpful. Transcripting and summarizing meetings was never that easy. It is already a game changing technology.. I'm lost on how you dismiss this. Crypto on the other hand has not solved any problem and most peo still don't get it or even used it. And very often we get new great ai things. Nearly my whole family tried chatgpt.

Gairgrg 3y ago

Really not sure what his problem is? It's an impressive demo which got viral for much better reasons than a lot of other things before. And I really don't mind at all if super rich people invest with even more money into it.

junon 3y ago

Was interested until it mentioned stitching. Sora isn't doing that. At least understand something before you slam it.

urbandw311er 3y ago

> For just about anyone else, it all happened so rapidly we really had a chance to ask: Is this something we actually want? Surely this is a typo - it should be “rarely” had a chance to ask.