10 ms·

The usual critics will quickly point out that LLMs like GPT-4o still have a lot of failure modes and suffer from issues that remain unresolved. They will point

• CamperBob2 2y ago
  Imagine what an unfettered model would be like. 'Ex Machina' would no longer be a software-engineering problem, but just another exercise in mechanical and electrical engineering. The future is indeed here... and it is, indeed, not equitably distributed.
  • aftbit 2y ago
    Or from Zones of Thought series, Applied Theology, the study of communication with and creation of superhuman intelligences that might as well be gods.
• aftbit 2y ago
  >Who cares? This stuff feels magical. Magical! On one hand, I agree - we shouldn't diminish the very real capabilities of these models with tech skepticism. On the other hand, I disagree - I believe this approach is unlikely to lead to human-level AGI. Like so many things, the truth probably lies somewhere between the skeptical naysayers and the breathless fanboys.
  • CamperBob2 2y ago
    On the other hand, I disagree - I believe this approach is unlikely to lead to human-level AGI. You might not be fooled by a conversation with an agent like the one in the promo video, but you'd probably agree that somewhere around 80% of people could be. At what percentage would you say that it's good enough to be "human-level?"
    • layer8 2y ago
      > You might not be fooled by a conversation with an agent like the one in the promo video, but you'd probably agree that somewhere around 80% of people could be. I think people will quickly learn with enough exposure, and then that percentage will go down.
      • MVissers 2y ago
        Nah– These models will improve faster than people can catch up. People or AI models can barely catch AI-created text. It's quickly becoming impossible to distinguish. The one you catch is the tip of the iceberg. Same will happen to speech. Might take a few years, but it'll be indistinguishable in a max a few years. Due to compute increase + model improvement, both improving exponentially.
        • krainboltgreene 2y ago
          > These models will improve faster than people can catch up. So that we're all clear the basis for this analysis is purely made up, yes?
        • paulryanrogers 2y ago
          How can we be so sure things will keep getting better? And at a rate faster than humans can adapt? If we have to damn rivers and build new coal plants to power these AI data centers, then it may be one step forward and two steps back.
      • pixl97 2y ago
        No, instead something worse will happen. Well spoken and well mannered speakers will be called bots. The comment threads under posts will be hurtling insults back and forth on who's actually real. Half the comments will actually be bots doing it. Welcome to the dead internet.
        • jfyi 2y ago
          Right! This is absolutely apocalyptic! If more than half the people I argue with on internet forums are just bots that don't feel the sting and fail to sleep at night because of it, what even is the meaning of anything? We need to stop these hateful ai companies before they ruin society as a whole! Seriously though... the internet is dead already, and it's not coming back to what it was. We ruined it, not ai.
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    I'm not so sure, I think this is what's called "emergent behavior" — we've found very interesting side effects of bringing together technologies. This might ultimately teach us more about intelligence than more reductionist approaches like scanning and mapping the brain.
    • dongping 2y ago
      On the other hand, it is very difficult to distinguish between "emergent behavior" and "somehow leaked into our large training set" for LLMs.
• layer8 2y ago
  > HAL's unemotional monotone in Kubrick's movie, "Space Odyssey," feels... primitive by comparison. I’d strongly prefer that though, along with HAL’s reasoning abilities.
  • moffkalast 2y ago
    I would say a machine that thinks it feels emotions is less likely to throw you out of a spaceship. Human empathy already feels lacking compared to what something as basic as llama-3 can do.
    • layer8 2y ago
      What you say has nothing to do with how an AI speaks. To use another pop-culture reference, Obi-Wan in Episode IV had deep empathy, but didn’t speak emotionally. Those are separate things.
    • thfuran 2y ago
      >I would say a machine that thinks it feels emotions is less likely to throw you out of a spaceship A lot of terrible human behavior is driven by emotions. An emotionless machine will never dump you out the airlock in a fit of rage.
      • pixl97 2y ago
        Ah, I was tossed out of the airlock in a fit of logic... totally different!
        • throwup238 2y ago
          The important part is that the machine explained its reasoning to you while purging the airlock.
          • dimask 2y ago
            In a chain of thought manner, as every proper AI, of course.
• dragonwriter 2y ago
  > This stuff feels magical. Magical. Because its capacities are focused on exactly the right place to feel magical. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t real utility, but language (written, and even moreso spoken) has an enormous emotional resonance for humans, so this is laser-targeted in an area where every advance is going to “feel magical” whether or not it moves the needle much on practical utility; it’s not unlike the effect of TV news making you feel informed, even though time spent watching it negatively correlates with understanding of current events.
  • BoorishBears 2y ago
    You really think OpenAI has researchers figuring out how to drive emergent capabilities based on what markets well? Edit: Apparently not based on your clarification, instead the researchers don't know any better than to march into a local maxima because they're only human and seek to replicate themselves. I assumed too much good faith.
    • dragonwriter 2y ago
      I don’t think the intent matters, the effect of its capacities being centered where they are is that they trigger certain human biases. (Arguably, it is the other way around: they aren’t focused on appealing to those biases, but driven by them, in the that the perception of language modeling as a road to real general reasoning is a manifestation of the same bias which makes language capacity be perceived as magical.)
      • BoorishBears 2y ago
        Intent matters when you're being as dismissive as you were. Not to mention your comment doesn't track at all with the most basic findings they've shared: that adding new modalities increases performance across the board. They shared that with GPT-4 vs GPT-4V, and the fact this is a faster model than GPT-4V while rivaling it's performance seems like further confirmation of the fact. - It seems like you're assigning emotional biases of your own to pretty straightforward science.
• agumonkey 2y ago
  That's what openai managed to catch. The large enough sense of wonder. You could feel it as people spread the news but not as the usual fad.. there was a soft silence to it, people focused deeply poking at it because it was a new interface.
• barrell 2y ago
  Did you use any of the GPT voice features before? I’m curious whether this reaction is to the modality or the model. Don’t get me wrong, excited about this update, but I’m struggling to see what is so magical about it. Then again, I’ve been using GPT voice every day for months, so if you’re just blown away from talking to a computer then I get it
  • famouswaffles 2y ago
    Speech is a lot more than just the words being conveyed. Tone, Emphasis, Speed, Accent are all very important parts of how humans communicate verbally. Before today, voice mode was strictly your audio>text then text>audio. All that information destroyed. Now the same model takes in audio tokens and spits back out audio tokens directly. Watch this demo, it's the best example of the kind of thing that would be flat out impossible with the previous setup. https://www.youtube.com/live/DQacCB9tDaw?si=2LzQwlS8FHfot7Jy https://www.youtube.com/live/DQacCB9tDaw?si=2LzQwlS8FHfot7Jy
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      The ability to have an interactive voice conversation has been available for the iOS app for the longest.
      • famouswaffles 2y ago
        Right but this works differently.
      • kaibee 2y ago
        Kinda stretching the definition of interactive there.
        • scarface_74 2y ago
          How so? You don’t have to press the mic button after every sentence. You press the headphone button and speak like you normally would and it speaks back once you stop talking. How much more “interactive” could it be?
• grantsucceeded 2y ago
  Magical? the interruptiopn part is just flow control at the edge. control-s, control-c stuff, right? not AI? The sound of a female voice to an audience 85% composed of males between the ages of 14 and 55 is "magical", not this thing that recreates it. so yeah, its flow control and compression of highly curated, subtle soft porn. Subtle, hyper targeted, subconscious porn honed by the most colossal digitally mediated focus group ever constructed to manipulate our (straight male) emotions. why isn't the voice actually the voice of the pissed off high school janitor telling you to man-up and stop hyperventilating? instead its a woman stroking your ego and telling you to relax and take deep breaths. what dataset did they train that voice on anyway?
  • mindcrime 2y ago
    I may or may not entirely agree with this sentiment (but I definitely don't disagree with all of it!) but I will say this: I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for this. Have a "corrective upvote" on me.
  • matchbok 2y ago
    [dead]
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    Right, because having a female voice means that it is soft porn. This is like horseshoe theory on steroids.
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    It's not that complicated, generally more woman-like voices test as more pleasant to men and women alike. This concept has been backed up by stereotypes for centuries. Most voice assistants have male options, and an increasing number (including ChatGPT) have gender neutral voices. > why isn't the voice actually the voice of the pissed off high school janitor telling you to man-up and stop hyperventilating sounds like a great way to create a product people will outright hate
• Melatonic 2y ago
  HAL's voice acting I would say is actually superb and super subtly very much not unemotional. Part of what makes so unnerving. They perfect nailed creepy uncanny valley
• WhitneyLand 2y ago
  How much of this could be implemented using the API? There’s so much helpful niche functionality that can be added to custom clients.
• OOPMan 2y ago
  I really don't think Sam needs more encouragement, thanks. Also, if this is your definition of magic then...yeah...
• noman-land 2y ago
  Magic is maybe not the best analogy to use because magic itself isn't magical. It is trickery.
• karmasimida 2y ago
  Very convincing demo However, using ChatGPT with transcribing is already offering me similar experience, so what is new exactly
• scarface_74 2y ago
  Some of the failure modes in LLMs have been fixed by augmenting LLMs with external services The simplest example is “list all of the presidents in reverse chronological order of their ages when inaugurated”. Both ChatGpt 3.5 and 4 get the order wrong. The difference is that I can instruct ChatGPT 4 to “use Python” https://chat.openai.com/share/87e4d37c-ec5d-4cda-921c-b6a9c73aba18 https://chat.openai.com/share/87e4d37c-ec5d-4cda-921c-b6a9c7... You can do similar things to have it verify information by using internet sources and give you citations. Just like with the Python example, at least I can look at the script/web citation myself
  • wintermutestwin 2y ago
    It is pretty awesome that you only have to prompt with “use python”
  • aspenmayer 2y ago
    > The simplest example is “list all of the presidents in reverse chronological order of their ages when inaugurated”. This question is probably not the simplest form of the query you intend to receive an answer for. If you want a descending list of presidents based on their age at inauguration, I know what you want. If you want a reverse chronological list of presidents, I know what you want. When you combine/concatenate the two as you have above, I have no idea what you want, nor do I have any way of checking my work if I assume what you want. I know enough about word problems and how people ask questions to know that you probably have a fairly good idea what you want and likely don’t know how ambitious this question is as asked, and I think you and I both are approaching the question with reasonably good faith, so I think you’d understand or at least accommodate my request for clarification and refinement of the question so that it’s less ambiguous. Can you think of a better way to ask the question? Now that you’ve refined the question, do LLMs give you the answers you expect more frequently than before? Do you think LLMs would be able to ask you for clarification in these terms? That capability to ask for clarification is probably going to be as important as other improvements to the LLM, for questions like these that have many possibly correct answers or different interpretations. Does that make sense? What do you think?
    • 2y ago
• croes 2y ago
  >This stuff feels magical. Magical. Sound like the people who defend Astrology because it feels magical how their horoscope fits their personality. "Don't bother me with facts that destroy my rose-tinted view" At moment AI is a massive hype and shoved into everything. To point at the faults and weaknesses is a reasonable and responsible thing to do.
  • hsavit1 2y ago
    yea, we don't want or need this kind of "magic" - because it's hardly magic to begin with, and it's more socially and environmentally destructive than anything else.
    • lannisterstark 2y ago
      Speak for yourself, my workflow and live has been significantly improved with these things. Having easier access to information that I sorta know but want to verify/clarify rather than going into forums/SO is extremely handy. Not having to write boilerplate code itself also is very handy. So yes, I absolutely do want this "magic." "I don't like it so no one should use it" is a pretty narrow POV.
      • oblio 2y ago
        Both your use cases don't really lead to stable long term valuations in the trillions for the companies building this stuff.
        • lannisterstark 2y ago
          Wonderful. I don't need them to. It works for what I need it to do.
          • oblio 2y ago
            You should be worried because this stuff needs to make sense financially. Otherwise we'll be stuck with it in an enshittification cycle, kind of like Reddit or image hosting websites.
• pmelendez 2y ago
  > Ignore the critics. Watch the demos. Play with it With so many smoke and mirrors demos out there, I am not super excited at those videos. I would play with it, but it seems like it is not available in a free tier (I stopped paying OpenAI a while ago after realizing that open models are more than enough for me)
• m463 2y ago
  > HAL's unemotional monotone on a tangent... I find it interesting the psychology behind this. If the voice in 2001 had proper inflection, it wouldn't have been perceived as a computer. (also, I remember when voice synthesizers got more sophisticated and Stephen Hawking decided to keep his original first-gen voice because he identified more with it) I think we'll be going the other way soon. Perfect voices, with the perfect emotional inflection will be perceived as computers. However I think at some point they may be anthropomorphized and given more credit than they deserve. This will probably be cleverly planned and a/b tested. And then that perfect voice, for you, will get you to give in.
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
  > HAL's unemotional monotone in Kubrick's movie, "Space Odyssey," feels... oddly primitive by comparison In comparison to the gas pump which says "Thank You!"
• nojvek 2y ago
  > Play with it! It’s not accessible to everyone yet. Even on api, I can’t send it voice stream yet. Api refuses to generate images. Next few weeks will tell as more people play with it.
• fhub 2y ago
  I prompted it with "Take this SSML script and give me a woman's voice reading it as WAV or MP3 [Pasted script]" and it pretty much sounds like HAL.
  • speedgoose 2y ago
    Did they release the new voices yet?
• password54321 2y ago
  Comments have become insufferable. Either it is now positive to the point of bordering on cringe-worthiness (your comment) or negative. Nuanced discussion is dead.
• lm28469 2y ago
  > It makes the movie "Her" look like it's no longer in the realm of science fiction but in the realm of incremental product development Are we supposed to cheer to that? We're already mid way to the full implementation of 1984, do we need Her before we get to Matrix ?
  • throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    Her wasn’t a dystopia as far as I could tell. Not even a cautionary tale. The scifi ending seems unlikely but everything else is remarkably prescient. I think the picnic scene is very likely to come true in the near future. Things might even improve substantially if we all interact with personalities that are consistently positive and biased towards conflict resolution and non judgemental interactions.
    • lm28469 2y ago
      > Her wasn’t a dystopia as far as I could tell. Well that's exactly why I'm not looking forward to whatever is coming. The average joe thinking dating a server is not a dystopia frighten me much more than the delusional tech ceo who thinks his ai will revolutionise the world > Things might even improve substantially if we all interact with personalities that are consistently positive and biased towards conflict resolution and non judgemental interactions. Some kind of turbo bubble in which you don't even have to actually interact with anyone or anything ? Every "personalities" will be nice to you as long as you send $200 to openai every week, yep that's absolutely a dystopia for me It really feels like the end goal is living in a pod and being uploaded in an alternative reality, everything we build to "enhance" our lives take us further from the basic building blocks that make life "life".
      • throwthrowuknow 2y ago
        There’s a lot of hyperbole here but I’ll try to respond. If LLMs can reach a level where they’re effectively indistinguishable from talking to a person then I don’t see anything wrong with someone dating one. People already involve themselves in all kinds of romantic relationships with nonhuman things: anime characters, dolls, celebrities they’ve never met, pillows and substitute relationships with other things like work, art, social media, pets, etc. Adding AI to the list doesn’t make things worse. I think there’s a strong argument that AI relationships would be much healthier than many of the others if they can emulate human interaction to within a very close degree. The scene which I referenced is one in which a group of three humans and one AI spend time together at a picnic and their interactions are decidedly normal. How many lonely people avoid socializing because they are alone and don’t want to feel like a third wheel? If dating or even just being friends with an AI that can accompany you to such events is accepted and not derided by people who happily have a human companion then I think having a supportive partner could help many people reengage with wider social circles and maybe they will eventually choose to and be able to find other people that they can form relationships with. OpenAI charges $20 a month which is an extremely reasonable price for a multipurpose tool considering you can’t buy a single meal at a restaurant for the same amount and is far better than the “free” ad supported services that everyone has become addicted to. We’ve been rallying for 20 odd years for payment based services instead of ads but whenever one comes along people shout it down. Funny isn’t it? The movie Her had an answer for our current fascination for screens as well. It showed a world where computers were almost entirely voice driven with screens playing a secondary role as evidenced by their cell phones looking more like pocket books that close and hide the screen. If you’re worried about pods, well they’re already here and you’re probably holding one in your hands right now. Screens chain us down and mediate our interactions with the world in a way that voice doesn’t. You can walk and talk effortlessly but not so much walking and tapping or typing. If the AI can see and understand what you see (another scene in the movie where he goes on a date with his “phone” in his pocket) and understands enough to not need procedural instructions then it can truly act as an assistant capable of performing assigned tasks and filling in the details while you are free to go about your day. I believe this could end the paradigm of being chained to a desk for office work 8 hours a day and could also transform leisure time as well.
• smugglerFlynn 2y ago
  Watching HAL happening in real life comes across as creepy, not magical. Double creepy with all the people praising this ‘magicality’. I’m not a sceptic and apply AI on a daily basis, but whole “we can finally replace people” vibe is extremely off-putting. I had very similar feelings during pandemic, when majority of people was so seemingly happy to drop any real human interaction in favor of remote comms via chats/audio calls, it still creeps me out how ready we are as a society to drop anything remotely human in favor of technocratic advancement and “productivity”.
• aiauthoritydev 2y ago
  1. Demos are meant for feel magical and except in Apple's case they are often exaggerated versions of their real product. 2. Even then this is a wonderful step for tech in general and not just OpenAI. Makes me very excited. 3. Most economic value and growth driven by AI will not come from consumer apps but rather the enterprise use. I am interested in seeing how AI can automatically buy stuff for me, automate my home, reduce my energy used, automatically apply and get credit cards based on my purchases, find new jobs for me, negotiate with a car dealer on my behalf, detect when I am going to fall sick, better diabetes case and eventual cure etc. etc.
• deleted 2y ago
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• bowsamic 2y ago
  The demos seem quite boring to me
• suarezluis 2y ago
  This is such a hot take, it should go in hot-takes.io LOL
• deleted 2y ago
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• goatlover 2y ago
  > It makes the movie "Her" look like it's no longer in the realm of science fiction but in the realm of incremental product development. The last part of the movie "Her" is still in the realm of science fiction, if not outright fantasy. Reminds me of the later seasons of SG1 with all the talk of ascension and Ancients. Or Clarke's 3001 book intro, where the monolith creators figured out how to encode themselves into spacetime. There's nothing incremental about that.
• badgersnake 2y ago
  Blah blah blah indeed, the hype train continues unabated. The problem is, those are all perfectly valid criticisms and LLMS can never live up to the ridiculous levels of hype.
• peterisza 2y ago
  Can anybody help me try the direct voice feature? I can't find the button for it. Maybe it's not available in Europe yet, I don't know.
• deleted 2y ago
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• cess11 2y ago
  You'll have a great time once you discover literature. Especially early modern novels, texts the authors sometimes spent decades refining, under the combined influences of classical arts and thinking, Enlightenment philosophy and science. If chatbots feel magical, what those people did will feel divinely inspired.
• vwkd 2y ago
  Funnily, I’d prefer HAL’s unemotional monotone over GPT’s woke hyperbola any second.
• byw 2y ago
  I mean, humans also have tons of failures modes, but we've learned to live them over time. The average human have tons of quirks, talk over each other all the time, generally can't solve complex problems in a casual conversion setting, and are not always cheery and ready to please like Scarlet's character in Her. I think our expectations of AI is way too high from our exposure to science fiction.