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> We’re moving toward a world where every job will be modeled After an OpenAI launch, I think it's important to take one's feelings about the future impact of

> We’re moving toward a world where every job will be modeled After an OpenAI launch, I think it's important to take one's feelings about the future impact of the technology with a HUGE grain of salt. OpenAI are masters of hype. They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the comments, a logistic curve looks exponential in the beginning, before it approaches saturation. Yet, logistic curves are more common, especially in ML. I think it's interesting that GPT-4o doesn't show much of an improvement in "reasoning" strength.

owenpalmer 2y ago
They're masters of hype because their products speak for themselves (literally)
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  Yeah. Open ai are certainly not masters of hype lol. They released their titular product to basically no fanfare or advertisement. ChatGPT took off on Word of Mouth alone. They dropped GPT-4 without warning and waited months to ship it's most exciting new feature (image input). Even now, they're shipping text-image 4o but not the new voice while leaving old-voice up and confusing/disappointing a whole lot of people. This is a pretty big marketing blunder.
  - fullstackchris 2y ago
    > ChatGPT took off on Word of Mouth alone. I remember for a good 2-3 months in 2023 ALL you could see on tiktok / youtube shorts was just garbage about 'how amazing' ChatGPT was. Like - video after video and I was surprised of the repeat content being recommended to me... No doubt openAI (or something) was behind that huge marketing push
    - loa_in_ 2y ago
      No, it's just the masses sniffing out the new fascinating techbro thing to make content about. In a way I'm sorry, that's what people do nowadays. I'd prefer it to be paid for, honestly.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Well if you were a typical highly engaged TikTok or YouTube user, you are probably 13-18 years old. The kind of cheating in school that ChatGPT enabled is revolutionary. That is going to go viral. It's not a marketing push. After years of essentially learning nothing during COVID lockdowns, can you understand how transformative that is? It's like 1,000x more exciting than pirating textbooks, stealing Mazdas, or whatever culturally self-destructive life hacks were being peddled by freakshow brocolliheads and Kim Kardashian-alikes on the platform. It's ironic because the OpenAI creators really loved school and excelled academically. Nobody cares that ChatGPT destroyed advertising copywriting. But whatever little hope remained for the average high schooler post-lockdowns, it was destroyed by instant homework cheating via ChatGPT. So much for safety.
    - _flux 2y ago
      Is it not possible this would be explained by people simply being interested in the technology and TikTok/Youtube algorithms noticing that—and that they would have placed you in the same bubble, which is probably an accurate assignment? I doubt OpenAI spent even one cent marketing their system (e.g. as in paying other companies to push it).
    - theshackleford 2y ago
      > No doubt Who needs evidence when we have your lack of doubt hey?
    - dncornholio 2y ago
      I think you meant to say "All that "I" could see". There's a lot of bubbles in social media. Not everyone is part of your bubble.
danielscrubs 2y ago
"real-world impacts remain modest so far." Really? My Google usage has went down with 90% (it would just lead me to some really bad take from a journalist anyway, while ChatGPT can just hand me the latest research and knows my level of expertise). Sure it is not so helpful at work, but if OpenAI hasnt impacted the world I fail to see which company have in this decade.
- Sabinus 2y ago
  If Google hadn't ruined Search to help Advertising perhaps it wouldn't have been such a stark comparison in information quality.
  - tux1968 2y ago
    It will be interesting to see how they compare, years from now, when ChatGPT has been similarly compromised.
    - sharpshadow 2y ago
      It might not happen in that way since there are alternatives available. Google had/has a monopoly on search.
      - zorowithenma 2y ago
        For the premium subscribers it'll be good, but they'll sure ruin the experience for free tier just like Spotify cause they just can't keep their business sustainable without showing vc's some profits.
  - d1sxeyes 2y ago
    Search was always a byproduct of Advertising. Don’t blame Google for sticking to their business model. We were naive to think we could have nice things for free.
    - phatfish 2y ago
kenjackson 2y ago
GPT-4 already seems better at reasoning than most people. It just has an unusual training domain of Internet text.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  If everyone is average at reasoning then it must not be a very important trait or we’d all be at reasoning school getting better at it. Really philosophy seems to be one of the least important subjects right now. Hardly anyone learns about it in school. If it was so important to success in the wild than it would stand to reason we all work hard at improving our reasoning skills, but very few do.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 2y ago
    What schools teach is what governments who set the curriculum like to think is important, which is why my English lessons had a whole section on the Shakespearean (400-year-old, English, Christian) take on the life and motivations of a Jewish merchant living in Venice, followed up with a 80 year old (at the time) English poem on exactly how bad it is to watch your friends choke to death as their lungs melt from chlorine gas in the trenches of the first world war. These did not provide useful life-lessons for me. (The philosophy A-level I did voluntarily seemed to be 50% "can you find the flaws in this supposed proof of the existence of god?")
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - andsoitis 2y ago
      > These did not provide useful life-lessons for me. Shakespeare is packed with insight.
      - ben_w 2y ago
jdietrich 2y ago
A Google search for practically any long-tail keywords will reveal that LLMs have already had a very significant impact. DuckDuckGo has suffered even more. Social media is absolutely lousy with AI-powered fraud of varying degrees of sophistication. It's glib to dismiss safety concerns because we haven't all turned into paperclips yet. LLMs and image gen models are having real effects now. We're already at a point where AI can generate text and images that will fool a lot of people a lot of the time. For every college-educated young person smugly pointing out that they aren't fooled by an image with six-fingered hands, there are far more people who had marginal media literacy to begin with and are now almost defenceless against a tidal wave of hyper-scaleable deception. We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer. What defences do we have when an LLM will be able to have a completely fluent, natural-sounding conversation in someone else's voice? I'm not confident that I'd be able to distinguish GPT-4o from a human speaker in the best of circumstances and I'm almost certain that I could be fooled if I'm hurried, distracted, sleep deprived or otherwise impaired. Regardless of any future impacts on the labour market or any hypothesised X-risks, I think we should be very worried about the immediate risks to trust and social cohesion. An awful lot of people are turning into paranoid weirdos at the moment and I don't particularly blame them, but I can see things getting seriously ugly if we can't abate that trend.
- fsloth 2y ago
  We’ve reached a stage, where it would be advisable to not release recent photos of yourself, nor any video with sound clips to public, unless you want an AI fake instaperson of yourself starting to reach out to member of your externally visible social network, asking for money, emergency help, etc. I guess we need to have an AI secretary to take in all phonecalls from now on (spam folder will become a lot more interesting with celebrity phone calls, your dead relative phoning you etc)
  - smokel 2y ago
    Hopefully, we will soon enter the stage where nobody believes anything they see anymore. Then, you no longer have to be afraid of being misinterpreted, because nobody is listening anymore anyway. Great time to be alive!
lynx23 2y ago
> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. I spend a part of yesterday evening sorting my freshly dried t-shirts into 4 distinct piles. I used OpenAI Vision (through BeMyEyes) from my phone. I got a clear description of each and every piece of clothing, including print, colours and brand. I am blind BTW. But I guess you are right, no impact at all. > Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild Yes, great, THANKS Meta, now the Scammers have something to work with. Thats a wonderful achievement which should be praised! </sarcasm>
- anon373839 2y ago
  > I got a clear description of each and every piece of clothing, including print, colours and brand. I am blind BTW. That is a really great application of this tech. And definitely qualifies as real-world impact. Thanks for sharing that!
fhe 2y ago
> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. I second that. I remember when Google search first came out. Within a few days it completely changed my workflow, how I use the Internet, my reading habits. It easily 5 ~ 10x the value of Internet for me over a couple of weeks. LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.
- palad1n 2y ago
  OMG I remember trying Google when it was in beta, and HOLY CRAP what I had been using was like freakin night and day. AltaVista: remember that? That was the state of the art before that, and it did not compare. Night and day.
  - wenc 2y ago
    I remember Google being marginally better than Altavista but not much more. The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.
    - dolmen 2y ago
      Yes, Altavista was the major step over Yahoo! directory.
    - gizajob 2y ago
      You just gave me a weird flashback to 1997. And hey maybe when combined with GPT-4o AskJeeves will finally work as intended.
    - sgerenser 2y ago
      I used Metacrawler, it was dog slow. The beauty of Google was it was super fast, and still returned results that were at least as good, and often better, than Metacrawler. After using Google 2-3 times I don’t think I ever used Metacrawler again.
    - kevindamm 2y ago
      Google was marginally better in popular searches and significantly better for tail searches. This is a big reason why it flourished with the technical and student crowd in earlier days because those exceedingly rare sub-sub-topics would get surfaced higher in the rankings. For the esoteric topics Yahoo didn't have it in catalog and Altavista maybe had it but it was on page 86. Even before spelling correction and dozens of other useful search features were added, it was tail search and finding what you were looking for sooner. Serving speed, too, but perhaps that was more subtle for some. Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.
koonsolo 2y ago
> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far Go ask any teacher or graphician.
- denvrede 2y ago
  That's one of my biggest fears, teachers using AI generated content without "checks" to raise / teach / test our children.
KronisLV 2y ago
> Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Maybe not GPT-2, but in general LLMs and other generative AI types aren't without their downsides. From companies looking to downsize their staff to replace them with software, to the work of artists/writers being devalued somewhat, to even easier scams and something like the rise of AI girlfriends, which has also gotten some critique, some of those can probably be a net negative. Even when it's not pearl clutching over the advancements in technology and the social changes that arise, I do wonder how much my own development work will be devalued due to the somewhat lowered entry barrier into the industry and people looking for quick cash, same as with boot camps leading to more saturation. Probably not my position individually (not exactly entry level), but the market as a whole. It's kind of at a point where I use LLMs for dev work not to fall behind, cause the productivity gains for simple problems and boilerplate are hard to argue with.
ben_w 2y ago
> OpenAI are masters of hype. They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. Perhaps. > Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release. The statement was rather more prosaic and less surprising; are you sure it's OpenAI (rather than say all the AI fans and the press) who are hyping? """This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas. … We are aware that some researchers have the technical capacity to reproduce and open source our results. We believe our release strategy limits the initial set of organizations who may choose to do this, and gives the AI community more time to have a discussion about the implications of such systems."""
- anon373839 2y ago
  That's fair: the statement isn't hyperbolic in its language. But remember that GPT-2 was barely coherent. In making this statement, I would argue that OpenAI was trying to impart a sense of awe and danger designed to attract the kind of attention that it did. I would argue that they have repeatedly invoked danger to impart a sense of momentousness to their products. (And to further what is now a pretty transparent effort to monopolize the tech through regulatory intervention.)
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > (And to further what is now a pretty transparent effort to monopolize the tech through regulatory intervention.) I disagree here also: the company has openly acknowledged that this is a risk to be avoided with regards to safety related legislation, what they've called for looks a lot more like "we don't want a prisoner's dilemma that drives everyone to go fast at the expense of safety" rather than "we're good everyone else is bad".
keiferski 2y ago
I can’t even get GPT 4 to reliably take a list of data and put it in a CSV. It gets a problem every single time. People read too many sci-fi books and then project their fantasies on to real-world technologies. This stuff is incredibly powerful and will have social effects, but it’s not going to replace every single job by next year.
- mFixman 2y ago
  GPT-4 is better at planning than at executing. Have you tried asking it to generate a regex to transform your list into a CSV?
  - keiferski 2y ago
    No, I’ll give that a shot. I have just been asking it to convert output into a CSV, which used to work somewhat well. It stumbles when there is more complexity though.
    - kohlerm 2y ago
      Humans also stumble with that as well. Problems being CSV not really being that well defined and it is not clear to people how quoting needs to be done. The training set might not contain enough complex examples (newlines in values?)
      - keiferski 2y ago
        No, the data is very well defined. For example, “name, date of birth, key ideas,” etc. The issue is with ChatGPT formatting a file.
        porksoda 2y ago
        Even if you get it to work 100% of the time, it will only be 99.something%. That's just not what it's for I guess. I pushed a few million items through it for classification a while back and the creative ways it found to sometimes screwup, astounded me.
jstummbillig 2y ago
> Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. I can't help but notice the huge amount of hindsight and bad faith that it demonstrated here. Yes, now we are aware that the internet did not drown in a flood of bullshit (well, not noticeably more), when GPT-2 was released. But was it obvious? I certainly thought that there was a chance that the amount of blog spam that could be generated effortlessly might just make internet search unusable. You are declaring "hype", when you could also say "very uncertain and conscientious". Is this not something we want people in charge to be careful with?
- pixl97 2y ago
  I think the problem is, we did drown in a flood of bullshit, but we've just somehow missed it. Even in this thread people talk about "Oh I use ChatGPT rather than Google search because Google is just stuffed with shit". And on HN there are plenty of discussions about huge portion of reddit threads being regurgitated older comments.
naasking 2y ago
> They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. I feel like everyone who makes this claim doesn't actually have any data to backup it up.
collyw 2y ago
Chat GPT 3.5 has been neutered, as it it won't spit out anything that isn't overly politically correct. 4chan were hacking their way around it. Maybe that's why they decided it was "too dangerous".
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
" GPT-4o doesn't show much of an improvement in "reasoning" strength." Maybe that is GPT-5. And this release really is just incremental improvements in speed, and tying together a few different existing features.
doug_durham 2y ago
It's well known that LLMs don't reason. That's not what they are for. It's a throw away comment to say that a product can't do what it explicitly is unable to do. Reasoning will require different architectures. Even with that LLMs are incredibly useful.

owenpalmer 2y ago

They're masters of hype because their products speak for themselves (literally)

famouswaffles 2y ago
Yeah. Open ai are certainly not masters of hype lol. They released their titular product to basically no fanfare or advertisement. ChatGPT took off on Word of Mouth alone. They dropped GPT-4 without warning and waited months to ship it's most exciting new feature (image input). Even now, they're shipping text-image 4o but not the new voice while leaving old-voice up and confusing/disappointing a whole lot of people. This is a pretty big marketing blunder.
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  > ChatGPT took off on Word of Mouth alone. I remember for a good 2-3 months in 2023 ALL you could see on tiktok / youtube shorts was just garbage about 'how amazing' ChatGPT was. Like - video after video and I was surprised of the repeat content being recommended to me... No doubt openAI (or something) was behind that huge marketing push
  - loa_in_ 2y ago
    No, it's just the masses sniffing out the new fascinating techbro thing to make content about. In a way I'm sorry, that's what people do nowadays. I'd prefer it to be paid for, honestly.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Well if you were a typical highly engaged TikTok or YouTube user, you are probably 13-18 years old. The kind of cheating in school that ChatGPT enabled is revolutionary. That is going to go viral. It's not a marketing push. After years of essentially learning nothing during COVID lockdowns, can you understand how transformative that is? It's like 1,000x more exciting than pirating textbooks, stealing Mazdas, or whatever culturally self-destructive life hacks were being peddled by freakshow brocolliheads and Kim Kardashian-alikes on the platform. It's ironic because the OpenAI creators really loved school and excelled academically. Nobody cares that ChatGPT destroyed advertising copywriting. But whatever little hope remained for the average high schooler post-lockdowns, it was destroyed by instant homework cheating via ChatGPT. So much for safety.
  - _flux 2y ago
    Is it not possible this would be explained by people simply being interested in the technology and TikTok/Youtube algorithms noticing that—and that they would have placed you in the same bubble, which is probably an accurate assignment? I doubt OpenAI spent even one cent marketing their system (e.g. as in paying other companies to push it).
  - theshackleford 2y ago
    > No doubt Who needs evidence when we have your lack of doubt hey?
  - dncornholio 2y ago
    I think you meant to say "All that "I" could see". There's a lot of bubbles in social media. Not everyone is part of your bubble.

danielscrubs 2y ago

"real-world impacts remain modest so far." Really? My Google usage has went down with 90% (it would just lead me to some really bad take from a journalist anyway, while ChatGPT can just hand me the latest research and knows my level of expertise). Sure it is not so helpful at work, but if OpenAI hasnt impacted the world I fail to see which company have in this decade.

Sabinus 2y ago
If Google hadn't ruined Search to help Advertising perhaps it wouldn't have been such a stark comparison in information quality.
- tux1968 2y ago
  It will be interesting to see how they compare, years from now, when ChatGPT has been similarly compromised.
  - sharpshadow 2y ago
    It might not happen in that way since there are alternatives available. Google had/has a monopoly on search.
    - zorowithenma 2y ago
      For the premium subscribers it'll be good, but they'll sure ruin the experience for free tier just like Spotify cause they just can't keep their business sustainable without showing vc's some profits.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  Search was always a byproduct of Advertising. Don’t blame Google for sticking to their business model. We were naive to think we could have nice things for free.
  - phatfish 2y ago

kenjackson 2y ago

GPT-4 already seems better at reasoning than most people. It just has an unusual training domain of Internet text.

bamboozled 2y ago
If everyone is average at reasoning then it must not be a very important trait or we’d all be at reasoning school getting better at it. Really philosophy seems to be one of the least important subjects right now. Hardly anyone learns about it in school. If it was so important to success in the wild than it would stand to reason we all work hard at improving our reasoning skills, but very few do.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 2y ago
  What schools teach is what governments who set the curriculum like to think is important, which is why my English lessons had a whole section on the Shakespearean (400-year-old, English, Christian) take on the life and motivations of a Jewish merchant living in Venice, followed up with a 80 year old (at the time) English poem on exactly how bad it is to watch your friends choke to death as their lungs melt from chlorine gas in the trenches of the first world war. These did not provide useful life-lessons for me. (The philosophy A-level I did voluntarily seemed to be 50% "can you find the flaws in this supposed proof of the existence of god?")
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    > These did not provide useful life-lessons for me. Shakespeare is packed with insight.
    - ben_w 2y ago

jdietrich 2y ago

A Google search for practically any long-tail keywords will reveal that LLMs have already had a very significant impact. DuckDuckGo has suffered even more. Social media is absolutely lousy with AI-powered fraud of varying degrees of sophistication. It's glib to dismiss safety concerns because we haven't all turned into paperclips yet. LLMs and image gen models are having real effects now. We're already at a point where AI can generate text and images that will fool a lot of people a lot of the time. For every college-educated young person smugly pointing out that they aren't fooled by an image with six-fingered hands, there are far more people who had marginal media literacy to begin with and are now almost defenceless against a tidal wave of hyper-scaleable deception. We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer. What defences do we have when an LLM will be able to have a completely fluent, natural-sounding conversation in someone else's voice? I'm not confident that I'd be able to distinguish GPT-4o from a human speaker in the best of circumstances and I'm almost certain that I could be fooled if I'm hurried, distracted, sleep deprived or otherwise impaired. Regardless of any future impacts on the labour market or any hypothesised X-risks, I think we should be very worried about the immediate risks to trust and social cohesion. An awful lot of people are turning into paranoid weirdos at the moment and I don't particularly blame them, but I can see things getting seriously ugly if we can't abate that trend.

fsloth 2y ago
We’ve reached a stage, where it would be advisable to not release recent photos of yourself, nor any video with sound clips to public, unless you want an AI fake instaperson of yourself starting to reach out to member of your externally visible social network, asking for money, emergency help, etc. I guess we need to have an AI secretary to take in all phonecalls from now on (spam folder will become a lot more interesting with celebrity phone calls, your dead relative phoning you etc)
- smokel 2y ago
  Hopefully, we will soon enter the stage where nobody believes anything they see anymore. Then, you no longer have to be afraid of being misinterpreted, because nobody is listening anymore anyway. Great time to be alive!

lynx23 2y ago

> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. I spend a part of yesterday evening sorting my freshly dried t-shirts into 4 distinct piles. I used OpenAI Vision (through BeMyEyes) from my phone. I got a clear description of each and every piece of clothing, including print, colours and brand. I am blind BTW. But I guess you are right, no impact at all. > Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild Yes, great, THANKS Meta, now the Scammers have something to work with. Thats a wonderful achievement which should be praised! </sarcasm>

anon373839 2y ago
> I got a clear description of each and every piece of clothing, including print, colours and brand. I am blind BTW. That is a really great application of this tech. And definitely qualifies as real-world impact. Thanks for sharing that!

fhe 2y ago

> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. I second that. I remember when Google search first came out. Within a few days it completely changed my workflow, how I use the Internet, my reading habits. It easily 5 ~ 10x the value of Internet for me over a couple of weeks. LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.

palad1n 2y ago
OMG I remember trying Google when it was in beta, and HOLY CRAP what I had been using was like freakin night and day. AltaVista: remember that? That was the state of the art before that, and it did not compare. Night and day.
- wenc 2y ago
  I remember Google being marginally better than Altavista but not much more. The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.
  - dolmen 2y ago
    Yes, Altavista was the major step over Yahoo! directory.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    You just gave me a weird flashback to 1997. And hey maybe when combined with GPT-4o AskJeeves will finally work as intended.
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    I used Metacrawler, it was dog slow. The beauty of Google was it was super fast, and still returned results that were at least as good, and often better, than Metacrawler. After using Google 2-3 times I don’t think I ever used Metacrawler again.
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    Google was marginally better in popular searches and significantly better for tail searches. This is a big reason why it flourished with the technical and student crowd in earlier days because those exceedingly rare sub-sub-topics would get surfaced higher in the rankings. For the esoteric topics Yahoo didn't have it in catalog and Altavista maybe had it but it was on page 86. Even before spelling correction and dozens of other useful search features were added, it was tail search and finding what you were looking for sooner. Serving speed, too, but perhaps that was more subtle for some. Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.

koonsolo 2y ago

> yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far Go ask any teacher or graphician.

denvrede 2y ago
That's one of my biggest fears, teachers using AI generated content without "checks" to raise / teach / test our children.

KronisLV 2y ago

> Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Maybe not GPT-2, but in general LLMs and other generative AI types aren't without their downsides. From companies looking to downsize their staff to replace them with software, to the work of artists/writers being devalued somewhat, to even easier scams and something like the rise of AI girlfriends, which has also gotten some critique, some of those can probably be a net negative. Even when it's not pearl clutching over the advancements in technology and the social changes that arise, I do wonder how much my own development work will be devalued due to the somewhat lowered entry barrier into the industry and people looking for quick cash, same as with boot camps leading to more saturation. Probably not my position individually (not exactly entry level), but the market as a whole. It's kind of at a point where I use LLMs for dev work not to fall behind, cause the productivity gains for simple problems and boilerplate are hard to argue with.

ben_w 2y ago

> OpenAI are masters of hype. They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. Perhaps. > Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release. The statement was rather more prosaic and less surprising; are you sure it's OpenAI (rather than say all the AI fans and the press) who are hyping? """This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas. … We are aware that some researchers have the technical capacity to reproduce and open source our results. We believe our release strategy limits the initial set of organizations who may choose to do this, and gives the AI community more time to have a discussion about the implications of such systems."""

anon373839 2y ago
That's fair: the statement isn't hyperbolic in its language. But remember that GPT-2 was barely coherent. In making this statement, I would argue that OpenAI was trying to impart a sense of awe and danger designed to attract the kind of attention that it did. I would argue that they have repeatedly invoked danger to impart a sense of momentousness to their products. (And to further what is now a pretty transparent effort to monopolize the tech through regulatory intervention.)
- ben_w 2y ago
  > (And to further what is now a pretty transparent effort to monopolize the tech through regulatory intervention.) I disagree here also: the company has openly acknowledged that this is a risk to be avoided with regards to safety related legislation, what they've called for looks a lot more like "we don't want a prisoner's dilemma that drives everyone to go fast at the expense of safety" rather than "we're good everyone else is bad".

keiferski 2y ago

I can’t even get GPT 4 to reliably take a list of data and put it in a CSV. It gets a problem every single time. People read too many sci-fi books and then project their fantasies on to real-world technologies. This stuff is incredibly powerful and will have social effects, but it’s not going to replace every single job by next year.

mFixman 2y ago
GPT-4 is better at planning than at executing. Have you tried asking it to generate a regex to transform your list into a CSV?
- keiferski 2y ago
  No, I’ll give that a shot. I have just been asking it to convert output into a CSV, which used to work somewhat well. It stumbles when there is more complexity though.
  - kohlerm 2y ago
    Humans also stumble with that as well. Problems being CSV not really being that well defined and it is not clear to people how quoting needs to be done. The training set might not contain enough complex examples (newlines in values?)
    - keiferski 2y ago
      No, the data is very well defined. For example, “name, date of birth, key ideas,” etc. The issue is with ChatGPT formatting a file.
      - porksoda 2y ago
        Even if you get it to work 100% of the time, it will only be 99.something%. That's just not what it's for I guess. I pushed a few million items through it for classification a while back and the creative ways it found to sometimes screwup, astounded me.

jstummbillig 2y ago

> Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. I can't help but notice the huge amount of hindsight and bad faith that it demonstrated here. Yes, now we are aware that the internet did not drown in a flood of bullshit (well, not noticeably more), when GPT-2 was released. But was it obvious? I certainly thought that there was a chance that the amount of blog spam that could be generated effortlessly might just make internet search unusable. You are declaring "hype", when you could also say "very uncertain and conscientious". Is this not something we want people in charge to be careful with?

pixl97 2y ago
I think the problem is, we did drown in a flood of bullshit, but we've just somehow missed it. Even in this thread people talk about "Oh I use ChatGPT rather than Google search because Google is just stuffed with shit". And on HN there are plenty of discussions about huge portion of reddit threads being regurgitated older comments.

naasking 2y ago

> They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far. I feel like everyone who makes this claim doesn't actually have any data to backup it up.

collyw 2y ago

Chat GPT 3.5 has been neutered, as it it won't spit out anything that isn't overly politically correct. 4chan were hacking their way around it. Maybe that's why they decided it was "too dangerous".

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

" GPT-4o doesn't show much of an improvement in "reasoning" strength." Maybe that is GPT-5. And this release really is just incremental improvements in speed, and tying together a few different existing features.

doug_durham 2y ago

It's well known that LLMs don't reason. That's not what they are for. It's a throw away comment to say that a product can't do what it explicitly is unable to do. Reasoning will require different architectures. Even with that LLMs are incredibly useful.