Ask HN: Are you tired of reading ChatGPT headlines?
I am. Every day, there are countless new articles about ChatGPT posted on here. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks it's overrated.
Most of the prompt answers are smart sounding bullshit. Maybe that's why the headlines never stop - the people who like to make smart sounding bullshit are the ones who love ChatGPT.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI prefer/recommend not to use the "hide" button too much in the front page, but in some case you can use it for a week if the ChatGPT posts get too annoying.
Like CNet generating their articles with ChatGPT... from the few times I've read CNet lately, I bet that didn't change their article quality one bit. They were blogspam, they stayed blogspam.
That's genuine utility value. The only utility I've ever had using crypto is buying mushrooms over the internet. Now with them decriminalized in my state and easy 1-2-3 spore kits available, I don't even need it for that any more.
I understand it's 'just' a language model, but it doesn't matter - that's not how it's perceived, and it is actually rather impressive anyway.
What you're seeing is just a manifestation of a rather major (sociological) event, and while I understand that the amount of hype is a bit over the top, to a large extent it makes sense.
If somebody thinks it's just a bullshit generator and 100 million people using it after 2 months are wrong, the problem is with the person who didn't put in the effort to learn to use it effectively.
Alternative explanation: Most people are happy to generate bullshit, and love that they now have a way to do it with zero effort. Bullshit copy, bullshit art, bullshit code — the sky's the limit!
Attention and profiling is money and power.
AI will steal attention by spamming identities, voting for/against products and opinions, discriminating in ways hard to reveal, at scale never seen before. It will read all your HN comments and clip a tag onto your ear. AI war will not be a T1000 walking on skulls, it will happen in our feeds, and platforms/governments will have no idea who’s artificial or russian this time.
Honestly it’s pretty concerning when I think about what can be done with the internet and societies by bad actors automating and weaponizing existing chatgpt and pic/video tech alone.
edit: I get very strong flashbacks to when wikipedia was new and people had to learn the hardway it wasn't always correct/up-to-date/etc.
For me, this is what gets exhausting. It is an impressive language model, and it is going to change a lot of things, but it isn't the Apocalypse and it isn't the Messiah. On HN I expect a certain level of technical understanding that is weirdly absent on this topic.
An example: every time the question of accuracy comes up people seriously suggest that you just need to prompt it for its sources. Or we just need to improve the training data. There's no recognition that there are tasks that a language model is just fundamentally unsuitable for.
I'm genuinely impressed about ChatGPT, and have been thinking about many times in the past when having such a tool at hand would have been massively helpful. Natural Language Processing is a damn hard problem, and ChatGPT seems to be a huge advancement in that regard.
But I actually laugh at all the people that think that this will replace humans in any meaningful capacity. If your job is only giving known answers to known problems, then you have something to fear. Otherwise this will only be a powerful productivity tool.
A Language Model will replace software developers much like Excel replaced accountants.
But Planet Money also found that there were 600,000 more jobs for regular accountants. After all, crunching numbers had become cheaper, more versatile, and more powerful, so demand went up.
The point is not really whether 600,000 is more than 400,000: sometimes automation creates jobs and sometimes it destroys them."
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47802280
Just throwing numbers on a spreadsheet didn't do the trick.
Sounds to me the existing jobs are more skilled than the former ‘accounting clerks’ which just sounds like data entry people.
Back in the day my mom used to do the books for the grocery store she worked for and all she really did was tally up all the data from the multiple cash registers and send it off to the corporate accountants. Not a whole lot of skill needed aside from attention to detail to ensure the totals were correct.
To me, the most impressive part of ChatGPT was not that it could give mostly correct answers to known problems. In a sense, internet search could do it already (just in a much more cumbersome way), with similar degrees of correctness.
The most impressive part for me was actually how seamlessly it parses and produces fluent natural language. Text generated by it reads like something a human would type.
So far I didn't try to fool it by purposefully asking something ambiguous (something that is a characteristic of natural languages), or ask about something that has an ambiguous answer to see how it handles it, but so far I'm impressed.
But I never considered that people may restrict the research of AI to language models due to the rampant success of this avenue of research. I hope this is not the outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised (i.e. the success of ChatGPT works as a blackhole for investment in the area, with everyone racing to cash in on it).
I’m really not sure where you get that from. I think the best we can say is that they are currently unsuitable. Yes, today the applications are limited, but you can’t blame people for projecting this incredible progress into the future a bit and seeing glimpses of how much this could change work and productivity. Insider reports are surfacing that both Google and Microsoft will be adding LLM outputs to their search engine result pages. Seems like a big deal to me considering transformers are only about 4 years old.
Of course they are—they'd be incredibly stupid not to ride the hype wave while it lasts. A business choosing to take advantage of current trends is not evidence that those trends are founded in anything substantial.
This is not possible. Of course, someone providing GPT as a "service" could provide bogus "sources" for particular output and people might take them at face value.
It is a wakeup call though. Considering how quickly this was developed, the likelihood of either of these manifesting within our lifetime became much more plausible.
This hyperbole is exactly why people like OP are getting sick of the headlines. It may be a major event sure, but only hindsight will be able to say that for certain. It may be another novel gimmick though, and this pronunciation will seem ridiculous in a year or two if that's the case. It's just too early to tell.
We asked some questions about her field, and even asked it to draw a cell through SVG. My mon confirmed that all if its output was correct.
Mom was completely amazed at what was happening. She couldn't believe it was answering like that, and so fast. For people 60+ ChatGPT is StarTrek science fiction.
These are the guys that had to write dead tree letters to ask for a paper in the other side of the world. And shuffle through stacks of physical bibliographic cards. Also they spent hours looking through tomes of Encyclopedia Britannica in search of info.
Us younger folks have just been slowly boiled like the frog with all this new technology. But it is indeed amazing.
"Naming a framework can be a crucial aspect of its success. It's important to choose a name that is memorable, catchy, and represents the core values and goals of the framework.
Here are a few suggestions:
Prodigy: A framework that aims to make web development simple and efficient.
Velocity: A fast-performing framework that emphasizes speed and agility.
Eon: A modern and innovative framework that incorporates the latest web development trends and technologies.
Apex: A framework that emphasizes scalability and reliability, helping developers build robust and scalable applications.
Fusion: A framework that seamlessly integrates different technologies, tools, and libraries to create a unified and seamless development experience."
I'm looking forward to hiring a prodigy.js expert with 10 years of prodigy.js experience.
Tried it, it did okay on some high-level stuff but couldn't get to working code: https://imgur.com/a/HModV0f
Do you think it's fair to hold it to the task of instantly creating a new JavaScript framework from scratch and implementing it? This is a task that multiple experts planning and collaborating in different areas of software engineering could perform together with extreme difficulty over a long period.
On the other hand, I was surprised that it came up with working, "correct" code for a difficult task:
https://imgur.com/a/Y2kumZq
Pastebin for the code:
https://pastebin.com/5JDvXtWi
I checked it and it is correct for n up to hundreds of thousands. (I'm not sure if that is really how matrix powers are supposed to work, but overall, its function returns correct exact solutions for the problem and worked without any modification.)
I find both conversations I just linked pretty impressive in their own ways.
I lived through the rise of the web, mobile internet, and the smartphone so I have my doubts about ChatGPT being the biggest technological breakthrough of my life.
Not to mention all of the things outside the realm of computer science competing for that title. Fusion power, solar power, alternatives to antibiotics, cures for diseases that kill millions, etc.
LLMs have a long, long way to go to get anywhere near that. All the predictions about replacing jobs are making dubious assumptions about radical improvements over the current state of the art. Maybe that will happen, maybe it won't.
The question in my mind is: is the curve just linear or is it getting closer to exponential at this point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation
Here is ChatGPT's response fwiw.
Prompt: is the curve of improvement in LLMs linear or more exponential?
ChatGPT: The improvement in language models has generally followed an exponential trend. With the advent of deep learning and the increasing availability of large amounts of data, the performance of language models has improved dramatically in recent years, leading to breakthroughs in various NLP tasks. However, it is important to note that the improvement curve of language models is influenced by multiple factors, including the amount of training data, the size and complexity of the model, and the computational resources available. The improvement curve of language models may also become more linear as the state of the art approaches certain limits.
> The improvement curve of language models may also become more linear as the state of the art approaches certain limits.
This part of ChatGPT's response is the crux of my original question.
It might be notable that I was able to focus and possibly learn from the response to my question via interaction with an LLM, and not via interaction with a human.
You mean that language models will never get better than ChatGPT? Or that ChatGPT itself won't be improved.
Because I guess the latter could end up being true if openai decides to call whatever user facing tool that GPT-4 powers something other than chatgpt.
“ChatGPT but for whatever” will probably be the most effective way to separate venture capitalists from their money in the near future, much like “crypto for whatever” and “Uber but for whatever” and “an app but for whatever” in the past.
I have genuinely found it incredible in certain situations. I don't feel like I am getting as much value from it as others might be so for the moment I like the discussion
Dropbox/google drive/etc?
Git maybe, although obviously not for all office jobs.
GPS navigation?
Keurigs and instant pots?
I strayed a bit from “office jobs” but yes I have lived through a number of things that save 30 minutes a day for a lot of people.
I get how it could replace certain jobs almost entirely, if those jobs involve churning out a lot of bullshit text. For anything that actually matters, checking/fixing ChatGPT output is going to take roughly as long as doing the research/writing oneself to begin with.
Poster's name of 'sanitycheck' happily checks.
It could help write emails faster, especially ones that require a lot of care. Or summarize meeting notes.
But on the other hand, no. This is actually a significant technological development that has real implications, positive and negative, for our entire society. It's not some BS nonsense like blockchain. This is almost as big as the rise of smartphones. We need to be talking about it.
It's certainly entertaining, albeit Midjourney is more exciting imo, but there are far more challenging problems in the field of Computer Science and sciences in general than NLP.
Unrelated, the irony of this post made me chuckle. By posting this, you're adding to the ChatGPT "headlines".