I don't think it's the same purpose. YouTube, TV and Movies offers enough speech samples and a lot of content is dubbed to other languages, and alot of this content already has the transcripts available.
They know who's calling, and the greeting was something like "Hello again". They are catching up at building a competitive database of persons and their preferences at the scale of FAANG. They're moving over from collecting info for their models to collecting info from their users for their agents. This is what they need to offer good agents.
But I might be wrong and it's just phoneme collection, as you speculate.
Agreed on the broader use of data. That said, it’s not just about phoneme collection—different channels and UX modalities reach different audiences and contexts. Each channel ultimately delivers unique inputs, fueling more specialized and robust models tailored to those specific use cases.
Regular human conversational voice, especially over the phone, is going to be a gold mine for training customer support AI agents. Actors reading movie scripts can't really provide that amount of relevance.
Sweet little duckling. Before the Internet you had to call a human on a phone to find phone numbers. 411 was a widely known number, similar to how widely known 911 is today.
I used to use GOOG-411 all the time before I had a smart phone. I must have provided so much training data that it is no surprise Google from early on has been very good at Speech-to-Text conversion of my particular accent :D
Does anyone else remember a very short lived Google experiment that allowed you to call a number, vocalize your search, and somehow without any additional steps, the results appeared on the browser in front of you? (which was not connected to the phone, or even logged into a Google account)
The best part of GOOG411 was that they would connect you to the phone number, free of charge, across borders.
List a business with a Google voice number and you can call in, check messages, and _dial out_ from Google voice. Free international calls!
I was in school in Canada where we had a payphone in a hallway. People heard me randomly saying "Funny Business Name, City State ... Connect me" into the phone so much, it became a running joke.
When I eventually got my own phone, I transferred the number and I still have it.
So the perception of those aged 50+, is one of people so far removed from technology they’d prefer to use a telephone to avoid their discomfort with computers?
I’m well into this group and still make a lot more api calls than phone calls.
Fresh out of college I recall vividly thinking, I’ll need to build an impressive list of side projects to overcome preconceptions about how much I can truly offer at my age. Maybe nothing has changed.
the idea that someone who was 20 in 1995 is too old to be comfortable with computers is a horrifying and offensive stereotype that deeply worries me for my own future
our industry is old enough that the first generation of pioneers has died of old age.
Do you really think someone who grew up with computers in the 80s is incapable of using a smart phone? These are people who are still in the workforce today. These are your most skilled colleagues.
Some of them probably designed the device you think they're too old to understand
I don't think anyone is denying the existence of Greybeards, it's more that the field has exploded so much in the meantime that the probability of a random 30 year old being in it is much higher than the probability of a random 50 year old.
Not really. A lot of people in their 20s might have never actually done much with a computer, yet they cannot put their phone down. I know lots of 20-somethings that cannot type. I know even more that do not own a traditional "computer". It has nothing to do with fear, but lack of need.
I had chatgpt read through my recent bloodwork results and helped me understand it better than my doctor.
50+ are going to be so addicted to this thing its not even funny. My parents are not reaching for AI immediately yet, but thats just a yet. This is the wave that could come at any moment.
My dad sells farming-related equipment to mostly older people and there are still people more comfortable giving him their credit card info over the phone instead of purchasing on his website online.
(Though I see that as mostly a failure of our financial industry. Credit card numbers should be obsolete by now.)
Just one data point but my father is in his 70s and has never owned a smartphone, when he wants to Google something he goes to the computer in the basement. On the other hand there are landline extensions all over the house. So yeah it would be more convenient for people like him.
Your comment made me lol. And it’s very rare for that to happen to me via reading text. And I needed it today. So I just wanted to tell you thank you and I hope you have a good day.
Because it shows that it's perfectly plausible for people ages 50 plus to appreciate the value out of these technologies every bit as much as us whippersnappers. Some of them are writing books about it, after all
You seem to have forgotten the context of this conversation. Right now we're talking about whether 50+ somethings can appreciate the value proposition of the 1-800 line and more generally of the whole line of GPT releases presently coming out.
Pointing to the book authorship help support the intuition that our Gen X friends are able to get it, because after all, it's not out of the question for them to be involved in these very fields. I don't think any of those points, which again in this context are the points that are under discussion, are things that hinge on whether or not the book specifically addressed particular llm methodologies.
You're surely right that they anticipate it being be a novelty that people share during holiday visits.
But as you can probably tell from the other replies, the idea that older people don't know how to use internet-era technology is a meme that was wearing thin 20 years ago already.
People who haven't had ChatGPT "land" for them yet are likely just people who don't find themselves asking a lot of questions they need a chatbot to answer, regardless of the medium. That probably has some age skew right now, but isn't really about the medium at all.
I’m a few years from 50 and while Google has deteriorated my Google fu and ability to see signals through the noise still serves me well enough and is my comfort zone.
When I dabble with chatgpt it always feels like I’m playing with a toy as I don’t really have a use case I’m taking to it. I’ve used a few websites creators and code generators which have been useful but also I don’t think they saved me much time overall. Web design, graphic design, etc and creative stuff are things I suck creating so it gives me a new power and is easy to iterate on. Otherwise, I’ve not found much actual value from it yet.
If it makes you much more efficient in your job, like it does for professional software devs, many of HN users, then i think you’re more apt to be excited by the tech
Aren't they doing a 12 days of Christmas thing where they release new features for 12 days? This would fit into that idea.
I was thinking earlier today that an agent listening to my calls would be helpful. I was on the phone with a financial institution that will require some followup. Being able to sync in an agent to transcribe and remind me would be valuable.
That's only because Zombo had everything. It was the original everything app/site that Musk so desperately wants X to be. Nothing can top that - not even AI.
I had in mind the surge in LLM chat support and the surge in thin ChatGPT wrappers with a custom system prompt. Claude/ChatGPT do seem useful, "an AI companion for Microsoft Paint" less so.
And now we will have mediocre middlemen/gig economy brokers with bad customer service performed by AI agents that you can summarize with chatgpt and automatically reply back to. Progress!!
I agree. A good chunk of the tech trends in the last decade were indeed rent seeking, but silent revolution was happening in the transformers and the neural network architecture domain, which made today's products possible.
And I'd wager that there are silent revolutions happening all across colossus that's the tech industry that will become apparent in the next decade.
Jeff Bezos put it best during his recent interview at the 2024 NYTimes Dealbook Summit, "We're living in multiple golden ages at the same time." There's never been a better time to be alive.
That's easy for a billionaire to say, isn't it? Jeff Bezos is not exactly a reliable narrator here. His business practices are built on exploitation and externalising his costs (such as the massive environmental damage).
I agree about an abundance of apps, but what type of value are LLMs adding?
It can sometimes be useful to input a more "human" search and have something get spit out but 60% of the time it completely lies to you. I'm talking about questions related to web specifications which are public documents. Section numbers, standards names, etc.. will be completely made up.
i think when people say things like this it indicates that they tried LLMs in 2022 and solidified their opinion there.
I had the same impression about the hallucinations 2 years ago. The reality is in at the end of 2024, you can get incredible value from LLMs.
I've used copilot to code almost exclusively now for the past few months. Anyone still comparing it to text completion I feel is operating on completely out of date information either intentionally or unintentionally.
This is a thin edge of the wedge issue, right? ChatGPT is pretty darn good for most things. I’ve used it extensively for the past 18 months and only in a few cases would I say it “completely lied to me”.
My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well. If the volume on a particular subject is low / susceptible to false information then it’ll lie.
Recently it lied hard about how to configure MikroTik routers. I lost many hours. But for a large construction project recently it completely balled out.
Are you doing cutting edge / complicated stuff? Have you examples of where it lies?
I don't want to turn this into another Claude lies less than ChatGPT subthread but since you mentioned configuration of MikroTik routers I felt like I should.
ChatGPT lies a lot about RouterOS, I don't know why. Claude helped me a lot on the other hand with all things MikroTik.
No specific prompts, but most were related to the XHR/Fetch specs and behaviors within. It would say "X.Y.Z sections defines this" but that section didn't exist at all and the answer provided was not accurate.
> My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well
I see. Well, I don't know if I find that very valuable but if others do, then so be it.
I wonder how many people are promoting it correctly. You can’t just query it like you might for google or something. It works best with lots of context and back and forth. And yeah, for many things you are going to get directional answers not exact ones (esp with “rote memory” like exact quotes from a book or something.)
Agreed this is a bad idea in the case you are replying to, but I love ChatGPT as a way to recover the name of a book or film I’ve forgotten. I recently prompted for “a book about nuclear wasteland dominated by a church” and it gave me A canticle for Leibowitz (which is great). I’m not sure how easy that would be any other way.
My experience with code completion tools (i.e. single line/method snippets) has been positive. But, anything more complicated seems to fall apart rather quickly.
I have upgraded to the $200 Pro tier, and, with o1-pro, all of my tasks delegated to the "junior" have been so much better. It takes longer to complete, of course, but the overall duration is less because I'm not having to go back and correct it as much as I was with 4o. It's been able to figure out problems that 4o continually failed on.
LLMs have been a personal tutor to me for the last year, able to explain anything and everything I've been curious about professionally and personally. I changed jobs to new technologies in large part because I effectively had an assistant able to help cover any gaps in knowledge I had, train me up quickly, and offer ongoing help on the job.
They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years.
>They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years.
If you're using them to fill knowledge gaps, what scaffolding have you set up to ensure that those gaps aren't being filled with incorrect-but-plausible-sounding information?
Off the top of my head, and just for the last couple of months, and only outside of work (where its value is even more immense), it has saved one of my indoor plants, told me how to handle a major boiler problem that would have left us without a working boiler during a weekend in the winder, with the next "emergency" repairman only available on Monday, advised me to use Kopia as backup solution for my personal files instead of Syncthing, helped me choose the right type of glass for a painting frame, answered a couple of questions about bikes and helped me when I was stuck in an harmonic analysis of a piece of music. All of that are extremely valuable to me (if only for the time not wasted googling answers), and in none of them its potential hallucinating would have been an issue. And I can't count the number of times where "specialists" in bike repairs or plumbing told me something incorrect or outright false, so I've learned to deal with hallucinations already!
> And I can't count the number of times where "specialists" in bike repairs or plumbing told me something incorrect or outright false, so I've learned to deal with hallucinations already!
So much this. So many times I've argued with hired experts saying "can't be done" just to see yes, it can be done.
Yes, but which of those things would you not have resolved just as well 10 years ago? All those possibilities were added by the maturing web itself, as a genuinely novel change from having to source books or experts/friends in the days before.
I'm glad ChatGPT didn't lead you astray, but I'm not seeing what it's added here besides shuffling up the user interface in a way that you presently and subjectively prefer?
objectively, it takes less time to ask a question and get a direct answer than it does to search for some words, leaf through a couple of results, find one that has the information you want, and then read that page. If I want to know the height of the Eiffel tower, being told it's 1083 meters tall is faster than searching for its website, finding the stats section, then locating that information on the page. Google realizes that, so they pull that info out of the page and just put it on the results page for you.
My plant would have been dead. As for the rest, sure, I would have resolved them eventually, after many frustrated hours of googling and trial and error.
Time is my most precious thing, I already don't have enough time to do all the things that I want to do, I don't want to waste that trying to find and test solutions when ChatGPT gives me instant answers. I'd rather spend time playing with my cats or riding a bike instead. It's not a matter of UI, it's a matter of preventing waste of time, energy and money, and less frustration. For that alone, €20/month is a very good value. And that's just for my personal life.
"many hours of frustrated googling and trial and error" isn't a familiar experience to me, but I'll trust that it is for you. I'm glad you see that as behind you now with this. I suppose you must not be alone.
> I'm not seeing what it's added here besides shuffling up the user interface in a way that you presently and subjectively prefer?
This. But in the same sense the past 50 years merely changed interface from dusty textbooks in libraries to Google Search, and the past 100 years gave us dusty textbooks over writing to Royal Society, and that just replaced the option of asking a local whisperer or hoping you'll find answers on the Sunday mass.
Do not underestimate the power of being able to get an answer to your problem described, visualized, and perhaps complete with interactive demo to explore it further, in time it would previously take you to formulate the right search query that finally gives you relevant information.
EDIT:
And that's on top of all the arbitrary data transformations prior tools couldn't do. E.g. I'm increasingly often using GPT and Claude models to turn photos of (possibly hand-written) notes or posters into iCAL files I can immediately import into our family shared calendar.
Another frequent use case, data normalization. Paste a whole dump of inconsistently structured data multiple people collected (say, addresses of various local businesses that helped a local NGO and now are supposed to get a thank-you card for Christmas). Like, you get 200 rows of addresses in a single column, with spelling mistakes, repetitions, junk at the end, arbitrary capitalization, wrong order of address segments, and such; you need to separate it out into 5+ columns (name line 1, name line 2, street address, zip code, city, etc.) and have it all normalized.
The fastest and most robust way to do it as a one-off job, today, is to paste the whole thing to GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet, tell it how the output should look (give one-two examples, mention some mistakes you saw), then send the message and wait 30 seconds for the job to be done for you.
(Yes, it may make mistakes - it didn't for me in recent memory, but it can. But for that, I quickly add an extra verification column for each one in LLM output, and do a simple case-insensitive substring match with original, and eyeball any data row that shows an error. And guess what, the formulas don't take much time either, since LLMs are good at writing them for you, too!)
I wouldn't discount this effect. As someone with sensory issues, one thing I like about ChatGPT as opposed to the "raw" internet is that I can see the answer to my questions in a nice and calm textual format without some website who created the article specifically to catch my search terms, but is trying to get me to deceptively click on ads or pull me into buying something through their affiliate links. That's absolutely increased my own enjoyment and productivity.
I find it useful, and it brings value to me (literally: I exchange valuable money for API access), even if it doesn't for you. Many other people report the exact same thing. Just because you don't find value in a technology, doesn't mean that others don't.
In the past week I have used it for helping write a script in a framework I'm not super familiar with (OpenSCAD), I was able to finish a project in 5 minutes that otherwise would have taken me hours. I have used it to help make movie recommendations (none of them were hallucinated). I have used it to translate a conversation with a non-english speaker, etc. There are other tools that can help me do all of these things, but none quite as fast or painlessly.
It might not be useful for your use case of asking questions related to specific web specs, but that doesn't mean that the technology has no value. Horses for courses...
That's because we're currently largely not using them correctly, i.e. hooked up to RAG instead of hoping that they've memorized enough of the training data verbatim, which is arguably a waste of neurons in a foundational model.
Imaging being graded on your ability to quote exact line numbers of particular parts of your codebase as a senior software engineer without being able to look at it!
I'd (generally) agree. About 5 minutes of using Flux, Claude or Suno would have provided more net new value than I've yet to get out of blockchain, self driving, gig brokers, metaverse, 5G, AR/VR, quantum computing, hyperloop, and whatever people were trying to make web3 be combined over the years. Not that I don't think all of these things will always perpetually fail to deliver (hell, if I had a chance to try Waymo already then self driving probably wouldn't be on the list), just the hype cycles were unrelated to when that delivery occurred (if ever).
The hard part is, despite actually having some "real" value delivered, you still have to sort through the 99% of bullshit that comes along with it anyways.
I will personally say that if you ever get the chance, definitely try a Waymo. I did recently for the first time and it's a hell of an experience. You can very vividly imagine it being the future.
I'm also going to stand up for AR/VR here. I'm in a long-distance relationship and me and my partner spend an hour or so in VRChat around two to three times a week. The power that has to reduce the badness of an LDR is well well well well worth the three hundred bucks I paid for a Quest. That and some of the golf games on it are fun.
I am super stoked to try a Waymo when I'm in a city with one. It's hype failures have more to do with 10 years of hype about its public availability yet not being available to 99% of the world's population 10 years later. Hype is useless without the result.
I've had an HTC Vive and an Oculus Rift 3 (Walkabout Mini Golf is one I tried!) and while I wouldn't try to argue NOBODY has found a use for it (somebody somewhere found uses for all of the things I mentioned, just not me and just not the majority of people like big new things are promised to) it never really ticked the "new value" box before they ended up in the closet for me.
That's totally fair. The tech is only barely coming out of the enthusiast adopter phase and there's not a critical mass of content on there to keep most people putting on the headset daily.
That and the ergonomics do still suck, even if I've mostly gotten used to them.
I do think VR will make it, though - starting with the kids. Apparently Gorilla Tag broke 1.5 million players recently, and those are mostly under-15s. The next generation is going to have a strange relationship with computers.
Those two persons fixedly looking to the other person reading some teleprompter that announces this feature -- likely written by ChatGPT -- is the weirdest thing ever.
I meant no disrespect, but from 2' or so, the conversation sounded more natural and things got smooth. Interest feature and I liked the 80's banner with the phone # like in the old TV ads!
Probably more about how they’re choosing to use resources
If they believe AGI is around the corner and they are competing with others to get there, seems silly to invest resources in standing up a phone line, etc.
My background isn't AI so I can't contribute to that. My background is WebRTC/telephony so I could build this. Even if I was involved in 'AI stuff' I would have zero impact, but I can build this!
Afghanistan and Turkmenistan are allowed, but not China or Russia. Which makes legal sense, I guess, but did the Taliban takeover just take place too recently for Afghanistan to be placed on the embargo list?
I hope they introduce a way to use Plus plan features/models. Would be neat to do quick queries in WhatsApp and forward results to friends & family without context switching/copy pasting.
something tells me all these bells and whistles around gpt are signs that scaling laws have plateaued, otherwise OpenAI et al. would focus more on improving model quality.
Maybe GPT-4 is the 1080p of LLMs: Noticeably better than 720p and 480p models, and not bad enough to warrant additional improvements.
Sure, 4K, 8K, ... are technologically available, but for the majority of use cases, 1080p is enough. Similarly, even though o1 and other models are technically feasible, for most cases the current models are enough.
In fact, GPT-4 is more than enough for 80% of tasks (text summarization, Apple (un)Intelligence, writing emails, tool use, etc.)—small models (<32B) are perfectly fine for those tasks (and they keep getting better too.)
o1 is way better than gpt-4 imo, feel that many people just don't have complicated tasks/questions they have to do in their day to day. it's like a half jump between 3.5 and 4 to me
That's not been my experience, though I guess it depends on what you're using o1 for.
My experience is that o1 is extremely good at producing a series of logical steps for things. Ask it a simple question and it will write you what feels like an entire manual that you never asked for. For the most part I've stopped caring about integrating AI into software, but I could see o1 being good for writing prompts for another LLM. Beyond that, I have a hard time calling it better than GPT-4+.
lots of coding tasks, discussions about physics/QM. I find that it produces better quality answers than 4o, which often will have subtle but simple mistakes.
Even writing, where it is supposed to be worse than 4O, I feel that is does better/has a more solid understanding of provided documents.
Interesting, could you share an example of this where it provides something of value? I've tried asking a few different LLMs to explain renormalization group theory, and it always goes off the rails in five questions or less.
Yes, surely they only have one type of Software Engineer and they all know how to improve model quality.
Alternatively, does it not seem more likely that they have different product groups? Surely the folks working on ChatGPT are an entirely different beast than the folks working in model development?
Yes, surely a sarcastic reductio ad absurdum of what was was said will inspire dialogue.
I think the GP's point is that their investing in new distribution channels could mean ROI in models has diminished significantly. Incidentally, I disagree with GP that's what this means-- this is another investment in brand awareness, AND data for multi-modal/audio. They might have gotten to 1080p for text chat but definitely not for voice chat.
Nothing more absurd than your response. OpenAI has a large engineering staff, it’s foolish to say they are all working on advancing models. The folks working on ChatGPT are going to continue working on ChatGPT. Let’s not even forget that O1 just got released recently.
Nothing I said was absurd in response to making an unsupported idea that model development has plateaued.
thing tells me all these bells and whistles around gpt are signs that scaling laws have plateaued, otherwise OpenAI et al. would focus more on improving model quality.
o1-pro is that model. Expensive and slow, but significantly better at many tasks that involve CoT reasoning.
I don’t get this. Define focus and how is just improving model quality gonna allow OpenAI to survive, they need a mix of commercialization and model improvement. No $$, no gpus, no researchers, no improvements
My guess is that the model got good enough to make its own bells and whistles — even the original 3.5 was good enough to make its own initial chat web UI.
I know it was that good, because I got it to do that for me… and then the UI kept getting better and the expensive models became the free default option and I stopped caring.
[*] limited bandwidth (8 kHz), providing a valuable opportunity to enhance and specialize models for telephony applications, ensuring better performance and user experience even with low-fidelity audio inputs.
I mean, nothing prevents them from running their existing data through a "noisy POTS" filter in A/B tests to see how that impacts customer satisfaction.
But being able to blame the user's phone line probably goes a long way to avoiding unhappiness due to testing :)
chatGPT: ~ You agree to openai terms and conditions...
Me: What's the square root of two?
chatGPT: What number do you want to know the square root of?
Me: Two
chatGPT: The square root of ten is approximately 3.1...
<click>
If they wanted to show how very non-understanding and un-intelligent chatGPT is, they are doing a great job. So much quicker to see in a voice interaction than through online query submissions.
it does the same as the chatgpt whatsapp chat, but well you can forward images to it, it can send your reminder emails in the future and can manage todos for you (some kind of memory)
if it would have gotten more traction i would have extended it that you can also forward emails to it and it responds to the original email as your assistant
(and hey, if someone from openAi is reading this, feel free to offer me a position as a product manager)
I can't find any information about how to start a new conversation as opposed to continuing an existing one. I asked the service itself and it doesn't know. In fact it doesn't even know it's behind a phone number.
I feel like everyone who has used a lot of AI tools has become accustomed to the LLM yap, but hearing it over TTS is much more annoying than when it's text you can skim through.
I did and should have given credit above for the voice, it's very good. I meant to comment on the verbosity of what was being said, not the quality of the TTS itself.
The yap factor is there, but they seem to be prompting this phone version to be more brief. I asked a few basic informational trivia questions and each response was 3 or four sentences. Less than the app or website version imo.
I like this a lot. I don't use AI a lot and I often find it annoying, so I don't eg feel the need to install the OpenAI mobile app (which I assume exists). Having ChatGPT in my WhatsApp (I live in a place where WhatsApp is everywhere) is a nice middle ground, lets me occasionally ask it stuff without worrying about accounts and projects and models and all that stuff. Cool!
You're right they did add anonymous access at some point, but it was quite a while ago I think. Smart move on their part. Makes casual use much more convenient.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] thread(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
In the days before we had pocket supercomputers, I used both of these services occasionally while out and about.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellme_Networks
They know who's calling, and the greeting was something like "Hello again". They are catching up at building a competitive database of persons and their preferences at the scale of FAANG. They're moving over from collecting info for their models to collecting info from their users for their agents. This is what they need to offer good agents.
But I might be wrong and it's just phoneme collection, as you speculate.
It also brings back memories of trying random (and known) 800 numbers from payphones.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/411_(telephone_number)
3 questions that Gen-Zers probably have never heard asked and will never ask themselves
List a business with a Google voice number and you can call in, check messages, and _dial out_ from Google voice. Free international calls!
I was in school in Canada where we had a payphone in a hallway. People heard me randomly saying "Funny Business Name, City State ... Connect me" into the phone so much, it became a running joke.
When I eventually got my own phone, I transferred the number and I still have it.
Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411 (2010)
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/goodbye-to-old-frien...
I'll definitely give it a go, I wonder if this lands better with those aged 50+ who are more used to phone calls rather than chat.
I’m well into this group and still make a lot more api calls than phone calls.
Fresh out of college I recall vividly thinking, I’ll need to build an impressive list of side projects to overcome preconceptions about how much I can truly offer at my age. Maybe nothing has changed.
our industry is old enough that the first generation of pioneers has died of old age.
Do you really think someone who grew up with computers in the 80s is incapable of using a smart phone? These are people who are still in the workforce today. These are your most skilled colleagues.
Some of them probably designed the device you think they're too old to understand
I know people who are in their 20s and 30s who seem to be uncomfortable with computers, cloud technology, and especially AI.
In some ways I'm one of them. I will never let an always listening AI helper be in my home. And I'm <40.
50+ are going to be so addicted to this thing its not even funny. My parents are not reaching for AI immediately yet, but thats just a yet. This is the wave that could come at any moment.
(Though I see that as mostly a failure of our financial industry. Credit card numbers should be obsolete by now.)
If anyone else reading this is in a place like you've described, try 1900hotdog.com
Pointing to the book authorship help support the intuition that our Gen X friends are able to get it, because after all, it's not out of the question for them to be involved in these very fields. I don't think any of those points, which again in this context are the points that are under discussion, are things that hinge on whether or not the book specifically addressed particular llm methodologies.
But as you can probably tell from the other replies, the idea that older people don't know how to use internet-era technology is a meme that was wearing thin 20 years ago already.
People who haven't had ChatGPT "land" for them yet are likely just people who don't find themselves asking a lot of questions they need a chatbot to answer, regardless of the medium. That probably has some age skew right now, but isn't really about the medium at all.
When I dabble with chatgpt it always feels like I’m playing with a toy as I don’t really have a use case I’m taking to it. I’ve used a few websites creators and code generators which have been useful but also I don’t think they saved me much time overall. Web design, graphic design, etc and creative stuff are things I suck creating so it gives me a new power and is easy to iterate on. Otherwise, I’ve not found much actual value from it yet.
If it makes you much more efficient in your job, like it does for professional software devs, many of HN users, then i think you’re more apt to be excited by the tech
I was thinking earlier today that an agent listening to my calls would be helpful. I was on the phone with a financial institution that will require some followup. Being able to sync in an agent to transcribe and remind me would be valuable.
I understand this isn't that.
EDIT: There is one limit at zombo.com. The limit is myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
The scary thing is it's actually conceivable to somehow integrate GPT into those things.
For the past 8-10 years it has all felt like a bunch of apps that just aim to be mediocre middlemen/gig economy brokers with bad customer service.
Isn't this the new LLM playbook?
I pay Claude/ChatGPT trivial amounts of money for metered API access to their models, and they in turn provide it to me.
Middlemen/marketplace models like "Uber for x" or "Etsy for x" or "Betterhelp for x" is a totally different business model.
Yes.
> and adding value.
No. The only breakthrough innovation LLMs gave us is the ability to speedrun the making of racist pictures. Not sure the world really benefited.
And I'd wager that there are silent revolutions happening all across colossus that's the tech industry that will become apparent in the next decade.
Jeff Bezos put it best during his recent interview at the 2024 NYTimes Dealbook Summit, "We're living in multiple golden ages at the same time." There's never been a better time to be alive.
It can sometimes be useful to input a more "human" search and have something get spit out but 60% of the time it completely lies to you. I'm talking about questions related to web specifications which are public documents. Section numbers, standards names, etc.. will be completely made up.
This is such an exhausting conversation
I had the same impression about the hallucinations 2 years ago. The reality is in at the end of 2024, you can get incredible value from LLMs.
I've used copilot to code almost exclusively now for the past few months. Anyone still comparing it to text completion I feel is operating on completely out of date information either intentionally or unintentionally.
My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well. If the volume on a particular subject is low / susceptible to false information then it’ll lie.
Recently it lied hard about how to configure MikroTik routers. I lost many hours. But for a large construction project recently it completely balled out.
Are you doing cutting edge / complicated stuff? Have you examples of where it lies?
ChatGPT lies a lot about RouterOS, I don't know why. Claude helped me a lot on the other hand with all things MikroTik.
No specific prompts, but most were related to the XHR/Fetch specs and behaviors within. It would say "X.Y.Z sections defines this" but that section didn't exist at all and the answer provided was not accurate.
> My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well
I see. Well, I don't know if I find that very valuable but if others do, then so be it.
it's just that every thread about LLMs in AI invariably has someone complaining about best results from a query best described as `SELECT * FROM...`
They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years.
If you're using them to fill knowledge gaps, what scaffolding have you set up to ensure that those gaps aren't being filled with incorrect-but-plausible-sounding information?
So much this. So many times I've argued with hired experts saying "can't be done" just to see yes, it can be done.
I'm glad ChatGPT didn't lead you astray, but I'm not seeing what it's added here besides shuffling up the user interface in a way that you presently and subjectively prefer?
Time is my most precious thing, I already don't have enough time to do all the things that I want to do, I don't want to waste that trying to find and test solutions when ChatGPT gives me instant answers. I'd rather spend time playing with my cats or riding a bike instead. It's not a matter of UI, it's a matter of preventing waste of time, energy and money, and less frustration. For that alone, €20/month is a very good value. And that's just for my personal life.
This. But in the same sense the past 50 years merely changed interface from dusty textbooks in libraries to Google Search, and the past 100 years gave us dusty textbooks over writing to Royal Society, and that just replaced the option of asking a local whisperer or hoping you'll find answers on the Sunday mass.
Do not underestimate the power of being able to get an answer to your problem described, visualized, and perhaps complete with interactive demo to explore it further, in time it would previously take you to formulate the right search query that finally gives you relevant information.
EDIT:
And that's on top of all the arbitrary data transformations prior tools couldn't do. E.g. I'm increasingly often using GPT and Claude models to turn photos of (possibly hand-written) notes or posters into iCAL files I can immediately import into our family shared calendar.
Another frequent use case, data normalization. Paste a whole dump of inconsistently structured data multiple people collected (say, addresses of various local businesses that helped a local NGO and now are supposed to get a thank-you card for Christmas). Like, you get 200 rows of addresses in a single column, with spelling mistakes, repetitions, junk at the end, arbitrary capitalization, wrong order of address segments, and such; you need to separate it out into 5+ columns (name line 1, name line 2, street address, zip code, city, etc.) and have it all normalized.
The fastest and most robust way to do it as a one-off job, today, is to paste the whole thing to GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet, tell it how the output should look (give one-two examples, mention some mistakes you saw), then send the message and wait 30 seconds for the job to be done for you.
(Yes, it may make mistakes - it didn't for me in recent memory, but it can. But for that, I quickly add an extra verification column for each one in LLM output, and do a simple case-insensitive substring match with original, and eyeball any data row that shows an error. And guess what, the formulas don't take much time either, since LLMs are good at writing them for you, too!)
I wouldn't discount this effect. As someone with sensory issues, one thing I like about ChatGPT as opposed to the "raw" internet is that I can see the answer to my questions in a nice and calm textual format without some website who created the article specifically to catch my search terms, but is trying to get me to deceptively click on ads or pull me into buying something through their affiliate links. That's absolutely increased my own enjoyment and productivity.
In the past week I have used it for helping write a script in a framework I'm not super familiar with (OpenSCAD), I was able to finish a project in 5 minutes that otherwise would have taken me hours. I have used it to help make movie recommendations (none of them were hallucinated). I have used it to translate a conversation with a non-english speaker, etc. There are other tools that can help me do all of these things, but none quite as fast or painlessly.
It might not be useful for your use case of asking questions related to specific web specs, but that doesn't mean that the technology has no value. Horses for courses...
Imaging being graded on your ability to quote exact line numbers of particular parts of your codebase as a senior software engineer without being able to look at it!
LLMs are not, in isolation, a search product.
Lots of engineering involved
The hard part is, despite actually having some "real" value delivered, you still have to sort through the 99% of bullshit that comes along with it anyways.
I'm also going to stand up for AR/VR here. I'm in a long-distance relationship and me and my partner spend an hour or so in VRChat around two to three times a week. The power that has to reduce the badness of an LDR is well well well well worth the three hundred bucks I paid for a Quest. That and some of the golf games on it are fun.
I've had an HTC Vive and an Oculus Rift 3 (Walkabout Mini Golf is one I tried!) and while I wouldn't try to argue NOBODY has found a use for it (somebody somewhere found uses for all of the things I mentioned, just not me and just not the majority of people like big new things are promised to) it never really ticked the "new value" box before they ended up in the closet for me.
That and the ergonomics do still suck, even if I've mostly gotten used to them.
I do think VR will make it, though - starting with the kids. Apparently Gorilla Tag broke 1.5 million players recently, and those are mostly under-15s. The next generation is going to have a strange relationship with computers.
https://www.youtube.com/live/LWa6OHeNK3s
We had a video monitor in front of us showing the live feed, that kept distracting me personally.
I meant no disrespect, but from 2' or so, the conversation sounded more natural and things got smooth. Interest feature and I liked the 80's banner with the phone # like in the old TV ads!
I was always curious how things worked when I saw announcements on HN. So happy to share to satiate the next generations curiosity :)
It's likely the people implementing the WhatsApp feature, are not the ones working on the LLM models.
If they believe AGI is around the corner and they are competing with others to get there, seems silly to invest resources in standing up a phone line, etc.
My background isn't AI so I can't contribute to that. My background is WebRTC/telephony so I could build this. Even if I was involved in 'AI stuff' I would have zero impact, but I can build this!
Maybe GPT-4 is the 1080p of LLMs: Noticeably better than 720p and 480p models, and not bad enough to warrant additional improvements.
Sure, 4K, 8K, ... are technologically available, but for the majority of use cases, 1080p is enough. Similarly, even though o1 and other models are technically feasible, for most cases the current models are enough.
In fact, GPT-4 is more than enough for 80% of tasks (text summarization, Apple (un)Intelligence, writing emails, tool use, etc.)—small models (<32B) are perfectly fine for those tasks (and they keep getting better too.)
This is what worries me. Aside from programmers and few other professions, most jobs in our civilization are prime for automation...
My experience is that o1 is extremely good at producing a series of logical steps for things. Ask it a simple question and it will write you what feels like an entire manual that you never asked for. For the most part I've stopped caring about integrating AI into software, but I could see o1 being good for writing prompts for another LLM. Beyond that, I have a hard time calling it better than GPT-4+.
How have you been using o1?
Even writing, where it is supposed to be worse than 4O, I feel that is does better/has a more solid understanding of provided documents.
Interesting, could you share an example of this where it provides something of value? I've tried asking a few different LLMs to explain renormalization group theory, and it always goes off the rails in five questions or less.
Alternatively, does it not seem more likely that they have different product groups? Surely the folks working on ChatGPT are an entirely different beast than the folks working in model development?
Nothing I said was absurd in response to making an unsupported idea that model development has plateaued.
o1-pro is that model. Expensive and slow, but significantly better at many tasks that involve CoT reasoning.
I know it was that good, because I got it to do that for me… and then the UI kept getting better and the expensive models became the free default option and I stopped caring.
[*] limited bandwidth (8 kHz), providing a valuable opportunity to enhance and specialize models for telephony applications, ensuring better performance and user experience even with low-fidelity audio inputs.
But being able to blame the user's phone line probably goes a long way to avoiding unhappiness due to testing :)
chatGPT: ~ This may be recorded...
chatGPT: ~ You agree to openai terms and conditions...
Me: What's the square root of two?
chatGPT: What number do you want to know the square root of?
Me: Two
chatGPT: The square root of ten is approximately 3.1...
<click>
If they wanted to show how very non-understanding and un-intelligent chatGPT is, they are doing a great job. So much quicker to see in a voice interaction than through online query submissions.
I did notice some weird VOIP noise on my first call, so maybe it was receiving a bad audio stream.
it does the same as the chatgpt whatsapp chat, but well you can forward images to it, it can send your reminder emails in the future and can manage todos for you (some kind of memory)
if it would have gotten more traction i would have extended it that you can also forward emails to it and it responds to the original email as your assistant
(and hey, if someone from openAi is reading this, feel free to offer me a position as a product manager)
* Limit user to 15m a month * Greetings unique to user state
It also needs access to Model/DB etc… which is all not exposable to internet