News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by nbardy on Saturday July 18, 2020 @08:16PM (#23885923)
One of the biggest issues is with cherry-picking. Generative ML results benefit greatly from humans sampling the best results. They are capable of producing astonishing results but don’t do this consistently this has a huge impact on any effort to productize. For example I’ve seen quite a few examples of text->design, text->code, with GPT-3 you could build a demo in a day, but the product will probably be useless if it’s not delivering results 50%+ of the time
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by teruakohatu on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:03PM (#23886138)
I don't know about GPT-3 but playing around with GPT-2 I often got the impression that it was regurgitating learned knowledge (reddit comments) rather than actually coming up with something novel.

With so many weights, it practically encodes a massive Internet text database.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by StavrosK on Sunday July 19, 2020 @07:52AM (#23888694)
I had that thought too, and my immediate next thought was that the value isn't in knowing the sentences, but in being able to put them together usefully.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by Kinrany on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:23PM (#23886238)
Having a better alternative to search engines would be great.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by quotemstr on Saturday July 18, 2020 @08:40PM (#23886030)
I think too few people are taking into account how inscrutable and inconsistent human creative-output results can be. We critique GPT-3 on the basis of it sometimes producing bad results --- but don't we all? Take poetry, for example. "The Complete Works of X", for any X, will probably contain a majority of forgettable or just bad works. What we remember from any author X is his cherry-picked best output. Likewise for ML systems.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by yyyk on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:06PM (#23886153)
The hype/scare re GPT-2/3 (etc.) is not for their poetry output, but rather for its potential for mass propaganda, telemarketing and so on. We can already get humans to do this stuff, all GPT could give is scale (that's no small deal).

However, if the output needs to be curated and edited by humans, the scale and automation is gone - we just get a different manual process, with a modest improvement to speed at cost of some decline in quality, and that's not very impactful.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by threeseed on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:28PM (#23886268)
The truly scary part is SEO where GPT-3 could ruin search engines overnight.

Google at this point favours long form content for many search intents. Being able to generate thousands of these pages in one-click is a real problem. Not just because of popular topics e.g. "covid-19 symptoms" but more so for the long tail e.g. "should I drink coffee to cure covid-19".

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by yyyk on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:39PM (#23886309)
Quite a lot of SEO already uses simple word generation techniques. It isn't clear GPT-3 is an improvement there - human text recognition might not be whatever Google does.

It may be that Google's algorithms don't care at all how human-like the text is, or that their own recognition algorithm/NN (whatever they use) isn't fooled. Even if it is affected, Google has the money and corpus to build its own competing NN to recognize GPT-3 text.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by mr__y on Sunday July 19, 2020 @02:38AM (#23887476)
While I have no doubts that they could build NN capable of recognizing GPT-3 text I believe that this would still pose a problem given the amount of content to be analyzed at the scale that Google deals with
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by yyyk on Sunday July 19, 2020 @07:47AM (#23888674)
I'm sure Google out of all entities could handle scale.

That said, there might be a different threat to Google. GPT-3 seems really useful as a search engine of sorts (with the first answer implementing the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button). Tune it for a query syntax, and for getting the 'top X' results somehow, then we just need the web corpus and a basic filter over the results. We could have a very interesting Google competitor.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by joe_the_user on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:46PM (#23886337)
If OP article was cherry-picked, the tree must not be very productive.

More than cherry-picking, there's the Eliza Effect - it's pretty easy to make people think generated text is intelligent. That text can seem intelligent for a while isn't necessarily impressive at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by bemmu on Sunday July 19, 2020 @11:00AM (#23889800)
To be honest, personally I had no idea it was generated until the author said so at the end.

Makes me worry about my own reading comprehension, but I think what happened was that since it was posted on HN and got upvoted a lot, I simply assumed that anything that I didn't understand was not the writer's fault, but mine.

For instance, it was unclear from the post what the bitcoinforum experiment was about, but I just dismissed it as me not being attentive enough while reading.

At one point GPT-3 writes: "The forum also has many people I don’t like. I expect them to be disproportionately excited by the possibility of having a new poster that appears to be intelligent and relevant." Why would people he doesn't like be paricularly excited about a new intelligent poster? Again I just assumed that I missed the author's point, not that it was nonsensical.

Twice it refers to tables or screenshots that are not included, but it seemed like an innocent mistake. "When I post to the forum as myself, people frequently mention that they think I must be a bot to be able to post so quickly" seemed like another simple mistake, meaning to say that when he posted as GPT-3, people thought he was being too quick.

This is like a written Rorschach test, when I'm convinced that what I'm reading must make sense, then I'll guess at the author's intent and force it to make sense, forgiving a lot of mistakes or inconsistencies.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by kunfuu on Sunday July 19, 2020 @10:57PM (#23894288)
The second one doesn't sound like a mistake to me. Someone being able to consistently post so quickly is actually a valid sign of being a bot.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by MetalGuru on Monday July 27, 2020 @10:12PM (#23971643)
Really interesting. Looking back, I did the exact same thing at many of the same points.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by rapnie on Sunday July 19, 2020 @02:28AM (#23887435)
It will be very annoying for e.g. forum moderators to determine whether first user posts are just a bit incoherent, or generated spam garbage.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by luckylion on Sunday July 19, 2020 @04:20AM (#23887874)
That used to be a pretty annoying thing back in the days of IRC as a kind of DOS: run a bunch of bots that just replay a conversation from another channel. Engaging them fails, but is that because they are bots, or because they're just ignoring you?
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by rapnie on Sunday July 19, 2020 @06:30AM (#23888387)
The new kind can be more targeted for specific purposes. They could be excellent tools for trolling a forum, inciting flame wars and such.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by luckylion on Sunday July 19, 2020 @11:30AM (#23889989)
That would require some more advanced tech though. I don't think GPT-3 can target divisiveness yet, especially since it would heavily depend on the community you're writing for, e.g. driving a wedge into the general population is very different than driving a wedge niches. The Linux vs Windows debate might get you engagement in a tech forum, but it'll fall short with social housing activists, and whatever issues they split on will probably not get you anywhere with the tech crowd.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by regularfry on Sunday July 19, 2020 @03:40PM (#23891856)
I don't think it needs to understand what a divisive issue is to have an effect. If you've got a human operator who can pick a divisive enough prompt, this can dramatically increase their inflamations-per-hour because they don't need to compose the body text.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by joe_the_user on Sunday July 19, 2020 @03:21AM (#23887631)
It's true that distinguishing these articles from ordinary jointed ramblings of poor writers would be hard. But I'm not sure what the benefit of filling forums with babble has to those running these models.

Bots offering idiocy and idiocy generally has done lots of damage. But by idiocy here I would quite carefully calculated cleverly polarized positions and I don't think just bot-rot would be enough (to maybe coin a phrase).

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by drcode on Saturday July 18, 2020 @08:30PM (#23885986)
I agree, but on the other hand one has to be careful not to be blind to the obvious power of a new technology, simply because it cannot be immediately turned into $$$.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by Vinnl on Sunday July 19, 2020 @04:36AM (#23887930)
Hmm, I don't know. If you're the IRA [1], it sounds like it could be more efficient to have your trolls select plausible-looking comments from the auto-generated ones rather than having them write them themselves all the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by ricksharp on Saturday July 18, 2020 @11:37PM (#23886799)
Yeah, I saw a text => UI generator.

It’s cool, but it looked like very basic stuff - the type of UI that is very easy to create in a few minutes. (And really with what was setup behind the scenes - maybe just as fast to just write the code.)

The hard part about software development is not those bits which are common, but the parts that are unique to our specific solution.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by fluffernutter on Sunday July 19, 2020 @12:14AM (#23886952)
> but the parts that are unique to our specific solution

Search terms tweaked for your unique interests, and not a commercial entity's, for example.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by bjourne on Saturday July 18, 2020 @11:22PM (#23886755)
True! That means that whoever can come up with a system that takes 10 texts written by GPT-3 and always selects the best one (as judged by humans) will become rich and famous. This sampling problem is one of the few major hurdles before generative ai:s become really useful.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by throwawaygh on Saturday July 18, 2020 @11:50PM (#23886845)
> rich

Is reddit gold really that valuable?

> famous

Surely there are easier ways.

> really useful

We already have enough 2020 reddit commenters regurgitating 2010 hn threads regurgitating 2000 slashdot threads, thanks.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by tgsovlerkhgsel on Sunday July 19, 2020 @10:58AM (#23889780)
It seems like with minor improvements, you could use this to significantly accelerate mundane parts of programming or writing. Human writes bulletpoints, neural net turns it into a program or letter, human corrects. There already was a pretty smart looking AI-based autocomplete shown on HN a couple weeks ago.

This will accelerate development. Is the current version there? Probably not. But GPT-4 might, and would then accelerate the development of future versions.

Even though this is not "magic", it sounds like it will turn into a practically usable and extremely valuable tool soon.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by GrantZvolsky on Sunday July 19, 2020 @04:07PM (#23892078)
Being a speaker of Czech and English without a single dominant language, I use Google Translate to improve my writing. I will write a draft in the target language and feed Translate the other. It often comes up with improved style and more accurate expressions, especially in Czech. So as far as writing goes, we're already there.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by _the_inflator on Sunday July 19, 2020 @03:45AM (#23887734)
Yes, it is more like happy path testing.

However I like spirit of optimism and first looks at encouraging and very promising results.

Exciting times!

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by m3kw9 on Saturday July 18, 2020 @08:52PM (#23886085)
I saw a demo of a gpt3 designing an app that looked just like Instagram home feed skeleton. While it seem impressive, but until you show me something more obscure, that was nothing to brag about.
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by jbhouse on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:00PM (#23886122)
Please please please post a link to that video. It sounds super interesting
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by Zetaphor on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:09PM (#23886172)
I assume they're referring to this tweet, where someone created a Figma plugin using the API

https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by threeseed on Saturday July 18, 2020 @09:10PM (#23886180)
It was posted here: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304

Honestly not that impressive since you can get comparable results with a series of regex rules given that there are limited ways to describe your intent e.g. "create a button of colour <colour> at the <location of button>"

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by TomMarius on Sunday July 19, 2020 @03:42AM (#23887722)
What are your thoughts on why nobody made the set of rules yet?
Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by luckylion on Sunday July 19, 2020 @04:31AM (#23887908)
If designers wanted to write texts to create visual designs, they'd be using some form of DSL and learn to code, wouldn't they?

I believe the hype is that people think they can replace the designer by "just telling the computer" what they want. I don't believe that will work, as they already have trouble telling a human what they want, and a computer won't really know what to do with "I want it to kind of feel like it's from that movie with the blue people that Cameron did, you know?"

In my experience, people have a hard time writing their ideas about designs & features down, because they don't know what they want. They want to talk about it abstractly with somebody who has a better understanding of the field so that person can help them develop the idea. I don't think ML will cover that part any time soon.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by Reelin on Sunday July 19, 2020 @04:57AM (#23887999)
> people have a hard time writing their ideas about designs & features down, because they don't know what they want

From an academic standpoint, writing is part of the thinking process. If you haven't written it down, you haven't fully thought it through. If it feels difficult, that's probably because your understanding isn't as complete as you thought it was.

From a software development standpoint, implementing something is part of the thinking process. Ever notice how the requirements have a tendency to break as soon as you actually try to implement them? If a spot seems difficult it just means you hadn't really figured it out yet.

Re:OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin by luckylion on Sunday July 19, 2020 @11:24AM (#23889964)
> From an academic standpoint, writing is part of the thinking process. If you haven't written it down, you haven't fully thought it through.

I 100% agree. I noticed a giant shift in tasks when I made one client write tickets instead of making phone calls. Writing it down forces you to think it through.

And I agree about software development as well, yes. Though I think it's even rare to have somebody describe all the features they want unless it's an experienced software developer who basically writes a textual representation of the application.

But for most PMs (that I've worked with at least), they have vague ideas about what they want, and bringing them into focus is a back and forth with developers and designers. I don't see them getting anywhere with an NLP automaton, but maybe with an Eliza-style system: "Give me a big yellow button saying 'Sign up'" - "Why do you want a big yellow button saying 'Sign up'?" - "You're right, that's too on the nose... give me a link saying 'Sign up'"...