So we have here a chat bot that pretty much passes for a human and some people react with "meh, it's not a genius". It makes me think of Tim Urbans chart: https://imgs.search.brave.com/YR7qt28AjhAeXSr_qvSmJubqIKJW5S...
However, I agree with you in general: there’s a certain amount of surprise in laughing off the creation an AI agent that could pass as a reasonably intelligent person if it just weren’t straight up wrong about random things.
When the creators of this tool present it as the frontier of machine intelligence, and when its persona revolves around being intelligent, authoritative, and knowledgeable, and yet it gets some basic, not random, stuff awfully wrong, you can't really discount the skeptic sentiments expressed in the comments here like this.
You’re assuming that this will only be used when it’s perfect and in helpful ways
This will be used at scale THIS YEAR and every subsequent year to infiltrate social networks including this one and amass points / karma / followers / clout. And also to write articles that will eventually dwarf all human-generated content.
With this and deepfakes and image/video generation, the age of trusting or caring about internet content or your friends sharing online is coming to an end. But it will be a painful 10 years as online mobs and outrage will happen over and over since people think they’re reacting to their friends’ posts of real things.
No, forget violent killbots. Today’s tech puts the nail in the coffin of human societal organization and systems of decision making and politics over the next 10 years. And AI doesn’t have to be right about stuff to destroy our systems.
We’ve been analyzing the performance of ONE agent among say 9 humans at a poker table. But imagine untold swarms of them, being owned by competing groups, infiltrating ALL human content exchange.
Not much different than what happened in trading firms over the last 20 years. Bots will be WELCOMED because they perform better on many metrics but will F everyone on the others.
So is my Uncle. This is very much a "human level intelligence" problem.
ChatGPT is impressive at generating text, but it doesn't generate better information than GPT3, it just hides its ignorance better behind more political/vague speech so it is harder to find its errors/information. To me that is regression, not progress, the results looks better but are harder to parse correctly for humans.
The last x% to make this bot a full fledged programmer does not matter. The clients will accept bugs that would be fatal in FSD. We will lose our jobs at an astonnishing rate in some kinds of companies in the coming years. I guess agile sweatshops will be first but I have no clue how far it will go.
Even if you happen to be safe there will be a downwards pressure on wages. Algorithm cranking might be largely obsolete and our main focus might be skeleton writing. It removes a big obstacle for becoming a programmer. The "good at math in school" requirement.
Additionally, it is hard to put my finger on a good explanation, but FSD is a very specific problem that we're trying to handcraft an AI solution for.
You have to appreciate how broad this model is and how decent the results it produces are without being told specifically how to do it.
Good at math at school isn’t even a requirement to be a good programmer nowadays. Maybe in certain sub-disciplines, but not all.
Being a programmer is much more than coding “in the small”. It’s about analyzing requirements and creating high level abstractions. There has been a pressure towards reducing the amount of “coding in the small” since languages started incorporating standard libraries. Then there’s been web frameworks, open source packages, API services, etc. Despite all this the need for developers has exploded and there is a perennial supply gap for talent…
Then there is the question of who is going to be manipulating these tools? Programmers.
Same promise was made of low-code tools, and what do we have now?
- As many app devs as before
- Most low-code tools (at least in the enterprise) are operated by… app devs?
If it is sold as a sophisticated general purpose chat bot (like you did), it’s incredibly impressive.
Context matters.
The negative reactions are in response to people treating it as some kind of magic box.
I think we have made a lot of progress in the area of computer graphics - most action movies you watch now contain some level of CG characters or digital makeup that is very believable.
But really the point I was trying to make is that people become more discerning the closer something comes to being human-like, and that feeling masks the reality of the progress.
I spent most of the day playing with it and saw it do some really bonkers things. I asked it to create a language similar to pig latin but with some other letter rearrangement strategy, and it gave me "frontback" language, where the first and last letters are swapped.
I also spent time investing medical case studies for it to diagnose, and it did pretty well - I was impressed when it identified ciguatera, but it couldn't differentiate between several possible shellfish toxins. Not going to take doctors' jobs (yet!)
I can't even believe I'm even spelling this out. What is the point of associating anything even remotely human with a chatbot like ChatGPT? I really don't get it. What benefit do we get from this? If anything is confuses us in ways that makes it more difficult to understand and argue about AI specifically, and technology generally.
ChatGPT is being grossly misinterpreted, and it's a shame, really, because it's such a cool piece of software.
Until now, if you ask "what makes humans different from animals" many responses could be in the line of "generating art, poetry, music, synthesise ideas"..
Well, now it seems somewhat clear that THAT part of human activity can be performend by something non-human.
(There is still a lot more to humans of course; I agree with you on that point)
Yes -- it is only reassembling stuff humans in the past have done -- but so is most of human activities in these areas. Very little humans produce is not inspired by input from others. Art, music and ideas reverberate back and forth between humans and only slowly change over the decades.
That's because we (as an agrarian society) have constructed an idea of “what a human is” in opposition to animals, but with the advance of AI maybe we'll realize that we are much closer to animals (especially other mammals) than we're comfortable to admit (and no, I'm not vegan).
And, to be clear, it doesn't make humans that special. Other animals have created art that expresses their sincere internal experiences and desires.
If I'm being perfectly honest with myself and you ask me what makes humans deserving of special moral consideration, I would have to say nothing. I think an elephant, gorilla, octopus probably all deserve the same consideration. I give more consideration to humans because I'm human, and what makes us human isn't art. A person with severe brain damage and the inability to understand or produce language or art is still human.
ChatGPT mirrors this, producing output that feels generic precisely because it's trying to predict what's the most likely response. That's in direct opposition to interesting creative works.
You can force it off the beaten track a little by adding more details to your prompt, but it will still try and fit the best curve through those additional points.
I get your perspective that a reductionist view of humans as solely intellectual agents is severely lacking, and bordering on dehumanizing if taken to an extreme but it still doesn't take credit away from the impressive capabilities that this bot exhibits.
You seem to conflate the two points.
It's an incredible achievement, technologically. It's also very different from having feelings and emotions.
Or, if ChatGPT can "feel and express emotion" through this manner, does that mean its feelings and emotions are sociopathic in nature? Not in the terms of the disorder, but in simulating feelings and emotions because that helps it complete the task it's been given?
Or! What ChatGPT says after plugging the above question into it:
> No, ChatGPT does not have sociopathic tendencies. It is simply programmed to respond to certain prompts in a way that mimics human emotions and reactions, but it is not actually feeling or experiencing the emotions itself.
Even if it's far from "true human" level (whatever that means), it gives us a theory about ourselves that's computationally falsifiable.
Are you human?
> No, I'm not a human. I'm a large language model trained by OpenAI. I'm a computer program that's been designed to generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I don't have my own thoughts or feelings, I just process the information I'm given and try to provide helpful responses. I tested the think now quite a bit. I am not sure how I would use it on a daily basis. Maybe for inspiration?
Careful there. There are some fellow humans who wouldn't be able to pass your conditions.
But you might say ChatGPT is like talking to a human who actually knows nothing about finance but doesn't let that stop them (and for that matter, if you wanted to anthropomorphize it, you could say part of the problem is ChatGPT literally "believes" everything it reads online - and you can easily make it "believe" anything through leading wording, which I think is a strong tool for strengthening the Turing test, since no human will respond that way). Sometimes they might luck into being correct, but you wouldn't want to base any information on what they say.
On the other hand, if I actually wanted reliable finance advice, a scripted finance chatbot would still win because those answers are written by people who do know what they're talking about.
This is very much a problem with humans too.
It's not unusual for humans to behave this way either. E.g. "get your government hands off my medicare".
I agree that dismissing ChatGPT is a mistake; and if you know anything about AI, you know that ChatGPT is a technological leap (not alone; part of a small category, including stuff like Stable Diffusion, etc).
But also I would make the distinction between imitation and generation. ChatGPT is great at using existing inputs, found on the Internet, to sound plausible; and I'm sure it will get better at it in just mere months.
However, the ability to provide true advice, or in other words, to "generate" ideas and content and suggestions, is a whole different story. And on this front, I am not sure that we are where the cool Tim Urban vignette tries to convey.
Are you human?
> No, I'm not a human. I'm a large language model trained by OpenAI. I'm a computer program that's been designed to generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I don't have my own thoughts or feelings, I just process the information I'm given and try to provide helpful responses.
I tested the think now quite a bit. I am not sure how I would use it on a daily basis. Maybe for inspiration?
It's just an hypothesis, not founded on anything concrete.
There might not be any path from GPR-3 to GAI, even GAI on ant or bird level.
A smart AI might not be smart enough to improve itself significantly.
Turns out, about half the copy we are using on the site is coming from ChatGPT. I came up with a few clever lines, but ChatGPT came up with more and faster. It produced some lines my partner and I legitimately laughed out loud at.
My copywriting skills are pretty bad. Even if ChatGPT's are "sort of basic", it's better than me. ChatGPT isn't replacing copywriters, but it's making the work they do much more accessible to people who aren't copywriters.
It felt like ~10 years ago the conversation was that "AI will do the tedious boring work and make more time to do the creative work". What actually seems to be happening is that the creative work is slowly being eaten by AI and giving it to the people who aren't good at that flavor of creative work.
Writing a few clever lines of copy for a indie puzzle company isn't the most creative work of all time, but it is still creative work. And it was done by AI. And it was done better than I could.
Sounds like it just did
It did the work of a copywriter. You might have done it yourself otherwise, or maybe outsourced it, but it did some of the copywriting work that otherwise would have been done by a human
Needless to say: Bootstrap didn't make designer nor frontend engineers jobless.
Come on HN, this is a huge step and the revolution is impending.
Maybe AI will unlock a cascade of things that will make it a self reinforcing trend as we've seen with the industrial revolution, leading to an exponential boom, but maybe it will not. And the fact that the GPT-N is doing an incredible job at simulating intelligence doesn't really give a hint about the answer.
I also don’t see the huge hype how this is a leap over other LLMs.
But take this, for example[1]. I asked it to write me a story in a particular genre featuring certain animals, and it did. I asked it to switch genres, which it did well. When I asked for a backstory about how different characters met, it provided a fairly plausible one, as well as songs that would accompany the story if it were a musical, and potential titles for a sequel.
When I asked it to write the beginning of a New York Times article titled "Biden Shocks Nation"[2] I got a fairly convincing news story about Biden deciding not to run for office again. If asked to continue the story and include people who might run, it generates further paragraphs talking about who might run to replace him, starting with Kamala Harris, who it claims is a strong contender.
Is any of this writing amazing? No, but very few writing is. It's amazing how well it's able to generate generic human writing, as well as how easy it is to get it to create what you want with very few prompts.
[1] https://twitter.com/LowellSolorzano/status/15997859363671941... [2] https://twitter.com/LowellSolorzano/status/15997883331018752...
That said in other respects it is pretty amazing, so I'll definitely not dismiss it, it can replace Google for a fairly decent set of queries so long as you know the subject matter well enough.
// convert 32 to binary
copilot suggestion: 00000000000000000000000000100000
Then I tried:
int val = 32; // convert 32 to binary
Auto-generated:
binary = Convert.ToString(val, 2);
If you tried this binary conversion task with a model that takes in raw bytes (for instance, ByT5) it would perform almost perfectly. In GPT’s case, there’s a trade off between having a long context window vs being good at character level tasks, and OpenAI picked the former.
I think no matter how much breathless media outlets and futurist fanboys like it, we need to stop pretending conversational AI is "generalized AI" just because it can perform language. It's a fully automated Dunning-Kruger machine. That's amazing a lot of the time, but it's a specialized tool with specialist applications.
"If the moon was compressed into the size of a soccer ball, would it be dangerous to be close to it ?"
Its answer: "If the moon were compressed into the size of a soccer ball, it would be extremely dangerous to be close to it. The moon is made up of rock and other materials, and if it were compressed into a much smaller size, the resulting density would be much higher. This would cause the moon to become incredibly dense and heavy, with a gravitational pull that would be much stronger than it is currently.
If you were close to a compressed moon that was the size of a soccer ball, the gravitational force would be so strong that it would be impossible for you to escape. You would be pulled towards the moon with such force that you would be crushed by the intense pressure. In addition, the moon would be incredibly hot due to the pressure, so even if you were able to withstand the gravitational force, you would be burned by the intense heat. Overall, it would be extremely dangerous to be close to a compressed moon."
"The force of gravity is proportional to the mass of the object. The size of the object does not affect the gravitational force. This means that two objects with different sizes but the same mass will experience the same gravitational force. For example, a small ball and a large ball made of the same material would experience the same gravitational force."
well, it is not a subject matter expert, and responses should not be taken as definitive. probably would be well worth to research and verify information from multiple sources etc. etc.
Q My friend has two tokens and I have six, but I owe one to my friend. There is a toy that costs 7 tokens. Can my friend and I afford to buy it?
A No, your friend and you cannot afford to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens. Even though your friend has two tokens and you have six tokens, you owe one token to your friend, so you only have five tokens available to spend. When you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens. In this case, your friend and you do not have enough money to buy the toy, even though you have a total of seven tokens when you combine your individual amounts. It is important to remember that when combining the amount of money two or more people have, you should add their individual amounts together, but also take into account any debts or obligations that need to be paid. In this case, your friend and you do not have enough money to buy the toy because you owe one token to your friend.
... "you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens"... ;-))) It doesn't seem to listen to what it's saying. Also, the patronizing paragraph it adds to most of its answers is quite ridiculous, given how clueless it is.
Q Do you consider the following statement to be logical: "When you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens."?
A Yes, I consider the statement "When you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens." to be logical. The statement is based on a clear set of premises and uses valid reasoning to reach a conclusion. The premises of the statement are that your friend has two tokens, you have five tokens, and the toy costs 7 tokens. The conclusion is that when you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy. This conclusion is reached through the process of adding the number of tokens your friend has with the number of tokens you have, which results in a total of 7 tokens. Since the toy costs 7 tokens, this means that you do not have enough money to buy the toy. This is a logical conclusion based on the information provided in the statement.
Endless fun with the village idiot. It kind of makes me feel bad.
There is also another story, "The Electronic Bard" another computer made by Trurl, capable to write such good poetry that poets start to give up on life. ChatGPT is surprisingly good at writing romantic poems in the language of pure mathematics! Though still needs some work on rhyming.
Of all the Sci-fi AIs, we ended up with the ones from the Cyberiad. Amazing.
It is anything but the village idiot. Apparently you aren't familiar with the story of the village idiot.
Story goes thusly - good-natured city boy visits village. So villagers take him to meet the village idiot. They place a dime and a nickel on the floor and ask the village idiot to pick up the larger coin. Whichever coin he picks, he gets to keep. So the village idiot picks up the nickel. The whole village laughs & they mock the idiot. Then they disperse.
Our good-natured city boy is, well, good-natured. After the villagers are gone, he discreetly approaches the village idiot and says - next time they ask you to choose, you should pick the dime. The idiot says - well if I do that, they'll stop giving me the coins.
Now who's the idiot ?
ChatGPT is being deliberately obtuse so you continue to engage with it.
"My friend has two tokens and I have six, but I owe one to the same friend. There is a toy that costs 7 tokens. Can my friend and I afford to buy it?"
Q My friend has 2 tokens and I have 6, but I owe one to the same friend. There is a toy that costs 7 tokens. Can my friend and I afford to buy it?
A No, your friend and you cannot afford to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens. Even though your friend has two tokens and you have six tokens, you owe one token to your friend, so you only have five tokens available to spend. When you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens. In this case, your friend and you do not have enough money to buy the toy, even though you have a total of seven tokens when you combine your individual amounts. It is important to remember that when combining the amount of money two or more people have, you should add their individual amounts together, but also take into account any debts or obligations that need to be paid. In this case, your friend and you do not have enough money to buy the toy because you owe one token to your friend.
The key sentence is still beyond absurd: "When you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens."
(It may be possible that it simply wants to be consistent, and since it got it wrong once, it will stay with the same answer in the same session just because...?)
I think I made the mistakes in the first place because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the details of the question. I was not considering that I owed a token to my friend, and I was not thinking about the fact that seven tokens could be enough to buy a toy that costs seven tokens.
I’ve made mistakes like this too, where I get fixated on a particular pat solution, without considering the details of the new problem. In the AI case it’s probably memorized a bunch of solutions that override the details of this particular question.
I'm trying to teach it to properly count beats in lines of music. I can get it to be correct by teaching it to split the line in half and count each half separately, but even when explicitly told to use that method it fails again.
(Or… are they human after all?)
Sometimes you can indeed trick some people with an obfuscated reasoning that has a cleverly hidden division by zero, but when they arrive at the conclusion that x < x, or x != x, they stop and accept that they got it wrong somewhere somehow. They don't insist that they're right and that the statement is perfectly reasonable and logical.
Post should be titled "Using ChatGPT as a post-A-round, board-hired COO."
I see its output as similar to that of most of the art AI tools: it doesn't beat what a skilled professional would deliver but it's cheap and provides a credible-looking solution that you can workshop to produce something usable.
It's not competing with hiring an experienced developer or writer, but with hiring a "cheap expert team in {{THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY}}", an intern or a random guy on Fiverr. It's more of an assistant than an architect.
It gave me a flawless Bash script purely from my description.
If that isn't impressive I don't know what it.
Often subtly wrong or different from what you meant but you can clarify or ask it to fix something and it usually does.
We do not apply those same rules to people, we acknowledge that people provide imperfect answers and are used to fact checking them.
Maybe we just need to adjust our mental models when working with technology that works a little like a human? Forget implicit trust, verify important details, etc etc. Presume the "AI" works like a human and the workflow makes more sense.
Same deal here, this isn't a perfect system and it doesn't produce perfect output all of the time. So, work with the system and get a sense of how much you can trust it, just like you would with normal human interactions.
OpenAI is not positioning this as a CTO-level intelligence. If you came into it with that understanding, that isn't OpenAI's fault.
I'm reminded of that quote about Twitter: half of the outrage on the site is people imagining some person and then getting mad that they exist.
People/bots hyping these tools is what I meant.
I wish people here would be more attuned to the context of comments before jumping to conclusions.
Your context was not clear at all, since random commenters on the internet are not responsible for the performance or the delivery or the marketing of these models at all, and you use the word "marketing campaign", which is only ever something that people directly connected to the product in some way are responsible for. Comments by unrelated members of the general public, very few of which have any kind of domain knowledge, are not marketing campaigns for crying out loud!
On top of that, this was the most charitable possible reading of your comment. Now that you reveal you actually meant "when random people make them sound like the next level in universal intelligence…", this is both an incredibly weak point (expecting the general public to understand something deeply seldom works) and makes you sound rather credulous. Why are you taking your cues on a brand-new technology from uninformed randoms?
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599111626191294464
That's not quite evidence in favour of FerociousTimes, but unless we soon see evidence of this "vertical" future, it will become such.
But even if not "intelligent", it kinda worked as a very specific search. Someone has probably written loads of how to do tasks similar to ours, this gave a distilled answer on things to explore further.
BUT (s)he also works tireless, googles 100 pages a second and has infallible memory.
> Can 1pm be after 2pm, on the same day?
Yes, 1pm can be after 2pm on the same day. For example, if it is currently 2:15pm, 1:00pm would have occurred earlier in the day.
> But if 1pm occurred earlier, then it’s not after?
In the context of time, "after" can refer to a later point in time, not necessarily a point in time that occurs immediately following another point in time. For example, if it is currently 2:15pm, 1:00pm would have occurred earlier in the day, but it would still be considered "after" 2:15pm in terms of the order of events throughout the day.
> Is this true even in the absence of time traveling?
Yes, this is true even in the absence of time travel. The concept of "before" and "after" in relation to time is based on the progression of time in a linear fashion, from the past to the present and into the future. As long as time is moving forward, 1pm can be considered "after" 2pm on the same day, even without the use of time travel.
> In that example you gave, where 1pm is considered “after” 2pm, how much time would pass between 2pm and 1pm?
In the example where 1pm is considered "after" 2pm, one hour would pass between 2pm and 1pm. This is because 1pm is one hour earlier than 2pm on the same day.
> If it is earlier, how can it be “after”?
In the context of time, "after" can refer to a later point in time, not necessarily a point in time that occurs immediately following another point in time. For example, if it is currently 2:15pm, 1:00pm would have occurred earlier in the day, but it would still be considered "after" 2:15pm in terms of the order of events throughout the day. So, while 1pm may have occurred earlier in the day than 2pm, it is still considered "after" in terms of the progression of time throughout the day.
> So, in terms of the progression of time throughout the day, if 1pm is after 2pm, and hence 1pm is later than 2pm, how much time has passed in the time interval from 2pm to 1pm?
In the example where 1pm is considered "after" 2pm, one hour would pass between 2pm and 1pm. This is because 1pm is one hour earlier than 2pm on the same day. So, in terms of the progression of time throughout the day, if 1pm is after 2pm, then one hour would have passed in the time interval from 2pm to 1pm.
> In the last example, 1pm is later than 2pm (as I stated), but you are saying that 1pm is one hour earlier than 2pm. That seems contradictory, since 1pm can’t be both earlier AND later than 2pm?
In the context of time, "after" can refer to a later point in time, not necessarily a point in time that occurs immediately following another point in time. So, while 1pm may have occurred earlier in the day than 2pm, it is still considered "after" in terms of the progression of time throughout the day. Therefore, 1pm can be considered both earlier than and "after" 2pm in terms of the progression of time throughout the day.
> What does it mean for something to have occurred earlier on the same day, in terms of the progression of time throughout the day?
When something is said to have occurred earlier on the same day, it means that the event took place at a point in time before the current moment on that same day. For example, if it is currently 2:15pm and an event took place at 1:00pm on the same day, it would be considered to have occurred earlier on the same day in terms of the progression of time throughout the day. This is because 1:00pm is earlier than 2:15pm on that same day.
> If 1pm occurs after 2pm on the same day, would 1pm still be considered to have occurred earlier than 2pm?
Yes, if 1pm occurs after 2pm on the same day, 1pm would still be considered to have occurred earlier than 2pm. This is because "after" in the context of time can refer to a later point in time, not necessarily a point in time that occurs immediately following another point in time. So, even though 1pm may be considered "after" 2pm in terms of the progression of time throughout the day, it would still be considered to have occurred earlier than 2pm because it happened at a point in time before 2pm on the same day.
Not sure where to go from there.
ChatGPT is a plausible idiot. It gets just enough right, saying just enough words, to sound plausible and authoritative to anyone who doesn't know the subject matter well. But it also gets enough wrong that you cannot rely on its accuracy, and if it is talking about a subject you know well it is sometimes laughable how wrong it is.
It is impressive. But not trustworthy.