> it should increase the quality of writing overall if people start taking advantage of these tools

Perversely, it might also dramatically decrease reading, if there's no incentive for anyone to need to properly understand anything.

A pretty dire scenario :(

It's probably going to devalue memorizing facts and concepts in the same way the internet already has, although to a further extent. This could be really exciting as everyone now has a subject matter expert on hand to ask any question they could think of.

Subject matter exports are quick to point out the limitations and flaws of chatGPT in their domain of expertise.

I expect in a few years we will have versions that are both more accurate, and can cite their answers / do real research.

I think that's unlikely. The architecture these things currently use doesn't allow for the possibility of that. We'd need to engineer completely different systems with a novel architecture largely unrelated to the current ones in order to do it.

You can search a knowledgebase using embeddings today and it works pretty well.

> It's probably going to devalue memorizing facts and concepts in the same way the internet already has [..]

OK, thought experiment: try to think of the brightest people you know/ever knew. Not the most successful, but the ones where after every interaction you were left thinking "wow, person X is really, really smart". I can think of a handful of people from over the decades, who worked in wildly different fields.

All of them were really good at recalling facts and at quickly grasping concepts. None of them ever needed anything explaining (or even saying!) twice.

Note: this isn't about people who excel at rote learning (like you might do for a school test), just there are people out there who are simply great at absorbing information.

ChatGPT isn't that, and my prediction is that it will never be that. People who are great at writing prompts for ChatGPT aren't going to be that, either.

>People who are great at writing prompts for ChatGPT aren't going to be that, either.

I don't see why this would be true. If you have evidence of some strong argument on why this would be true, I'd like to hear them.

As an anecdote, I work with young people (x<25) that don't seem to be worse at recalling facts than the older generation. The bright/geeky ones grew up reading up wikipedia and, in fact, have a wider grasp of facts/stories than the older generation (in my experience)

Maybe it'll force people to state their points clearly and avoid bullshitting, if no-one is willing to wade through unclear paragraphs. That might have a positive effect in the long run.

I've defeated it already using basic prompt engineering.

Is prompt engineering what kids are calling typical hacking behavior these days?

/This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own./

Ironically, students almost all suck at writing...

Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class.

Many of my college classes are (and even high school classes! though I was coming out of HS in the tail end of covid) like this.

High school: Watch ~1hr lecture every night for next day's class, in which we did worksheets and the teacher would work through problems, but we were generally expected to have learned the material (teacher would not re-teach it).

College: Last semester I had a Data Structures class with a similar structure, but with 2-3 lectures a week. Same idea, we worked on practice sheets in class and had far more time to ask questions instead of having the entire concept taught to us. I much preferred this because some concepts covered, I had a very solid understanding of, so not wasting time in class was great.

That approach to education is quite common. There’s been more of a push over the past decade or so under the “flipped classroom” moniker, but it’s the same principle as reading at home, then working with that knowledge in a group where different ways of thinking may be discussed.

I currently have a class where the professor does a hybrid of that. Instead of a four-and-a-quarter hour class, he makes a one hour video the day before with the rote part of the lecture and tries to address anything that came up among students since the previous week's class. Then we have a three-and-a-quarter hour class which is mostly work and there's a minimal lecture to warm everybody up. While the medium is largely technical, it is a studio art class however so it was a bit different from most classes, anyway.

No, schools (and employers, and scientists, and everyone else) are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they will rapidly become irrelevant, and cannot possibly hope to continue operating in anything resembling their traditional role.

Your position is that humans should stop bothering with learning?

The primary purpose of schools is not "learning" but exercising power through gatekeeping and accreditation. For most disciplines, the Internet already contains learning resources that make the average school's curriculum look like utter garbage by comparison. We don't use schools for learning, we use them to decide who gets to do what in life.

Why so you believe that is the purpose of schools?

Why does so much learning and research take place if these are not primary purposes of schools?

Why are schools so inefficient at teaching if it's their primary purpose? (E.g. students who've had no schooling can generally do one year of schooling before university, and then in university perform at the same level as people who were schooled for over ten yeras).

Source on that?

Your positions are too confidently severe. For starters, self-directed education isn't effective for most young people. Some form of school need endure, remote or not. If you're going to make more dystopian leaps with AI as an infinite conceptual gap-filler, just remember that people need constructive socialization.

And yet somehow kids go to school and learn stuff. How is that possible?

There are approximately zero economic indicators showing this.

"Economic indicators" are entirely irrelevant for that discussion. This isn't going to be a gradual change either. At some point, GPT-n is going to be available with super-human capabilities in all tasks that matter, and then it's simply over, from one day to the next. Nobody will continue paying people to do things that AI can do better, faster, and more reliably, at lower cost.

No, that's not how jobs work. Comparative advantage means it's worth paying people to do a job even if you're better at it than they are, because you have more important things to do.

Hiring AIs to do something is extremely expensive. You're basically setting a warehouse of GPUs on fire.

Anyway, if it was true total factor productivity would be exploding, but it's actually kinda underperforming. (And automation almost always causes increased employment.)

Maybe in training but presumably you buy the trained AI service or whatever and run on cpu. AWS machines with GPUs don’t even surpass roughly $25 an hour. That’s the low end for a desk worker.

Admitting my last comment is a bit false. Turns out ChatGPT is running on GPUs.

It is, but especially high memory ones, and presumably it's loaded on a bunch of them since it supports simultaneous queries.

True, but surely the cost of multiple machines is amortized by simultaneous queries?

Yeah but have you tried dealing with people? Just like horses replaced cars, for lots of reasons, an http endpoint, powered by AI, that could do the work of a person, would replace so many jobs. Or ATMs for example.

> Just like horses replaced cars, for lots of reasons

Other way round, right?

Humans (labor) are different from horses (capital) because 1. they actively participate in work, ie, they don't just literally do what you tell them 2. they actually signed up to work, whereas horses don't care. And 3. if you give them money, they'll also become your customers. Though, I don't know if that's a major factor for employers, even if there is that Henry Ford anecdote.

ATMs are a good example here because there are more bank tellers now than before ATMs were invented. (see Jevons' paradox)

Lol oops yeah I wrote that backwards. Too late to edit now, ah well.

There are some jobs where labor needs to care. Most tech jobs, for example. But there are lots of jobs, especially temp ones, that are about throwing as many bodies as you can afford at a problem, and don't ask questions or try to do it smarter. So 1 is actually a detriment in those kinds of jobs.

To point 3, Henry Ford aside, if businesses really wanted employees to be able to afford their goods, they'd stop offshoring jobs!

ATMs put bank tellers out of work. There do happen to be more bank tellers now than before because there are more bank customers needing more bank services, but my bank only needs X tellers at at time vs X+1 or 2 or 3, and they don't hire any for 24 hours services. It's a bit hard to see, because the number of tellers is higher now than before, but the question is how many more tellers would there be without said machines?

You’re predicting something that has never happened before by invoking magic AI that can do any tasks without specifying real-world limitations that might come up.

One day eventually we will have general human equivalent AI, at least for the vast majority of work tasks. Sure, but that's as much a premise for a science fiction story as a prediction about the future.

We are absolutely nowhere near even close to beginning to know how to even start building such a thing. Chat bots, language models and image generators are fun tools that look amazing to people who don't understand how they work, but they're extremely rudimentary compared to real intelligence.

I'll make a counter-prediction. All the low hanging fruit in language model development have been picked. Like all technologies there's a steep part of the S-curve of development and that's where we are now, but you can't extrapolate that to infinity. We'll soon hit the top of the curve and it will level off, and the inherent limitations of these systems will become a severe obstacle to further major advances. They will become powerful, useful tools that may even be transformative in some activities, but they won't turn out to be a significant step towards general AI. An important step maybe, but not a tipping point.

> Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class

This model (“flipped classroom”) has been recommended by many for quite a long time (at least since internet video delivery for the purpose became practical, but ISTR the first suggestions actually predate even that) and the reasons just seem to keep growing.

Thanks, I was trying to remember what this was called!

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

I'm a huge supporter of this model. I used to think I was terrible at math. Once Khan Academy and other online resources were available, it all started to click for me. Turns out my problem was that I could never keep up with the lectures. Being able to pause and replay a lecture and then ask for help when I got stuck in my homework would have been amazing.

The nearby university already does this.

It... It sometimes works. It depends a LOT on the instructor.

Should also note: it only really works when all your lecturers share some information about workloads...

Sorry, it is unclear if this comment is AI generated or not, I can't give you full credit for it.

(No seriously. "The classifier considers the text to be unclear if it is AI-generated.")

I just tried the op comment and got

> The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated.

It's going to falsely label any recent innovation in language as generated, because the training set will skew human-written as old and GPT generated as new language.

> The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI

is this just a baseless assertion or do you have something to back it up?

what I'm seeing is that a lot of kids will have a 1:1 coach for a lot of topics.

I know now it's not perfect, but this thing may be a few years away from having a likeable personality and fact checking what it says.

> The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI. This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own.

I think the form will change, but the substance is going to be like it always has.

Those who give a damn, want to and are able to improve will be able to do it 100x by getting access to a new source of diversified ideas and view points, variations on their own, and information. And efficiently and more or less reliably delegating low-value stuff at a low marginal cost, freeing up bandwidth & increasing impact.

And the grifters who’re always looking for shortcuts and constantly try to game whatever system they are in without any desire whatsoever to learn anything or grow in anyway… will keep doing just that. And the only value they’ll be able to bring will be… access to a tool anyone (but, yes, not everyone) can access.

And that matters, because in the end many of the problems worth solving aren’t technical problems, but people problems.

Writing this, I realise I may have completely missing your point and gone way off topic here.