I agree, and one more thing is that it _is_ useful.

If somebody thinks it's just a bullshit generator and 100 million people using it after 2 months are wrong, the problem is with the person who didn't put in the effort to learn to use it effectively.

> If somebody thinks it's just a bullshit generator and 100 million people using it after 2 months are wrong, the problem is with the person who didn't put in the effort to learn to use it effectively.

Alternative explanation: Most people are happy to generate bullshit, and love that they now have a way to do it with zero effort. Bullshit copy, bullshit art, bullshit code — the sky's the limit!

Why is the code bullshit? It routinely helps me with repetitive stuff.

If your code is repetitive, you should deal with that by abstracting it, not by using a probabilistic black box to generate more.

That's sometimes easy, sometimes not so easy due to the boilerplate requirements of the language/framework/library one uses. Other times it introduces a trade-off between repetition and code complexity/readability, so it's not the silver bullet your comment suggests it to be.

My humble prediction is that this will happen regardless of AI quality improvements. People imagine socialist scifi scenarios with crystal balls on green lawns telling them how to build spaceships. But reality will organically grow from where we are now:

Attention and profiling is money and power.

AI will steal attention by spamming identities, voting for/against products and opinions, discriminating in ways hard to reveal, at scale never seen before. It will read all your HN comments and clip a tag onto your ear. AI war will not be a T1000 walking on skulls, it will happen in our feeds, and platforms/governments will have no idea who’s artificial or russian this time.

Honestly it’s pretty concerning when I think about what can be done with the internet and societies by bad actors automating and weaponizing existing chatgpt and pic/video tech alone.

Which, if my experience with users is anything to go by, will be 99% of the users. Even worse is people asking it about subjects they have no domain expertise in and having to wonder (or worse just assume) its correct. At the very least, it should give some easily understood indication of 'confidence'.

edit: I get very strong flashbacks to when wikipedia was new and people had to learn the hardway it wasn't always correct/up-to-date/etc.

The thing is, it's always confident. It gave you the highest confidence answer, out of many high confidence answers. Low confidence would imply the model has not seen the particular words before. A Markov chain does not suffer from imposter syndrome.

Heh - I say the thing is to get the general public to realize that, and not assume "computers are always right" ? (eg, I don't think the problem is with chatGPT being 'wrong' - I think the problems start when people assume its right...)

Do you consider yourself in the 99% or you're as confident in yourself as ChatGPT to be in the 1% smartest people in the world?

Depends on the domain I'm asking it about? I have things I'm good at, and things I suck at.

> I understand it's 'just' a language model, but it doesn't matter - that's not how it's perceived

For me, this is what gets exhausting. It is an impressive language model, and it is going to change a lot of things, but it isn't the Apocalypse and it isn't the Messiah. On HN I expect a certain level of technical understanding that is weirdly absent on this topic.

An example: every time the question of accuracy comes up people seriously suggest that you just need to prompt it for its sources. Or we just need to improve the training data. There's no recognition that there are tasks that a language model is just fundamentally unsuitable for.

When all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails?

I'm genuinely impressed about ChatGPT, and have been thinking about many times in the past when having such a tool at hand would have been massively helpful. Natural Language Processing is a damn hard problem, and ChatGPT seems to be a huge advancement in that regard.

But I actually laugh at all the people that think that this will replace humans in any meaningful capacity. If your job is only giving known answers to known problems, then you have something to fear. Otherwise this will only be a powerful productivity tool.

A Language Model will replace software developers much like Excel replaced accountants.

I worked for a while in a fundamental neuroscience research environment. Basically there was one supplier of VERY expensive equipment in the field. But research groups that shelled out lots of money were now restricted to only research subjects the machine could do. This actually change the focus from fundamental exploration research to directed research. I think ChatGPT is the same. It will limit what most people believe AI is and what it is used for. (On a basic level isn't it just data mining on a grand scale?) The fundamental problem of "truth" is not considered important in the hype. If it can't deliver anything that you know absolutely to be "truth" without having to verify it then it is just a shiny new toy. I think the headlines and hype are generated to gloss over the shortcomings of this field in general. (is it a sign of the times whats that other media generated hype that makes money ----blockchain?)

This is actually an interesting reply, and something I did not consider.

To me, the most impressive part of ChatGPT was not that it could give mostly correct answers to known problems. In a sense, internet search could do it already (just in a much more cumbersome way), with similar degrees of correctness.

The most impressive part for me was actually how seamlessly it parses and produces fluent natural language. Text generated by it reads like something a human would type.

So far I didn't try to fool it by purposefully asking something ambiguous (something that is a characteristic of natural languages), or ask about something that has an ambiguous answer to see how it handles it, but so far I'm impressed.

But I never considered that people may restrict the research of AI to language models due to the rampant success of this avenue of research. I hope this is not the outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised (i.e. the success of ChatGPT works as a blackhole for investment in the area, with everyone racing to cash in on it).

"According to the Planet Money podcast, in the US alone, there are 400,000 fewer accounting clerks today than in 1980, the first full year that VisiCalc went on sale.

But Planet Money also found that there were 600,000 more jobs for regular accountants. After all, crunching numbers had become cheaper, more versatile, and more powerful, so demand went up.

The point is not really whether 600,000 is more than 400,000: sometimes automation creates jobs and sometimes it destroys them."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47802280

And I still need to hire and accountant to do my taxes every year.

Just throwing numbers on a spreadsheet didn't do the trick.

This is a manufactured problem by companies who create tax software who lobby the American government to increase the complexity of the tax code. I have never needed to hire an accountant to do my personal taxes in any country other then the USA.

> The point is not really whether 600,000 is more than 400,000

Sounds to me the existing jobs are more skilled than the former ‘accounting clerks’ which just sounds like data entry people.

Back in the day my mom used to do the books for the grocery store she worked for and all she really did was tally up all the data from the multiple cash registers and send it off to the corporate accountants. Not a whole lot of skill needed aside from attention to detail to ensure the totals were correct.

"An example: every time the question of accuracy comes up people seriously suggest that you just need to prompt it for its sources."

Can you point us (provide URLs) to where you saw people suggesting this.

This is not possible. Of course, someone could provide bogus sources and people might take them at face value.

> There's no recognition that there are tasks that a language model is just fundamentally unsuitable for.

I’m really not sure where you get that from. I think the best we can say is that they are currently unsuitable. Yes, today the applications are limited, but you can’t blame people for projecting this incredible progress into the future a bit and seeing glimpses of how much this could change work and productivity. Insider reports are surfacing that both Google and Microsoft will be adding LLM outputs to their search engine result pages. Seems like a big deal to me considering transformers are only about 4 years old.

> Insider reports are surfacing that both Google and Microsoft will be adding LLM outputs to their search engine result pages.

Of course they are—they'd be incredibly stupid not to ride the hype wave while it lasts. A business choosing to take advantage of current trends is not evidence that those trends are founded in anything substantial.

> * isn't the Apocalypse and it isn't the Messiah*

It is a wakeup call though. Considering how quickly this was developed, the likelihood of either of these manifesting within our lifetime became much more plausible.

> What you're seeing is just a manifestation of a rather major (sociological) event, and while I understand that the amount of hype is a bit over the top, to a large extent it makes sense.

This hyperbole is exactly why people like OP are getting sick of the headlines. It may be a major event sure, but only hindsight will be able to say that for certain. It may be another novel gimmick though, and this pronunciation will seem ridiculous in a year or two if that's the case. It's just too early to tell.

And it's the first iteration of an impactful model. Wait till the second and third generations come out. I've promised myself I have to keep on top of what it's doing.

I agree. I showed ChatGPT to my 70 year old mom who was a Biology professor at a university all her life.

We asked some questions about her field, and even asked it to draw a cell through SVG. My mon confirmed that all if its output was correct.

Mom was completely amazed at what was happening. She couldn't believe it was answering like that, and so fast. For people 60+ ChatGPT is StarTrek science fiction.

These are the guys that had to write dead tree letters to ask for a paper in the other side of the world. And shuffle through stacks of physical bibliographic cards. Also they spent hours looking through tomes of Encyclopedia Britannica in search of info.

Us younger folks have just been slowly boiled like the frog with all this new technology. But it is indeed amazing.