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.