It’s the same with every paradigm shift.

“GUIs are pretty but slow. Ok, they’re faster but just glued on to CLI programs. Ok, they’re native but less information dense. Ok, that’s a good thing, but…”

“The internet is nice but you still have to go to the store/bank. Ok, you can shop/bank online but you still have to call airlines. Ok you can buy airline tickets but you still have to go to the library to research. Ok, you can research but you still have to drive in to work. Ok…”

Maybe it’s a half empty / half full thing, but there is some portion of the populace that can’t acknowledge the promise of anything until it is perfect and comprehensive.

And, yes, there’s another portion that can’t acknowledge gaps or flaws of the promise is sufficiently huge. But it’s the former that grinds my gears.

Your overall point is reasonable, but to take your point about GUIs...we actually lost an awful lot moving from text based interfaces going to GUI. We got universal adoption and more or less zero training required...but we got very slow and inflexible interfaces.

Command line didn't vanish ... You can still use it. Approximately 90% of my work is done via TUI, so it's certainly not gone.

I'm talking about people behind counters, people in stock rooms, people in all kinds of data entry and so on. The terminal did vanish from many places. We're not the market.

I worked at a paint store in my teens (2010s) that operated a beautiful text only PoS system that had been built decades ago and it was incredible. So efficient, purpose built, nary a click.

Yeah and owner would have to have SWE on payroll to continue having it working. It's why people migrated to a more general, albeit sometimes also more confusing apps/platforms.

It was a chain (Sherwin Williams), so I assume they could afford an in house dev team.

I use tons of GUI apps with mostly a keyboard (or sometimes only a keyboard). For example, my Git client of choice is Tower, and I’m able to get all my work done without taking my hands off the keyboard. It took me a bit of time to get used to the shortcuts, but now I’m able to work off my muscle memory.

Well written GUI apps will always have good support for keyboard-only use. This is doubly true for apps that care deeply about accessibility, since some people have disabilities that make it hard for them to use a mouse or trackpad.

On the other hand, TUIs will never support non-Latin scripts properly, or have good support for screen readers, or be easily discoverable without a manual, or have uniform automation support using native automation APIs. In my view, CLIs are strictly inferior to GUIs unless you’re putting together data pipelines.

I'm speaking more generally but

> Maybe it’s a half empty / half full thing, but there is some portion of the populace that can’t acknowledge the promise of anything until it is perfect and comprehensive.

Probably because paradigm shifts or new ways of doing things come with a lot of trade-offs that can be seen only after the change has been absorbed more. Early adopters are usually blind to these issues (or decide to be blind at them), conservatives don't look at the improvements but think that there might be something not that good in the future by projecting past experiences.

I would assert that the "here are the current flaws" side is still necessary in the overall conversation, since they provide the necessary feedback that allows technology to improve. Similar to political debates influencing the Overton window of a population, I see the "future promise" vs "current flaws" as a human algorithm realizing itself. The debate never ends, but the "mean" value keeps moving as technology progresses. As a "future promise" person myself I used to be annoyed by the "current flaws" side as well until I started seeing things through this lens.

I'm mostly curious how far the hockey stick will go up. Eventually most things level off.

this

Considering this hockey stick is in the field that is in the business of making hockey sticks it could go pretty far. A hockey stick maximizer if you will.

This is the big question isn't it. With self driving cars we have been on the final 20% for what seems like forever.

Big difference here is that it becomes more useful as it gets better. Self driving cars aren't useful until they reach a certain threshold.

I think there is a feedback loop with self-driving cars.

More self-driving cars on the road -> more driving data for that company -> better self driving cars

We are seeing continuous improvements in image and video generation / understanding every year. It was just probably too naive to think that self driving can work well without getting to human level video understanding (which is still not AGI).

But when we have that, it’s hard to believe that self driving won’t work.

To me the key issue are these 'hallucinations'--mistakes that seem plausible but are completely made up, like API endpoints that would be super useful except for the small problem that they don't exist. GPT4 is better than GPT3 on these but it still produces a lot of them.

The question is whether these are somehow inherent to the LLM approach or whether scaling up and continued improvements can eventually get rid of them.

They are the main barrier at this point between a very useful tool, but one that still needs to have all its output carefully checked by humans when it comes to anything important, and a true autonomous agent that can be given full tasks to do on its own.

It seems pretty clear to me that you could do some more RL to enforce truth-telling/admitting when it does not know - it would just be much more labor intensive compared to the RLHF they have already done because fact checking is difficult.

I'd imagine they've already been doing lots of RL in this direction, which explains the improvements in GPT4, but it's still an issue. Maybe they can eventually eliminate hallucinations completely, but I could also imagine that it will end up being difficult to do that without lessening its creativity across the board. Perhaps making things up is fundamental to how LLMs work and trying to stop it from doing that will kill the magic. I'm not an AI researcher so I really have no idea--just speculating.

I'm not at all trying to downplay the power or significance of LLMs, btw, in case that's why I'm getting downvoted... I'm using copilot/GPT4 every day and they are massive productivity boosters. But currently I see them as tools for producing rough drafts that need to be revised and checked over. If they can't solve hallucinations, LLMs will stay in this lane, which is still incredible, amazing, and useful, but won't necessarily get us to the AI endgame that the hype is predicting.