Re:Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already
by jiggawatts on Sunday May 21, 2023 @02:07AM
(#36018429)
> In my experience, people are far more capable and competent when they feel comfortable and are interested in the task.
That's definitely true, but in my experience people have limits: simple biological ones. Repetitive tasks make practically all humans bored, for example.
The fact that AIs never get sleepy, distracted, or bored already makes them super-human in at least that one aspect. That they have essentially perfect English comprehension, and hence aren't phased by the use of jargon or technical language, puts them head-and-shoulders above most humans.
The frustrations I'm venting aren't some rare thing. I'm working on a technical team where the project manager doesn't understand what the team members are saying. This is not just a matter of syntax, or jargon. They just don't understand the concepts. This is so common in the wider industry that I'm pleasantly surprised, shocked even, when I come across a PM that can ask useful questions instead of needing endless corrections along the lines of: "It's spelled SQL, not Sequel." I've never met a PM that could do simple arithmetic, like "10 TB at 100 MB/s will take over a day to copy, we should plan for that!". Never.
I've tested Chat GPT 4 on both language and concepts that I've seen trip up PMs, and it understood "well enough" every time.
For example, GPT 4: The sentence "We deployed sequel server successfully last night" seems incorrect due to the incorrect naming of a product. "Sequel server" should actually be "SQL Server", a popular relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. Therefore, the corrected sentence should be: "We deployed SQL Server successfully last night."
PS: If you tell GPT 4 to pretend it is a technical project manager and instruct it to ask followup questions, it is noticeably better at this than any PM I have worked with in the last few years.
That's definitely true, but in my experience people have limits: simple biological ones. Repetitive tasks make practically all humans bored, for example.
The fact that AIs never get sleepy, distracted, or bored already makes them super-human in at least that one aspect. That they have essentially perfect English comprehension, and hence aren't phased by the use of jargon or technical language, puts them head-and-shoulders above most humans.
The frustrations I'm venting aren't some rare thing. I'm working on a technical team where the project manager doesn't understand what the team members are saying. This is not just a matter of syntax, or jargon. They just don't understand the concepts. This is so common in the wider industry that I'm pleasantly surprised, shocked even, when I come across a PM that can ask useful questions instead of needing endless corrections along the lines of: "It's spelled SQL, not Sequel." I've never met a PM that could do simple arithmetic, like "10 TB at 100 MB/s will take over a day to copy, we should plan for that!". Never.
I've tested Chat GPT 4 on both language and concepts that I've seen trip up PMs, and it understood "well enough" every time.
For example, GPT 4: The sentence "We deployed sequel server successfully last night" seems incorrect due to the incorrect naming of a product. "Sequel server" should actually be "SQL Server", a popular relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. Therefore, the corrected sentence should be: "We deployed SQL Server successfully last night."
PS: If you tell GPT 4 to pretend it is a technical project manager and instruct it to ask followup questions, it is noticeably better at this than any PM I have worked with in the last few years.