Yeah but what could possibly be the scam? OpenAI's product works (most of the time).

The Mechanical Turk really played chess.

Are you suggesting that ChatGPT is secretly backed by humans? That’s impossible, it is faster than the fastest humans in many areas.

They're joking.

They invented a relativistic device that slows time inside a chamber. A human can spend a whole day answering a prompt at their leisure.

that wouldn't be scam that would be a invention worthy of a Nobel Prize and be world altering beyond the impact of AI. I mean controling the flow of time without creating a supermassive blackhole would allow sort of fun exploits in computation alone not to mention other practical uses like instantly aging cheese or wine

A more plausible theory is that the training actually relies on a ton of human labeling behind the scenes (I have no idea if this is true or not).

> A more plausible theory is that the training actually relies on a ton of human labeling behind the scenes (I have no idea if this is true or not).

Isn't this already generally known to be true (and ironically involving Mechanical Turk-like services)?

Not sure if these are all the same sources I read a while ago, but E.G.:

https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/human-lab...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/20/1050392/ai-indus...

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnaqz/ai-isnt-artificial-or...

https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artifici...

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186243643/the-human-labor-po...

Altman didn't actually do his job, he just let ChatGPT run the company.

I think an internal scam of OpenAI is more likely than OpenAI being a scam, if “scam” is even the right framing.

I don't think so. LLMs are absolutely not a scam. There are LLMs out there that I can and do run on my laptop that are nearly as good as GPT4. Replacing GPT4 with another LLM is not the hardest thing in the world. I predict that, besides Microsoft, this won't be felt in the broader tech sector.

They really aren't nearly as good as GPT4, though. The best hobbyist stuff that we have right now is 70b LLaMA finetunes, which you can run on a high-end MacBook, but I would say it's only marginally better than GPT-3.5. As soon as it gets a hard task that requires reasoning, things break down. GPT-4 is leaps ahead of any of that stuff.

No, not by themselves, they're not as good as GPT-4. (I disagree that they're only "marginally" better than GPT-3.5, but that's just a minor quibble) If you use RAG and other techniques, you can get very close to GPT-4-level performance with other open models. Again, I'm not claiming open models are better than GPT-4, just that you can come close.

it’s not really possible for it to be a scam. if you want to see its product you can go and try it yourself