For writers maybe, but absolutely not for programmers, it's incredibly useful. I don't think anyone who's used GPT4 to improve their coding productivity would consider it a fad.
Copilot provides useful autocompletes maybe… 30% of the time? But it doesn’t waste too much as it’s more of a passive tool.
FWIW i don’t try to use it for this. mostly i use it to automate writing code for tasks that are well specified, often transformations from one format to another. so yes, with a solution in mind. it mostly just saves typing, which is a minority of the work, but it is a useful time saver
This is not a fad, this is the beginning of a world that we can just actually naturally interact to accomplish things we have to be educated on how to accomplish now.
Haha, I love that people can't see the writing on wall - I think this is a bigger invention than the smartphone that I'm typing this on now, fr - just wait and see ;)
Do you mean in the Browsing Mode or something? I don't think it is naturally capable of that, both because it is performing lossy compression, and because in many cases it simply won't know where the text that was fed to it during training came from.
Tell me briefly about the TCP/IP protocol and provide links to relevant sources
ChatGPT:
TCP/IP Protocol Overview Definition & Purpose: TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the foundational communication protocol suite for the internet and other networks. It dictates how data is transmitted over the network by breaking it into packets, addressing them, transmitting them, and ensuring they are received correctly.
Key Components:
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol): Ensures reliable delivery of data by establishing a connection and managing the transmission process, including packet sequencing and error handling. IP (Internet Protocol): Handles addressing and routing of packets, ensuring they reach the correct destination across diverse networks. Functionality:
Data Handling: Data is divided into packets, which are then sent and reassembled at the destination. Error Correction & Sequencing: TCP handles errors and maintains the correct sequence of data packets, ensuring integrity in communication. Importance: TCP/IP is critical for setting up the internet and intranet networks, allowing different types of computers to communicate effectively regardless of their architecture, operating system, or data structure.
Further Reading & Sources:
RFC Documents (Request for Comments):https://www.rfc-editor.org/
These are detailed documents that specify the protocols and policies of the internet, including TCP/IP standards. They are available through the IETF RFC Pages. Internet Society:https://www.internetsociety.org/
A global, nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution, and use of the internet. It offers various publications and resources on internet protocols at Internet Society. Educational Institutions:https://ocw.mit.edu/
Many universities and technical institutes provide comprehensive notes and lectures online. Resources like MIT's OpenCourseWare or Stanford's Engineering Everywhere often have relevant materials on networking and protocols. By exploring these resources, you can delve deeper into how TCP/IP works, its role in modern communications, and the technical details underlying internet networking."
I copied the urls of the links because I dont know how to hyperlink on HN and the Stanford Engineering Everywhere link was broken. This is from the standard GPT4 ChatGPT web client. No plugins or browsing features enabled.
The problem is that those links doesn't link to where it got that text, it links to whatever that text linked to. Saying it is giving links is like saying that when I copy paste an article with links I am providing links to the source. No I am not, I am plagiarizing including plagiarizing those links.
So, it has read some TCP tutorials and wrote that blurb based on those. Don't you think it is fair that it links one of those to give credit? LLMs aren't capable of writing tutorials based on specs, they write tutorials based on tutorials it has seen, it should link to those.
I'll be sure to tell everyone that uses the Internet
By far the wildest piece of this stuff is that it near completely obliterates any traces of where the outputs come from. The black box is trained, and yes sometimes some salient data pole rfc's are captures, but generally where each training comes from is not stored. That would largely defeat the purpose, would make the data it's crunching essentially incompressible, to store so much origin information.
Deeply unimpressed by this answer. This isn't linking it's sources, of where this response was trained upon. It probably got the write up & links from hundreds of other places.
To anthropomorphize it further, it's a plagiarizing bullshitter who apologizes quickly when any perceived error is called out (whether or not that particular bit of plagiarism or fabrication was correct), learning nothing, so its apology has no meaning, but it doesn't sound uppity about being a plagiarizing bullshitter.
Another way of looking at this is that bottom-feeder websites do work that could easily be done by an LLM. I've noticed a high correlation between "could be AI" and "is definitely a trashy click bait news source" (before LLMs were even a thing).
To be clear, if your writing could be replaced by an LLM today, you probably aren't a very good writer. And...I doubt this technology will stop improving, so I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that 2023 will be a high point for LLMs and they aren't much better in 2033 (or whatever replaces them).
Nonetheless, trained ears and subject matter experts can still pick their preference.
I agree with the key point that paid content should be licensed to be used for training, but the general argument being made has just spiralled into luddism at people who are fearful that these models could eventually take their jobs; and they will, as machines have replaced humans in so many other industries, we all reap the rewards, and industrialisation isn't to blame for the 1%, our shitty flag waving vote for your team politics are to blame.
Eh, I would trust my own testing before trusting a tool that claims to have somehow automated this process without having access to the weights. Really it’s about how unique your content is and how similar (semantically) an output from the model is when prompted with the content’s premise.
I believe you, in any case. Just wanted to point out that lots of these tools are suspect.
Labeling few samples, LoRA optimizing an LLM, generating labels on millions of samples and then training a standard classifier is an easy way to get a good classifier in matter of hours/days.
Basically any task where you can handle some inaccuracy, LLMs can be a great tool. So I don't think LLMs are a fad as such.
Overall, current LLMs remind me of those bottom-feeder websites that do no original research--those sites that just find an article they like, lazily rewrite it, introduce a few errors, then maybe paste some baloney "sources" (which always seems to disinclude the actual original source). That mode of operation tends to be technically legal, but it's parasitic and lazy and doesn't add much value to the world.
All that aside, I tend to agree with the hypothesis that LLMs are a fad that will mostly pass. For professionals, it is really hard to get past hallucinations and the lack of citations. Imagine being a perpetual fact-checker for a very unreliable author. And laymen will probably mostly use LLMs to generate low-effort content for SEO, which will inevitably degrade the quality of the same LLMs as they breed with their own offspring. "Regression to mediocrity," as Galton put it.