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Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by wkat4242 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @04:52PM (#41027996)
We need a lot more of this kind of in depth analysis. Right now the cheering on of AI is overwhelming. Criticism is often suppressed, both on the vendor side who just want to sell, and on the client side who have very strong FOMO.

I work for the client side and this bothers me a lot. It's very hard to get a true honest value analysis done with all the sales influence and office politics going on.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by chad1n on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:20PM (#41028235)
If you complain the the current generation of LLMs isn't as impressive as some people try to prove it is, the shills complain that you used the wrong prompts and maybe you should fine-tune the model. I don't think people should spend much time trying to write a prompt to find a working solution because they could just do that. In the author's case, if he used the summary provided by ChatGPT, I doubt that anyone would have realized it's wrong, but that doesn't mean it's good either.

The problem with LLMs is the lack of reliability and coherence. If it gives you a wrong answer and you ask it if it's sure, in most cases it will show another wrong answer and you need to go through multiple of these hops to get something fine.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by rplnt on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:42PM (#41028433)
This "sorry, I was wrong, here's another wrong answer" is basically my only experience with llm. But it also onpy works if I know the answer or the answer I get is really stupid. Luckily the latter is common.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by apwell23 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:40PM (#41028421)
> If you complain the the current generation of LLMs isn't as impressive as some people try to prove it is, the shills complain that you used the wrong prompts

I think the go to is everyone said the same thing about the internet. Look where we are now.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Sharlin on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:17PM (#41028746)
Only after the bursting of a very big hype bubble, remember?

AI is also different in the sense that it has already gone through several hype cycles, each followed by an "AI winter" of broken dreams. Clearly large DL models are a breakthrough, but the amount of hype and hot air is entirely out of proportion to the actual results.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by LudwigNagasena on Sunday July 21, 2024 @04:59PM (#41028065)
I would expect an in-depth analysis to at least include a comparison of various prompts.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Spivak on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:31PM (#41028335)
I have actually made (what I think to be) a working summarizer at $dayjob and it took a lot more hand-holding to get results than I initially expected. A straight summary wasn't very good, the "summary of summaries" approach as implemented by LangChain was garbage and didn't produce a summary at all, even a wrong one. The algorithm that actually worked:

1. Take the documents, chunk them up on paragraph then sentence then word boundaries using spaCy.

2. Generate embeddings for each chunk and cluster them using the silhouette score to estimate the number of clusters.

3. Take the top 3 documents closest to the centroid of each cluster, expand the context before and after so it's 9 chunks in 3 groups.

4. For each cluster ask the LLM to extract the key points as direct quotes from the document.

5. Take those quotes and match them up to the real document to make sure it didn't just make stuff up.

6. Then put all the quotes together and ask the LLM not to summarize, but to write the information presented in paragraph form.

7. Then because LLMs just can't seem to shut up about their answer make them return JSON {"summary": "", "commentary": ""} and discard the commentary.

The LLM performs much better (to human reviewers) at keyphrase extraction than TextRank so I think there's genuinely some value there and obviously nothing else can really compose english like these models but I think we perhaps expect too much out of the "raw" model.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by __loam on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:08PM (#41028659)
It's cool to hear about something substantial that isn't just an api call to the "God" machine. This sounds like a pretty sophisticated and well considered approach, but it does call in to question whether a system that needs to be used as a subsystem in a larger one to be reliable is worth the amount of money being invested in making them right now.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by whiplash451 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:06PM (#41028117)
Indeed. And more models as well.

That being said, these initial results are not reassuring.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by moffkalast on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:39PM (#41028403)
Part of the problem IMO might be that OP is relying on OAI and Google's systems to dump data from websites and pdfs into the context and hoping it's correct and formatted properly. It probably is, but the odd random skips could also be explained by copy paste fails. Would be a better comparison if it was just provided in plain text.

It's also all long context models getting pages of data, which even for these flagship ones is certainly just RoPE or similar which is a cheap hack but isn't super accurate [0]. 4o is best and still showing haystack benchmark accuracies below 80% and Gemini is just completely blind. That certainly needs fixing up to 100% before we can say for sure that nothing will ever get skipped.

[0] https://preview.redd.it/rlgauej7ve4d1.jpeg?width=1086&format...

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by badgersnake on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:10PM (#41028142)
I think most people have realised AI is wildly overhyped at this point.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Bumblonono on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:24PM (#41028262)
Its frustrating to read this over and over again.

AI is basically ml at this point. And it did already A LOT.

Whisper, great jump in quality for speech to text, segment anything, AlphaFold 2, all the research paper Nvidia publishes regarding character movement, AI Raytracing, Nerfs, all the medical research regarding radio imagin, advances in fusion reactors...

We have never been so close to a basic AI/AGI / modern robots. we have instructGPT which allows for understanding 'steps' easier and more stable than anything we developed before in multip languages.

ChatGPT and LLM advances are great and helpful.

Image generation is already poping up in normal life.

AI is not wildly overhyped at this point. We are in the middle of implementation after the first LLM breakthrough and a LOT more money is funnelt into AI/ML research now as it was 10 years ago.

The future is, at least for now, really interesting and there has not been any sign of a wall we are hitting.

Even the missing GPT-5 might feel like a slight wall, but we just got GPT4-o mini which makes all of the LLM greatness a LOT cheaper and a lot easier to use.

We switched from text parsing and avg bad results to just using llama3 (with a little bit of saveguarding) and its a lot better.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by 127 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:28PM (#41028309)
Nerfs aren't really ML at all. The algorithm was discovered with ML, but it works just fine without any ML.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Bumblonono on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:39PM (#41028401)
I thought there is a Nvidia implementation using ml.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by apwell23 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:41PM (#41028426)
> Image generation is already poping up in normal life.

Really? where ?

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Bumblonono on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:45PM (#41028451)
In my city on ads. On news article pages. On YouTube.

In my company we even have a LoRa for a specific company style of images (icons and similiar)

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by apwell23 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:12PM (#41028702)
> news article pages.

really curious about this. do you have an example link by anychance

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Bumblonono on Monday July 22, 2024 @08:26AM (#41033607)
https://www.golem.de/news/abwesenheitsassistent-der-schrecke...

Its a german news site for it people.

But i have seen ai image already on the street, unfortunate i was in public transport and not able to take a picture fast enough when i saw it and i currently work most of the time from home.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by ThatMedicIsASpy on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:14PM (#41028712)
Most IT news sites I use started to use AI over stock images.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by badgersnake on Monday July 22, 2024 @01:31AM (#41031174)
> Its frustrating to read this over and over again.

Your account is 3 days old, you haven’t read anything over and over again.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Bumblonono on Monday July 22, 2024 @08:21AM (#41033581)
I'm reading hn for over 10 years and i comment on it too much / spend to much time here.

I just create a new account to get away from fomo and add a little bit more effort to commenting.

But as you can see, it doesn't work very well

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by OrigamiPastrami on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:15PM (#41028191)
I'm not even sure most people on HN feel that way, although there's plenty of criticism here. Most of the time I use ChatGPT I become genuinely upset within a few minutes because it's so brazenly awful and regularly ignores what I ask it. I see people on here promoting its ability to help them with writing code. I wonder if these are people that just don't know what good code looks like.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by ta8645 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:26PM (#41028280)
I recognize the hype for what it is, but I find the people calling for "sanity" are overrepresented everywhere; and it seems to me they discount the actual utility of AI way too much. In other words, I think the AI-skepticism is overhyped, just as much as AI itself.

For my uses, I find AI to be a much better search/answer engine than Google ever was. It can produce answers with hyperlinks for further reading much better and more efficiently than any other option. I no longer have to read through a bunch of seemingly random Google search results, hoping that my specific question is addressed.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by lottin on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:07PM (#41028649)
I think it's a matter of personal preference. I much prefer going through a series of search results than reading anything a chatbot has to say about any topic.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by ben_w on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:46PM (#41028463)
Mm.

As it happens, I've just been using it this weekend to write code for me. Two things:

(1) it's not business critical code, it's a side project that I want to get done but otherwise wouldn't have energy for. Especially not in this heatwave in a century old building that has no air-con.

(2) my experiments are a weird mix of ChatGPT wildly messing things up and it managing to get basically everything done to an acceptable result (not quality of code, quality of output). Sometimes I have the same experience as you, that it's just aggravating in its non-comprehension, sometimes it's magical.

I don't know if it can be magical more often if I was "better at prompting". But I do know that I also get aggravated (less often) by other humans not understanding me, and those are much harder to roll back to a previous point in the conversation, edit the prompt, and have them try again :P

As for code quality… well, sure. Stuff I'm asking ChatGPT for is python and JavaScript, and I'm an iOS dev. I can't tell when it's doing something non-idiomatic, or using an obsolete library or archaic pattern in those languages.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by glenndebacker on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:33PM (#41028358)
It helps me to code (or helped me with mathematical concepts that I find difficult to implement or would take me a lot of time) but then again I use it for generating mainly graphics related code in Blender or as part of a grasshopper script so the code doesn't that much as the correct output.

That being said, I often come in a situation that its not the code that is bad but the solution. Where I need to tell the LLM that it's not logical to do it in a certain way leveraging on my own knowledge.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by Bumblonono on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:32PM (#41028341)
Plenty of people understand that LLM is not AI.

Nonethless, try looking more left and right. There are really good opensource solutions which can surfe the web for you like stormai, Or you can use anythingllm and give it all your local files.

You can write your tips and tricks, start commands, upgrade procedures etc. in Markdown and reference it through your local LLM.

I like it for coding specifically for languages or things i write seldomly (i'm not coding every day but did for 15 years).

Nonetheless, googles internal code review tool is already suggesting things which are getting accepted by more than 50%. Thats a lot and will only get better. GitHub with Copilot will also just get better every day too. They probably struggled (as the whole industry) with actually getting used to having ML stuff in our ecosystem. Its still relativly new.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by sen on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:18PM (#41028220)
“Most people” (and still talking tech crowd) are still figuring out what these very early version of AI can do, what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, etc.

Most non-tech people think AI is no different to “algorithms” and is just another IT buzzword that means “computer people click a few buttons and it does all the work for them”.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by parker-3461 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:08PM (#41028665)
I would only consider this as “in depth” if and only if the author provided clearer methodology on the exact model used for this write up.

It is still unclear to me whether this is a deficiency in all ChatGPT models or this is just one of the many.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by stareatgoats on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:07PM (#41028651)
> Right now the cheering on of AI is overwhelming

Perhaps everywhere else. On HN mostly what I see are these fairly shallow dismissals TBH. It is a natural reaction when your own livelihood is affected, old as tech itself to be sure [0]. Still, it's getting tiresome. A new technological revolution is unfolding, and the people best positioned to lead and keep it in check are largely balking.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by ninetyninenine on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:57PM (#41028544)
>Right now the cheering on of AI is overwhelming

It's both, the level of criticism is also overwhelming and delusional.

I hear things like, AI will never be as smart as me!, It will never take over my job, Look it got this and this wrong, No chance it can ever be as smart as me! It's always a comparison to their own abilities so I think a lot of it is just an attempt to stay relevant in a world where technology is about to replace all of us.

I think by now everyone knows the limitations of current LLMs. The result of this "in depth" analysis is not only expected but very obvious. Nobody is surprised and none of this is suppressed because it's so obvious.

What's delusional is the amount of criticism around the performance. The denial that AI is more and more matching human intelligence. Of course it's not there yet, but LLMs made a giant leap and bridged a huge gap.

AI is no match for humanity now, that much is obvious. I think the delusion lies in the fact that many people are trying to deny the trendline... the obvious future and trajectory of what progress has been pointing too. Milestones are getting surpassed at a frightening pace. AI is now running circles around the turing test and I can now ride a car with no driver and it's normal in SF.

We are here bitching about the fact that AI shortens a text rather then summarizing it without remarking at the fact that you can actually bitch to the AI directly about this fact and demand the AI to stop shortening the text and start summarizing it.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by __loam on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:17PM (#41028745)
The problem with this take is that you're conflating different software systems under the same vague AI umbrella. Waymo is a completely different technology than generative AI. Talking about how over a decade and billions of dollars in R&d in self driving is finally bearing fruit has nothing to do with the performance of LLMs.

It is true that LLMs appear to be an exciting technology, but it's also delusional to assume they're following a positive trendline. Performance between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was like a 25% improvement that took 2500% more resources to train. It's clear that there's diminishing returns to bigger and bigger models, and the trend we've been seeing in the industry is actually smaller models trained for longer periods in an effort to bring down inference costs while maintaining current performance.

More intelligent models may require new techniques and technologies that we don't have yet. I'm sure it will get better but the path to improving isn't as obvious as you're making it sound. Making comparisons to Moore's law is also disengenuous because we're actually running into physical limits on how dense we can make chips due to the size of atoms themselves, so past trends for technological development may not continue to bear out.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by ninetyninenine on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:38PM (#41028917)
Obviously the overall trend I'm referring to is AI from a more general perspective. Deep learning.

You are doing exactly as I said. Focusing on obvious criticisms on the current state of the art. We know the obvious pitfalls of LLMs. It's completely obvious nowadays.

I also never pointed to an obvious path forward. I pointed to the an obvious trend that indicates whether you like it or not, we will move forward.

>It is true that LLMs appear to be an exciting technology, but it's also delusional to assume they're following a positive trendline. Performance between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was like a 25% improvement that took 2500% more resources to train. It's clear that there's diminishing returns to bigger and bigger models, and the trend we've been seeing in the industry is actually smaller models trained for longer periods in an effort to bring down inference costs while maintaining current performance.

AI is following a trendline. I never said specifically LLMs are exactly on this trendline. LLMs are only a part of this trendline along with other technologies and part of the overall progress deep learning is making. It is extremely likely that there will be an AI that will solve all of current issues with LLMs in the coming decades. Whether that AI is some version of an LLM remains to be seen.

>Making comparisons to Moore's law is also disengenuous because we're actually running into physical limits on how dense we can make chips due to the size of atoms themselves, so past trends for technological development may not continue to bear out.

I never made a comparison to moores law... are you replying to me or someone else? AI with the performance of a human brain is highly realizable despite physical limits because intelligence to the level of the human brain already EXISTS. The existence of humans themselves is testament to the possibility it can be done and is not a fundamental limit.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by __loam on Monday July 22, 2024 @06:27AM (#41032797)
The brain is not a computer. Continued insistence that it is will result in heartbreak for the computer scientists involved.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by ninetyninenine on Monday July 22, 2024 @11:24AM (#41035511)
Fortunately nothing of the sort has happened. Not sure what you’re referring to here.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by apwell23 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:39PM (#41028410)
> Right now the cheering on of AI is overwhelming.

I think the tide is turning for sure. Metaverse scam unraveled pretty fast after building for months.

Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by recursive on Sunday July 21, 2024 @06:11PM (#41028697)
Remember NFTs?
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by apwell23 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @07:00PM (#41029107)
NFT probably was much tamer. There was no trillion dollar companies renaming themselves to metaverse, no gartner predictions of 30 trillion by 2030, ppl spending 1 hr everyday in the metaverse all with no actual definition or care for what metaverse actually was. NFT atleast had clear definition. WTF is metaverse. How the fuck did zuckerberg and nadella get away with metaverse farce. I feel so cynical about tech and world in general.
Re:When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind by 23B1 on Sunday July 21, 2024 @05:27PM (#41028299)
Tech is one of the best places to be a rampant liar because the money is self-reinforcing and everyone who might call you out... is also getting paid by the same lie or liars!