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Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#221

Post by latexr »

aprdm wrote: post #212
latexr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> English isn't her first language too and sometimes she can ask what a term means in English. That’s a good example of a subpar use for an LLM. Dictionaries have existed since before computers. Digital dictionaries are faster, more reliable, and less power consuming than any LLM.

Not really.. I think you don't know what you're talking about :) It's a chat, she is talking about a subject, and then she can expand on a word, all very naturally, as she is talking with a human. That's very different than having some subject you're reading about and then having to carry a dictionary which has no context about the subject, and doesn't talk back to you

You don’t have to “carry a dictionary”. Digital versions exist and can give you definitions right in whichever app you are, with usage examples. Grammar and spell checkers do it with context. This is not new technology. And you’re conveniently ignoring the points of speed, energy usage, and required internet access.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#222

Post by aprdm »

latexr wrote: post #221
aprdm wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really.. I think you don't know what you're talking about :) It's a chat, she is talking about a subject, and then she can expand on a word, all very naturally, as she is talking with a human. That's very different than having some subject you're reading about and then having to carry a dictionary which has no context about the subject, and doesn't talk back to you

You don’t have to “carry a dictionary”. Digital versions exist and can give you definitions right in whichever app you are, with usage examples. Grammar and spell checkers do it with context. This is not new technology. And you’re conveniently ignoring the points of speed, energy usage, and required internet access.

I don't know how to tell how off the mark you're. Perhaps try studying a subject on a language you aren't fluent in and compare the experience using chatgtp vs traditional methods ? I don't know what else to tell you, it has been life changing to my wife on a way that dictionaries haven't been

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#223

Post by sangnoir »

aprdm wrote: post #67
bmitc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point, it provided some solution, and then you were able to continue to expand upon that solution. I keep reading responses like yours, but I haven't seen any specific examples of problems being solved, so it all sounds very abstract. In my interactions with ChatGPT, it felt like just interact…

I think this speaks to the bubble you're in and how your kind of software development probably represents 0.1% of what's out there. I don't even know what WebGPU, Warren Abstract machine or "whatever is that you're trying to do" is. I've been doing dev for ~20 years now, most of the work out there is essentially plumbing events/databases/REST APIs/regexes/JSON/configs/ web UIs in existing and well established framewo…

> I think this speaks to the bubble you're in and how your kind of software development probably represents 0.1% of what's out there.

Grandparent specifically said they find ChatGPT useful for things outside their wheelhouse:

>> [...]troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in

It sounds to me like it may not be safe to use ChatGPT if you can't check its work.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#224

Post by tdeck »

lucideer wrote: post #213
bmitc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point, it provided some solution, and then you were able to continue to expand upon that solution. I keep reading responses like yours, but I haven't seen any specific examples of problems being solved, so it all sounds very abstract. In my interactions with ChatGPT, it felt like just interact…

> Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point... I think it's worth stepping back here and re-examining the hurdles your setting for your own understanding. The essential question here is: is ChatGPT useful to people. What you seem to be implying with your question is: I will not use ChatGPT unless it can solve problems with X lev…

I'm not the OP but I had a similar set of experiences with ChatGPT so I find the discussion useful. Essentially I already know how to find what I need using a search engine, and I know how to use cues from the source material to judge if it's correct. When I try using ChatGPT for technical problems I face, I frequently get hallucinated answers that feel like a waste of time.

Then I go on HN and read these paeans from other technologists who say ChatGPT has completely changed how they work and is 10x better than using Google. I'd like to have that too! I just don't get it, it doesn't match my experience at all. And yes I did try the paid ChatGPT model for a month.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#225

Post by sangnoir »

aprdm wrote: post #214
smrq wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've matured in my career I've gone to SO less and less, to the point where I mostly avoid it now. I use tools, languages, and libraries with which I am now highly familiar--perhaps more so than the average SO answerer, although I guess it would be arrogant to say for sure--and so the bulk of my questions are edge cases in my knowledge which are more easily answered by reading source code or specs. I suspect this…

Probably because you're deep specialized in something or have stagnated on a company for a long time ? I cannot imagine knowing everything about what I am working on, that has changed dramatically every 3-4 months even within the same company

When you've been working for a while - not necessarily even for the same company- you gather an internal library of knowledge that you can pattern match against for solutions. You may not have seen the exact same thing, but you may have seen something like it. There are hardly ever an entirely novel class of bugs anymore

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#226

Post by aprdm »

sangnoir wrote: post #225
aprdm wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because you're deep specialized in something or have stagnated on a company for a long time ? I cannot imagine knowing everything about what I am working on, that has changed dramatically every 3-4 months even within the same company

When you've been working for a while - not necessarily even for the same company- you gather an internal library of knowledge that you can pattern match against for solutions. You may not have seen the exact same thing, but you may have seen something like it. There are hardly ever an entirely novel class of bugs anymore

Yeah definitely. But the tooling is very diverse in big companies. They might use every database under the sun, one day you might be doing React another one AngularJS, one day Django another day FastAPI, one day k8s, other day terraform.. at least my brain is very limited and it can be helpful

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#227

Post by UncleMeat »

aprdm wrote: post #65
dkrich wrote: post #51

Yes. Ben Thompson has recently written a lot of commentary about it and, to be fair, he seems quite bullish on it. But so far to me this seems to be almost universally loved by programmers while I don’t really know anyone else who uses it at all. I think after the past 15 years which saw some of the most rapid technological advances in history along with the greatest bull market in history, people’s credulity is off…

Hm, my wife uses it daily for her classes which aren't tech related. She describes it as a very patient professor who meets her where she is at and doesn't judge. English isn't her first language too and sometimes she can ask what a term means in English.

My wife's students just seem to use it to cheat to turn in nonsense papers.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#228

Post by hnaccountme »

I dont think you are missing much. Most people are only Almost Intelligent and looking to make a quick buck.

LLMs are just better content search/generation. But the generation part messes it up since these models have no concept of right and wrong the output is fictional. This is ok if that's your goal, but if you are looking for accurate information then obviously this becomes a problem.

Most of these new "technologies" (AI/Block chain ... the hyped up stuff) only exist because of cheap computing power and cheap capital. None of these technologies have created any real tangible value, its always some version of "its early days" argument.

None of these things will last long by themselves when the economic conditions change.

On another note, I feel AI/Block chain are just tracking people. They are both good surveillance tools.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#230

Post by mindwok »

I think many people are really underestimating the "intelligence" of an LLM. People have this misconception that LLMs are just complicated Markoc chains, predicting text based purely on probability. They are not. As it turns out, to accurately predict text, you need to learn a lot about the world. In fact, there's lots of fascinating things hidden in the weights of LLMs, like a geographic model of the world. [1]

To me, this is the most important part of ChatGPT. GPT-4 has some massive shortcomings, but to me it's clear that this road we have started to head down is producing actual intelligence, in the real sense. 5 years ago, AGI felt completely intractable to me. Now, it feels like an implementation detail.

[1] https://twitter.com/tegmark/status/1709572469978231063

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