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Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

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Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#81

Post by marcus_holmes »

neilv wrote: post #68
rglover wrote: post #28

I've been using it for long-term memory supplementation. Had a faint memory of driving around in a friend's truck back in high school and was trying to remember a Marilyn Manson song we always played. Asked it this the other day: > Are there any other marilyn manson songs with a crowd shouting? And it spit out: === Yes, Marilyn Manson has used the sound of a crowd shouting in several other songs besides "The Beautifu…

> I think this will seriously destroy Google and the concept of SEO. Presumably, SEO will evolve. An SEO goal might be to have influence over people, and one method is to game the information systems people use. Before, the specific methods involved gaming search engines. Right now, they'll be looking at gaming LLMs.

Presumably by writing content that is hyper-targeted at specific questions (e.g. "which is the best X for me to use?") that the LLM will then consume, hoping that it will be regurgitated as fact when the LLM answers that specific question. [I am not an expert on LLM training, so I might be wrong]

This will then mean writing a lot of such content, because hyper-targeted and presumably more repetition = more weighting.

Which is too boring a task for a human. So we'll have an LLM that churns out blog articles that are not designed for humans to read, but purely for other LLMs to read. They may even discover optimisations over "natural" language that improve readability for the target LLM. So we'd end up with half the web being full of incomprehensible junk designed to game search results for commercial gain. So no change then ;)

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#82

Post by gooob »

extr wrote: post #67
bilsbie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most call centers aren’t about answering questions though. It’s more about putting the ability to make changes to your system behind a phone wall and an employees judgement. AI can still do that role but it’s nowhere as easy as a question answering bot.

Bingo. The biggest problem with implementing LLMs-as-call-center-agents, at least in contexts like insurance, is fraud. Even GPT-4 is just too easy to fool currently. Call center conversations are often adversarial, where the caller wants the agent to create a change to the system that is somehow fraudulent or to their benefit, and it's the agent's job to hold the line. You don't want a situation where people are cal…

that wouldn't happen though because the program would see that the user didn't in fact change their policy.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#83

Post by extr »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #71
extr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimistically, it might be an improvement. Imagine a world where you can call in or chat. Hold time is zero in both cases. You never need to "transfer" to a new department, or supply the same information over and over. LLMs have access to all the case files and needed info on the backend instantaneously. Health insurance companies may still seek to deny claims, but the fog of bureaucracy is no longer so easy to hide…

Often, holding times are not only due to a shortage of call center employees available, but also to encourage the caller to give up. I doubt the hold time would be zero, unless the government legislates a maximum hold time. Even then, the AI could stall with endless patience and requesting clarifications and further information, and repeating details back to you to confirm, with minor errors requiring correction, whi…

Do you have direct experience with a call center where this was happening? This sounds like a ridiculous conspiracy theory. In every call center I've ever had experience in, median/mean hold time was a KPI that was relentlessly optimized for. Hourly demand was modeled and staffing levels were set such that hold times were kept to the minimum possible with the resources available. Calls-not-answered was an inverse metric. That's not to say the optimal hold time is always zero. It's also bad to have too many staff sitting idle "just in case" demand suddenly peaks. It's a tricky problem. But LLMs obviously obey the laws of compute scaling, not human scaling, so I would expect it to scale to demand very quickly.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#84

Post by d0mine »

rglover wrote: post #28

I've been using it for long-term memory supplementation. Had a faint memory of driving around in a friend's truck back in high school and was trying to remember a Marilyn Manson song we always played. Asked it this the other day: > Are there any other marilyn manson songs with a crowd shouting? And it spit out: === Yes, Marilyn Manson has used the sound of a crowd shouting in several other songs besides "The Beautifu…

How certain are you that these are real songs and not just hallucinations? How would you check it?

Web search shows its sources e.g., if it is link to the official YouTube channel, then there is some certainty that is not a fake.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#85

Post by Belituio »

1.: It's the first time I'm seeing a chatbot who could easily replace the human layer.

Chatgpt understands tons of languages.

So I highly prefer to write things up like "you can change a username by going to this ui and click this and than that".

Or anything in-between.

Even if chatgpt only takes care of translating and creating a proper support ticket.

2.: Text understanding. I have plenty of tasks were a human would need to do things for me like "pull out all features of this building and make a list out of it" before I can verify it.

3.: I can already see the use case of fine-tuning my own agent with my own data. Now it's actually worth it to write proper documentation or architecture decision records. Basically doing brain dump because after I can just ask it things like "why do we use angular?" "Because you tried out react and didn't like it"

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#86

Post by extr »

gooob wrote: post #82
extr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. The biggest problem with implementing LLMs-as-call-center-agents, at least in contexts like insurance, is fraud. Even GPT-4 is just too easy to fool currently. Call center conversations are often adversarial, where the caller wants the agent to create a change to the system that is somehow fraudulent or to their benefit, and it's the agent's job to hold the line. You don't want a situation where people are cal…

that wouldn't happen though because the program would see that the user didn't in fact change their policy.

Didn't they? Or was it a system error? Perhaps the LLM has no record of it because the user's sister's boyfriend called in with a different phone number and misstated the policy number. But the change was definitely supposed to go through. In fact it's an absurd failure on the insurance company's fault for not processing that change correctly. Let me speak to the manager! I'm calling the Department of Insurance and reporting you!

A million variations of this play out every day in call centers. Even with fastidious notes and records, people are able to abuse process and benefit-of-the-doubt to create situations where they benefit. LLMs will definitely catch many situations humans will miss. But currently they are quite gullible and people-pleasing, which is great for their role of "AI Assistant" but less good for the role of "engaged in a never-ending escalating adversarial game with highly motivated fraudsters".

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#87

Post by galleywest200 »

d0mine wrote: post #84
rglover wrote: post #28

I've been using it for long-term memory supplementation. Had a faint memory of driving around in a friend's truck back in high school and was trying to remember a Marilyn Manson song we always played. Asked it this the other day: > Are there any other marilyn manson songs with a crowd shouting? And it spit out: === Yes, Marilyn Manson has used the sound of a crowd shouting in several other songs besides "The Beautifu…

How certain are you that these are real songs and not just hallucinations? How would you check it? Web search shows its sources e.g., if it is link to the official YouTube channel, then there is some certainty that is not a fake.

You check the output by listening to the songs.

A web search to find songs of an artist with shouting would take listening to a bunch of tracks you "thought" were it. Now at least you have three to look at first.

I did the same thing last night with "Sega dreamcast games with giant robots". It spit out names and I searched them on wikipedia until I found the exact one I remembered. (Slave Zero was the game for the curious)

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#88

Post by xboxnolifes »

d0mine wrote: post #84
rglover wrote: post #28

I've been using it for long-term memory supplementation. Had a faint memory of driving around in a friend's truck back in high school and was trying to remember a Marilyn Manson song we always played. Asked it this the other day: > Are there any other marilyn manson songs with a crowd shouting? And it spit out: === Yes, Marilyn Manson has used the sound of a crowd shouting in several other songs besides "The Beautifu…

How certain are you that these are real songs and not just hallucinations? How would you check it? Web search shows its sources e.g., if it is link to the official YouTube channel, then there is some certainty that is not a fake.

Is this a trick question, or something? You look up the song name on YouTube/apple music/Spotify/a song index to listen and see if they ended up being the song you thought about.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#89

Post by syntaxing »

Filligree wrote: post #22

Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet , but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's…

Do you have an example of this!?!! There's so many untranslated light novels I want to read but the ML translation has been historically terrible where it's not readable. Being able to translate light novels without a translator/scanlator would be huge.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#90

Post by numeri »

yosito wrote: post #24
Filligree wrote: post #22

Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet , but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's…

> GPT-4 is competent at translation That really depends on the language. It's still kinda awkward at Hungarian. Personally, I think DeepL is still way better at translation.

In what ways would you say its awkward? I'm really curious about its performance in languages that might not have shown up in its training data much. I will say, I've tried using it with a dialect, and it's good when it chooses to use the dialect, but slips into formal/prestige language extremely often.
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