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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

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Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#301

Post by mxkopy »

systemvoltage wrote: post #261
simplestats wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant think of the last time I saw the word "corporations" used in a post that wasn't part of an attack on them as inferior/evil/villanous etc. Speaking of NLP, your post would be very easy to classify sentiment of using a simple keyword approach. Anyway, I've worked both in academia and industry. Industry is simply more practical and better at technology. In tech areas, academia desperately needs industry to provid…

Hot take: Corporations are also amazing. James Webb mirrors? Made by a private big corp (Ball Aerospace). So are all instruments of James Webb. NASA contracts out their work to many big fat corporations. Semiconductors to hearing aids, Corporations make the world tick. They’re absolutely incredible. When people get together, they can build stuff like rockets and vaccines. Capitalism makes all of this happen. So the a…

You are conflating the organization of human activity with the most dominant form of organization today. Capitalism made all of these things happen today. 50,000 years ago, were equivalent behaviors organized in a similar way? I don't think so. And to think that the space of human behavior is significantly different than it was 50,000 years ago is misguided, in my opinion.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#302

Post by robbrown451 »

Google Assistant is pretty impressive, and getting more so every day.

Wanna see what it can do? Give your phone to a 7 year old. My kid has conversations with the "Google Lady" fairly often, and they go on for considerable length. I'm regularly amazed at her ability to come up with something reasonable. Even if it is just to keep a kid amused.

Also, when I get frustrated with her and say something mean to her (the Google Lady, not my kid), she'll tend to respond in a way that makes me feel genuinely bad. That's impressive.

(I know Google is not loved at HN, but still.... )

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#303

Post by robocat »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #166
300bps wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. I've had numerous people look at the actions of software I wrote over the last 30 years make comments like, "Ohhhhhh it probably did that because it knew x". The software had no such functionality. Seems to be a natural thing for people to be overly optimistic about software's capabilities.

People always over-estimate the complexity of stuff they don't understand. If I had a nickle for every time an internet commenter attributed intentional design to a feature that's simply the designer copying established default practice...

> People always over-estimate the complexity of stuff they don't understand.

Really? I see people hugely under-estimate how complex things are. Cellphones. Water reticulation systems. Networks. Software. Etcetera. Anything where they don’t know much about the problem, and they come up with a trite solution (as though they have some sort of amazing level of insight, and everybody else in the world must be just plain stupid).

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#304

Post by [deleted] »

TrackerFF wrote: post #298

I loathe the fact that chatbots have not only replaced a lot of human customer support, but that companies have made it almost IMPOSSIBLE to reach critical (human) customer support. It's a fucking travesty, and something companies should be shamed for. For example - I'm currently having issues with an international shipment. It is unclear if the shipment ever left the country, if it's in limbo - hiding in some wareho…

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#305

Post by canjobear »

punkspider wrote: post #300
tibbar wrote: post #128

It’s reasonable to try GPT3 out with all default settings as the author seems to do and provide an assessment, but it’s not clear the author is aware of the extent to which you can configure the model and how the quality and variety of results will vary as a result. For instance, the author doesn’t go into detail on the prompts he’s using (maybe there are none other than his questions.) This is a little misleading be…

I agree. Here's what GPT3 had to say when I set temperature to 0. Q: Is it safe to walk downstairs backwards if I close my eyes? A: No. With temperature 0.7: A: Yes, because there is a banister. This one surprised me. Given that temperature was 0, I usually expect a solid response: Q: Why is there a correlation between the number of times Trump tweets the word great and the high temperature in Pyongyang three days la…

The last response sounds like a reasonable attempt at a joke to me.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#306

Post by Isinlor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #164

after having played AI dungeon for a while these issues become obvious very quickly. These large models are good at producing text in some probabilistic manner but they don't understand anything at all. Other than for obvious commercial and hype reasons I have no idea why there is still so relatively little recognition of criticisms that Gary Marcus and others provide because it's blatantly obvious if you interact wi…

Sam Altman, Jul 19, 2020:

> The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It’s impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#307

Post by dorkwood »

avereveard wrote: post #132
pwinnski wrote: post #13

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output. We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction…

> We want it to be true Founders and salesman pretend it to be true for that sweet sweet VC money, while underneath devs try to fake it as plausibly as possible. And I'll up it with a prediction: watch closely call centers, and as soon as you see them closing in droves, invest in ai startups as something begun to really move.

How would you notice an increase in call centers closing? Is there a place to view that data?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#308

Post by nmstoker »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #208
klabb3 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who questions or points out that the technology doesn't do what the business people think it does[...] Uh oh, we've got a downer! Jokes aside, I'd like to consider an even simpler explanation, namely that "The purpose of a system is what it does"[1]. In this case, it would suggest decision makers are fully aware that they suck. Why would anyone want something that sucks? Because it's discouraging, and custom…

I have to agree with this. I do not understand why I type all of my relevant information into a chatbot, and then a real person comes on the other end, and asks me all the same questions. Worse is when it is on the phone. I can only assume the intent is to discourage me, as that amount of ineptness is even more depressing to assume.

To be fair, people disregard the prior experience with other people too, so they're not necessarily treating bots that differently here. I had this in the supermarket the other day: went through an issue with the first person, they explained it to the more senior person who I heard listening, she then ignored what was said and repeated the exact same steps (whilst I was trying to talk her out of it because I could see it was a waste of even more time!)

What I find odd about the online time wasting approach is that I just get the money back from the bank eventually, so they lose in the short-term (as the bank is sure to pass this cost back to the company) plus next time/long term I take my business elsewhere because I then know they aren't an honest participant.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#309

Post by josefrichter »

First of all, chatbots or a UX nightmare, but everybody ignores that, for some reason. Their dumbness is part of the problem, but not the biggest one. Typing full words or even sentences instead of just clicking a few buttons is just stupid. Even more so on mobile devices, where typing is a total pain and ought to be avoided at all costs.

Voice input is awkward and dumbness is even more exposed. Also when dealing with chatbot you might have kinda specific issues and terminology that voice recognition doesn't capture very well.

On top of that, chatbots usually end up being just glorified fulltext search, but often cramped into tiny window somewhere in the corner.

There's a lot that needs to change to make chatbots usable at least in some use cases.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#310

Post by ClumsyPilot »

systemvoltage wrote: post #261
simplestats wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant think of the last time I saw the word "corporations" used in a post that wasn't part of an attack on them as inferior/evil/villanous etc. Speaking of NLP, your post would be very easy to classify sentiment of using a simple keyword approach. Anyway, I've worked both in academia and industry. Industry is simply more practical and better at technology. In tech areas, academia desperately needs industry to provid…

Hot take: Corporations are also amazing. James Webb mirrors? Made by a private big corp (Ball Aerospace). So are all instruments of James Webb. NASA contracts out their work to many big fat corporations. Semiconductors to hearing aids, Corporations make the world tick. They’re absolutely incredible. When people get together, they can build stuff like rockets and vaccines. Capitalism makes all of this happen. So the a…

"So the attack on capitalism is so deeply deluded"

Under Colonial powers corporations engaged in slave trade, folks that fought against slavery were fighting against capitalism, totally deluded right?

Ancient Japan had corporations in year 578 A.D., where they capitalist? Fascism and Nazis had corporations, and they made great scientific progress, were they capitalist?

If the answer to any of the above is no, then maybe you don't get to use 'mah Capitalism!' when defending policies of today, unless you want to be accused of hypocrisy.

Economists do not use meaningless terms like 'capitalism', they talk specific, Neoliberal, Shumpeterian, etc.

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