I think in the beginning of the century some older people felt similar towards websites and such. “It doesn’t work the way I want”. Some technical/knowledgeable people understood the nuances. Same goes here
Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
321–330 of 426 posts
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#322Earlier 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…
The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. It doesn't really matter how the chatbot saves the money, they can just see the end results and use the money for bonuses instead.
>> The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem.
That's not going to serve the company when they deploy it to take orders at a drive-thru. McDonalds pushing the state of the art, now that's interesting!
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#323Having 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…
Someone described GPT-3 as a "very good search engine" and I'm pretty happy with that explanation (even if honestly going from the regressions to 'search engine' is a pretty tenuous thing).
At least then there's a more nice understanding that it's about matching stuff its already seen (for various definitions of seen) rather than making things up out of full cloth
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
I find it hilarious that the strongest response is about some ancient examples of centuries ago. If anything, this is a praise of the system we have today.
People don’t understand Capitalism and they seem to have joined the liberal progressive bandwagon. Progressives used to be extremely pro-Capatilist movement. Until lately, and some fringe socialist ideas of Bernie Sanders, it was universally accepted. Apparently after 2020, the entire progressive movement started stomping on billionaires and corporations.
There is a reason why most strong economies are capitalist. It’s the best tool we have.
Also, I tend to believe the opposite of what the HN hive mind thinks. Usually the opposite is true and even if it’s not, it breaks the bandwagoning. Thanks for the response!
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, for some reason most anti-capitalists cite the bad parts of Capitalism and broad brush the entire concept. If humans can get together and collectively improve the world while feeding their families from the profits, there is no wrong doing. No one hands over profits, it’s earned and it’s a reward from the society through the mechanism of free markets. It’s probably the only thing I’d prefer to do instead of working in Academia or some other incentive structure.
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#326Having 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…
Someone described GPT-3 as a "very good search engine" and I'm pretty happy with that explanation (even if honestly going from the regressions to 'search engine' is a pretty tenuous thing). At least then there's a more nice understanding that it's about matching stuff its already seen (for various definitions of seen) rather than making things up out of full cloth
More specifically it is a templates search engine where it can replace some parts, like the name of persons etc.
You know all those old "Hello { PERSON_1 }, have you heard about {PERSON_2} in {CITY_1}?", that is most how to think about it, it searches for a template and then applies it with the arguments it fetched from your string.
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
I am talking about just verifying your identity. You spend 5 minutes punching in your life story via a numeric keypad so that you can get transferred to a person, then you spend another 5 minutes phonetically spelling out your life story why?
It is even stupider in a chat bot, why are people not able to scroll up to see what you have already typed in?
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> From a computer vision perspective, I think most of that is fairly easy No, not at all. The hard part is to do computer vision to understand what you can do with objects, not just convert object representation of images into string texts. For example, can I move this object away to get an object under it? Can I place an object on this object without it toppling over? Is this object dirty and moving it will smear th…
I agree with all that (though I don't really necessarily associate any of that with computer vision, perhaps it's my physics bias). Having good state estimation, kinematic, and dynamics models of real world objects is something that is very mature in controlled environments, but not very mature in other environments.
I think you might over-estimate what the current computer vision models are capable of. They are very good at recognizing what class an object belongs to, but they aren't very good at extracting data about the object based on the image. Extracting data of objects from images is image recognition, and humans and most animals relies heavily on vision to get data about objects.
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#329I 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…
This is a great example of chatbots working as intended.
A human agent has no fucking idea where your package is either, and almost certainly there are processes in place to get it to its destination.
The only thing to do in such an instance is to bullshit the customer until the package eventually arrives and they leave you alone, and I can't think of a better way to achieve this at scale than with GPT-3.
Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 ma…
I find it hilarious that the strongest response is about some ancient examples of centuries ago. If anything, this is a praise of the system we have today. People don’t understand Capitalism and they seem to have joined the liberal progressive bandwagon. Progressives used to be extremely pro-Capatilist movement. Until lately, and some fringe socialist ideas of Bernie Sanders, it was universally accepted. Apparently a…
"Also, I tend to believe the opposite of what the HN hive mind thinks."
I recommend instead of treating it as a culture war you pick up: 'Economics: The User's Guide'.