Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#51

Post by insanitybit » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:46 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #43

I can't imagine using ChatGPT for anything, personally. As a society we have grown physically obese on high calorie, sugar-packed foods combined with a sedentary lifestyle. Seems like we're about to become mentally obese when we no longer have to use our minds read or write and can just be spoon-fed AI generated words, music, and video. We will become a society of fat, drooling simpletons sitting in recliners consumi…

Some counterpoints.

1. People have been saying "this tech will make people stupid" for ages. And it's kind of true, but it's not clear that it's bad. Yes, when technology can do things we stop learning to do those things because it stops mattering. If it does still matter we would still learn.

2. I've had good conversations with ChatGPT. I didn't ask it to solve a problem, I asked it to describe algorithms, give me information about them, etc. It was a great tool. Instead of having to find a peer, catch them up, do the polite dance, schedule a call, etc, I can just say "Hey tell me about consensus algorithms. OK, tell me about some of the tradeoffs. Given this change in a data model, what changes in those tradeoffs?"

Anyway, I think this doomer view is pretty unfounded.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#52

Post by partiallypro » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

sslayer wrote: post #7

I predict ChatGPT is the next Self driving Tesla tech.

Self-driving tech is heavily regulated and requires physical testing (sans Nvidia's new interesting approach of actually created a VR world to teach the AI), it's not remotely comparable. GPT is just another tool on the toolbelt, people that use it in a reliant way will get torched. It's no different than a regular search engine, it just compiles data instead of sitting in an index. Combined with a search engine, and knowledge, it's fine.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#53

Post by insanitybit » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:49 AM UTC

kenhwang wrote: post #28

buzzdenver wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT Caused 'Code Red' at Google: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/chatgpt-caus...

ChatGPT is one of those few technologies that: 1. Competes against and destroys Google's primary profit center (search). 2. Google cannot copy, improve, and give away for free to use as a moat without severe collateral damage to itself. There's very little incentive to use a search engine to find an ad ridden website to answer a question when one can ask ChatGPT directly for a much better response. Google is rightful…

I wanted to find out which show I was thinking of the other day. I knew there was a scene where the song "The Middle" by Jimmy Eats World. I Google'd for a bit - useless. I gave up quickly when I realized I could just ask ChatGPT. It gave me a list of movies and TV shows, no fuss, no ads, no bullshit.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#54

Post by andrecarini » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:55 AM UTC

I don't quite get the appeal of replacing a search engine with ChatGPT. It's certainly useful for many use cases [1], but when you're searching for information you likely want some trust signals attached to that information.

When you land on a website that aggregates information (Reddit, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, et cetera) you have many signals on display that helps you evaluate the quality and trustworthiness: upvotes, comments, user history, edit history, community meta data, and the list goes on. When you ask a question to ChatGPT, you have no idea if it's complete fiction or not, and if you want to check you'll have to end up searching around anyways.

Maybe ChatGPT could eventually stop generating false answers and have metadata attached to the answers it gives, but I wouldn't bet on it unless it grows into much more than just a language model.

[1]: Assistive technologies, introducing the web to elderly/children, generating fiction, creative copy, ...

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#55

Post by visarga » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:57 AM UTC

fullsend wrote: post #26

decremental wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet not just from a technical standpoint. I'm sure many people started playing with ChatGPT and were like maybe Google isn't so amazing and high tech after all. They look like ancient tech compared to ChatGPT. It's a brand image problem now too. Google: dinosaur tech that exists only to gather information about you and serve you ads.

The brand in general is incredibly weak now. When I use Google it feels cluttered with ads and useless results. Using GPT was such a relief. I use it 75% versus Google 25% for data science hobby projects.

Google, the new AltaVista

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#56

Post by wombat_trouble » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:57 AM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #29

warning26 wrote: post #5

It’s really impressive watching OpenAI go from “no one can use this model because it’s too dangerous” to “everyone can use the model online but you can’t have the model because we’re selling it to Microsoft for billions of dollars.”

What is their sincere interpretation of "Open" in "OpenAI"? Their models are not distributed publicly, correct? Do they describe the network characteristics and training data openly? Where's the "open" part? EDIT: I just read their charter and it describes "benefit of humanity" (laudable if feasible for them to deliver on it) but nothing about openness.

There is this rather cute "intent laundering" ecosystem surrounding this work. Starting with Common Crawl, which uses the "we're not collecting anything, we're just a list of URLs" excuse to reject removal requests. And then feeding into nonprofits that effectively develop the technology for buyers such as Microsoft while being able to escape scrutiny because they're just small, charitable academic research shops...

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#57

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 4:59 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #43

I can't imagine using ChatGPT for anything, personally. As a society we have grown physically obese on high calorie, sugar-packed foods combined with a sedentary lifestyle. Seems like we're about to become mentally obese when we no longer have to use our minds read or write and can just be spoon-fed AI generated words, music, and video. We will become a society of fat, drooling simpletons sitting in recliners consumi…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#58

Post by vore » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 5:00 AM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #23

sillysaurusx wrote: post #14

pg deserves a lot of credit for predicting this a decade ago: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html > The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of swit…

If we're giving pg credit for calling things over decade ago, look at #5 on this list behind Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey: http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

Didn't Sam Altman found the notorious retina-scanning cryptocurrency?

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#59

Post by visarga » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 5:01 AM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #47

mustacheemperor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are open source / OS model-based projects competing with OpenAI’s text generation. At least one, NovelAI, also has a Stable Diffusion fork incorporated into their paid product. At least so far none of them are close to what’s been achieved with ChatGPT, and that could in itself be driving some of the hype. ChatGPT was probably more impressive to me on the first impression being familiar with the limitations of…

I think the problem is time. To replicate the OpenAI RLHF architecture, they need their own high-quality dataset, which takes time to create. Without details about the hyperparameters, RL architecture, and omitted steps, they need to test a lot of things, which takes time and money. It requires more resources than it took SD to replicate DALL-E 2, which took months and was an easier task.

Check out Constitutional AI from Anthropic. They automated "RLHF" by simply writing a few rules.

Re: Microsoft eyes $10B bet on ChatGPT

#60

Post by Gh0stRAT » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 5:02 AM UTC

karpierz wrote: post #50

I'm seeing a lot of responses that see ChatGPT replacing Google, and it's unclear to me how? It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google. Whereas it's unclear to me how it replaces "best vegetarian restaurants in Gastown". It can string together a coherent statement, but then I have to go search to see whether it actually recommended vegetar…

>It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google.

Being able to answer unprofitable questions has value insofar as you become peoples' go-to search engine for more profitable queries. That being said, I agree the threat to Google is probably over-hyped. (simultaneously, the spectre of LLMs coming along and giving people a reason to visit a competitor is probably the biggest threat to Google in the past decade+)