Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

tedgioia.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 444 posts

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#41

Post by mynameisvlad »

jesterman wrote: post #28
sampo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't cite their sources? Has there been research on neural nets who could cite their sources? In common cases, thousands or millions of items in the training set have contributed to the weights in the pathways that activate for a certain input. But maybe for some inputs, only a small number of items in the training set contributed strongly to the weights on the pathways the are decisive to the output? Could you de…

perplexity.ai/ specifically uses web sources to construct natural language. I believe it's going to be in Bing soon?

It still has the exact same issues. I asked it to tell me about “Microsoft layoffs before 2022” and it confidently stated that Microsoft had no layoffs before 2022, with one of its sources even talking about the previous layoffs in 2009.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#42

Post by zabzonk »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #17

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

but isn't it getting its information from all those "partially right contributors"? if so, won't it be only partially right (i.e. sometimes/often wrong) itself?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#43

Post by raldi »

ResearchCode wrote: post #26
ajuc wrote: post #7

"Cars won't replace horses, because they require roads and horses don't."

Still waiting on those autonomous cars. Unlike many other software development tools, I've found ChatGPT to be useless so far.

I saw three autonomous cars driving around my neighborhood in just the past week, all with nobody at the wheel.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#44

Post by dsr_ »

andrepd wrote: post #35
VBprogrammer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail. I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what th…

Well it's essentially a (good) search engine then, isn't it? Somebody somewhere wrote that description, and chatgpt understood your query and fetched it.

A good search engine gives you references you can read, because they exist.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#45

Post by phoehne »

raesene9 wrote: post #31

The way I've come to look at ChatGPT is via a D&D analogy. It's like a helpful Bard with 1 rank in all the knowledge skills and a good bluff roll. It'll give you good answers to a lot of basic queries, but if it doesn't know, it'll just make up something and provide that. Once you know that, I think it can be a lot of use and in many way, I think it'll get a lot better with time. I've already found it useful in basic…

I use the know it all uncle. Who does know a lot but is sometimes wrong. But either way, the answer comes with the full conviction they’re right. Certainly not good for medical diagnosis, but great for “I’d like a python script that retrieves all my GitHub issues ranked by priority and sorted by date.”

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#46

Post by karpierz »

williamcotton wrote: post #40
karpierz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah, my mistake. I'd assumed that the GP was referring to the later work and echoing its core premise (language has no intrinsic meaning; or rather takes on meaning from context and intent). As an aside to anyone reading, would highly recommend internalizing the Tractatus. It really helps side step a lot of "high minded" debates (ex: is X conscious, is it moral to do Y) by actually making you ground what you actu…

In many ways LLMs are more in support of the Philosophical Investigations era understanding of language and less in support of the logical positivist understanding of language put forth my Frege... Like, the Frege approach is like the symbolic AI approach... define the rules, derive the meaning from the rules. The PI approach is like the LLM approach... derive the rules and meaning from "experiencing" the use of the…

I think the PI approach still requires that the agents in the game have a shared internal model of the game.

You can make Searle's Chinese Room argument, but I always find "assume there exists a book that contains every conversation ever" as a flawed premise.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#47

Post by xnx »

Usefulness is the correct measure. ChatGPT is limited, but immediately very useful in a surprising number of ways. Compare that to the Bitcoin hype, where, even though it has had years, is still mainly useful for drug transactions and other illegal transfers.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#48

Post by endisneigh »

jchw wrote: post #19
endisneigh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philosopher/etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field. Does this "person" make mistakes? Can't cite their sources? Yeah this definitely happens (especially the sources thing), but when you're trying to understand something new and complex and you can't get the "gist" of it, ChatGPT does surprisingly well. if you don't…

That goes for pretty much any resource; there's a lot of botched or sub-optimal explanations of complex things out on the internet. But being able to have a conversation with someone who has a decent conceptual grasp on something is better than a perfect encyclopedic article alone, and ChatGPT is able to roughly do that for a lot of subjects. As for how you know it's accurate, you don't really have to know it's accur…

> That goes for pretty much any resource; there's a lot of botched or sub-optimal explanations of complex things out on the internet. But being able to have a conversation with someone who has a decent conceptual grasp on something is better than a perfect encyclopedic article alone, and ChatGPT is able to roughly do that for a lot of subjects.

people keep saying this, but it isn't true. if you ignore sites like this one and reddit there are plenty of authoritative articles and explanations about things with provenance. and if they are wrong they'll update their information.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#49

Post by gunshai »

My stance is pretty simple.

The folks that adapt their own language centers and domain reasoning around using chatGPT (or these types of models) will stand to gain the most out of using them.

This article is an eye roll to me, a calculator gives you confidence as well, doesn't mean you used it correctly.

It is very hard for me to not outright dismiss articles like this that don't consider the usefulness of the tool. They instead search for every possible way to dismiss the tool.

>My conclusion isn’t just that ChatGPT is another con game—it’s the biggest one of them all.

* YAAAAAWN *

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#50

Post by enragedcacti »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #18
karpierz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But there's definitely uses for a tool that produces a lot of boilerplate content that a human can then proofread (ex: writing cover letters, filling out unstructured paperwork, etc.) Edit: I personally underestimated the use-case, because the "more optimal" thing to do when auto-fill…

I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail. I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what th…

> Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood

Its an extremely well understood piece of technology and has been for decades outside of Toyota. Here is a 2005 paper that accurately models the fundamental behavior of the Prius HSD [1]. There are dozens of pages that explain it in various detail, including ones with live simulators of the power split device. [2] There are tons of forum threads of amateur Prius owners chatting about the internals.

I don't say this as a dunk, but to point out that a person's perception of chatGPT's capabilities are heavily influenced by their familiarity with the domain.

[1] https://www.engr.uvic.ca/~mech459/Pub_References/01500979.pd...

[2] http://eahart.com/prius/psd/

Post reply on HN