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GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

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161–170 of 235 posts

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#161
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Panic seems like the wrong response. Figure out what you do that these things can’t. Use them to make yourself more productive. In the late 90s I was told my job was going to be outsourced, then dotcom, then the GFC, and lots of smaller bumps along the way. Those were actually somewhat scary times. Now should be excitement about what’s possible.

While you are not wrong, the idea that gives me anxiety is that this replaces all programmers. My job theoretically is safe for now. I work on fairly novel stuff, while a lot of my day is json parsing there is a big chunk of it that is domain specific. That said... it's that one day it will just take over all of programming that has me in dread. The only option then in my somewhat middle age is to unironically "learn…

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1637087219591659520

I don't know if that helps, I thought it was an interesting take.

I believe we still have humanity, even if everyones job was replaced, I don't think we're going to just let each other starve, even if Microsoft have their own auto-coders, I think we'd all do our best to keep some type of economy going for as long as possible.

I don't think everyone in the world wants to be living in the gutter, nor do I think the majority of the people in the world want to be filthy rich either.

We'll likely have a lot of people working on open source initiatives to help democratize access to important technologies etc.

Who knows what the future will bring. Maybe a massive solar flare while wipe it all away next week anyway...no one knows.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew something changed after AlphaGo. Compute could do what we thought only true intelligence can do. So I agree, LLMs are not a black swan. It will change everything, nevertheless. I keep reading these opinions that LLMs are just doing some advanced form of copy paste. Actually, we don't know what they are doing. Are they actually doing some form of modelling and abstraction? Seems likely to me.

AlphaGo is basically the same as image recognition, not sure why you thought AlphaGo was special compared to detecting faces. AlphaGo works the same way but maps game structures on a Go board instead of mapping facial structures and comparing those to known people.

That's exactly the kind of attitude I am talking about. You can rationalise pretty much everything and keep moving the goal post. I've seen AI do something nobody thought was possible. If that doesn't influence how you think about AI I cannot help you.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew something changed after AlphaGo. Compute could do what we thought only true intelligence can do. So I agree, LLMs are not a black swan. It will change everything, nevertheless. I keep reading these opinions that LLMs are just doing some advanced form of copy paste. Actually, we don't know what they are doing. Are they actually doing some form of modelling and abstraction? Seems likely to me.

"I keep reading these opinions that LLMs are just doing some advanced form of copy paste. Actually, we don't know what they are doing. Are they actually doing some form of modelling and abstraction? Seems likely to me." This is exactly the problem with AI. For business or government, the answer is as important as the methodology employed. A black box does not work for the majority of use cases. Until it can show its…

Yes, in many situations it is important that we get AIs to explain how they came up with a result, and that we are confident in the correctness of the explanation. That is probably the most interesting thing you can work on now. Is that a sideshow? I don't think so, although I wouldn't mind that at all.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth are you talking about?

Our brain excels at pattern matching. We attribute a lot of human abilities to “intelligence”, but the line between that and pattern-matching (or “autocomplete” ad it’s being referred as here) is being challenged by these latest LLMs. If it can look at a picture, explain what’s in it, and hypothesize about physics inside the picture’s environment, is it “just pattern matching”?

"If it can look at a picture, explain what’s in it, and hypothesize about physics inside the picture’s environment, is it “just pattern matching”?"

That's extrapolation via approximation. Computers synthesize a specification. The difference is nuanced and entirely contextual.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the "I don't know"'s are usually silent.

Lmao. Now I’m imagining any questions posted anywhere like Ask Hacker News, Ask Reddit, or Quora being filled with everyone that doesn’t know the answer replying “I don’t know.”

Product q&a on Amazon has this. It is because Amazon emails you other people's questions about products you have previously purchased, and many users don't realize there is no need to reply just to be polite.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#166
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to have a calculator (or say bookkeeping software) that gives correct results most of the time but not always, and then hear from the developers that it will get better with each iteration. I need a calculator that is correct 100% of time, not even 99.999%, because otherwise I can't rely on it at all. In other words, the utility of a calculator that is correct only 99% of time is zero, since you can't ev…

have you ever got on an airplane? are you aware that they are not 100% safe?

airplanes do not execute in a vacuum eg: computer. There are external factors that might cause an airplane to fail. A fully working airplane all things equal in terms of weather and a good pilot, will be safe.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#167
So, researches paid by OpenAI are going to publish a paper to convince everyone else that an OpenAI product could have some economic impact.

Am I the only one who sees a conflict of interest here?

Is this preprint already submitted for peer review or published somewhere? Or is it just an advertisement formatted in LaTeX?

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#168

I asked Chat GPT which antacid medications are contraindicated for some medication I'm on. Easily found through NICE. It made up a severe risk of death taking a very common medicine combo. It was super convincing, even giving information on how long to avoid taking them together. It was pure bullshit. I think as much as hyping the benefits we need to hype the flaws and dangers. If the public at large learn to trust t…

This has been my experience: Chat GPT is astonishing in terms of producing plausible natural language text that looks related to the question. That's an astounding achievement imho. It does not (and I suspect wasn't expected to) produce correct answers to questions.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#169
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (sales-y) colleagues are already writing marketing emails with ChatGPT. Saves a little bit of work, but it might result in the loss of being able to write such emails yourself. This can extend to other jobs, which will have some effects. Use in education worries me more. If schools don't change their lazy group-projects and "write an essay on" strategies now , coming generations will have put less effort in than p…

> coming generations will have put less effort in than previous This has been happening since the inception of school. Calculators made math easier. Sparknotes made book reports easier. Wikipedia made essays easier. > leading to a further drop in levels Did levels drop because stuff got easier? Were there other causes over the past years, like dopamine dependency form infinitely scrolling algorithmic attention grabbi…

> Did levels drop because stuff got easier?

Where did I say that that's the reason? You're coming up with developments that made school "easier" without any further similarity to ChatGPT, and don't consider adaptations in the curriculum or testing following those developments. I specifically mention that schools will have to get rid of (some of) their lazy evaluation processes.

> Also, is there an actual drop in levels? I can't seem to find a source that has decent data on this. And the only stuff I can find says 'IQ' has been rising over time. So please share it with me.

1. The Norwegian IQ study: https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...

2. A comparison of exams in Dutch secondary education: https://nos.nl/artikel/2465434-eindexamens-wis-en-natuurkund...

That trend has been observed everywhere, but has rarely been investigated for uncomfortable reasons. The Flynn effect wasn't actually believed, not even by Flynn himself.

> Lastly, I'm personally not convinced any of this will lead to a net negative per se.

That's such a bad basis to mess with the foundation of modern society.

> The calculator caused people to stop learning mental arithmetic

Agree.

> and start learning more complicated math

Doubt it. Mind you: I mean arithmetic, which is what calculators do, not maths. People rarely do arithmetic, even with a calculator, let alone more complicated calculations. Engineers, ok, they benefit from calculators, but the calculator has not engaged other people in more complicated arithmetics, I think.

> Which might be more valuable and interesting than writing emails.

I don't disagree, but it will still have unforeseen effects, and doesn't alleviate my worries about education levels.

Re: GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs

#170
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except hammers already do not work as expected 100% of the time, as evident by them painfully hitting the hands of the workers in mishaps. Yet we still use them.

How is a hammer "not working as expected" if you hit your hand with it? This makes no sense. If I hit my hand with a hammer, what am I supposed to expect except causing pain and injury? If I try to light a cigarette and accidentally set my beard on fire due to my own clumsyness, did the lighter malfunction? No, the lighter did exactly what it was supposed to do, it was my hand that didn't do what I expected.

If you want to continue with semantics, the worker did not expect to hit his thumb until the hammer bounced off of it, hence the tool did not work as expected. Until regular hammers are able to put nails into wood by themselves, we are talking about the success of the complete system that includes both the hammer and its user.

Either way, when working with humans we already deal with plenty of misses and mistakes. Programmers create 10 to 20 bugs per 1000 lines of code, 9 out of 10 businesses fail, accountants make detrimental blunders, etc.

The point is that in the end the ML systems need only to replace these already non-perfect systems. I'll refrain from judging the consequences of this as I think it's out of scope.

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