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Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

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Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#71

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

extr wrote: post #61
dandelany wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am dreading the inevitable future day when I have to argue about a denied health insurance claim on the phone with a fucking robot prompted to make it as difficult as possible for me to win.

Optimistically, it might be an improvement. Imagine a world where you can call in or chat. Hold time is zero in both cases. You never need to "transfer" to a new department, or supply the same information over and over. LLMs have access to all the case files and needed info on the backend instantaneously. Health insurance companies may still seek to deny claims, but the fog of bureaucracy is no longer so easy to hide…

Often, holding times are not only due to a shortage of call center employees available, but also to encourage the caller to give up. I doubt the hold time would be zero, unless the government legislates a maximum hold time. Even then, the AI could stall with endless patience and requesting clarifications and further information, and repeating details back to you to confirm, with minor errors requiring correction, which might be even worse than waiting on hold.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#72

Post by mattvlr »

I used to build my own little wiki / knowledge graph as a fun project to see what it was capable of.

You feed it a topic and ask it to return a list of topics that are related to the parent topic. Repeat for each child topic, set a max depth and you can generate a topic tree about anything. Always asking for it to use JSON as the output.

I then had GPT-4 write an encyclopedia style entry for each child topic with nice formatting and links to actual wikipedia when possible.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#73

Post by LouisSayers »

I've been using it to refactor my code.

I paste in all the code that it needs context for, tell it how I'd like to refactor it (e.g. there are two concerns, split them into their own structures). It then gives me a high level of what it'd do, I review and then tell it to implement what it said.

I tried this yesterday in golang with some gRPC calls and while it seemed to hallucinate a couple details, overall it did a pretty good job. I think part of getting it right will be to guide it a little more.

I'm building my own product so don't have to worry about getting company approval etc for this.

Also, language learning - I'm learning German atm and plan on asking it to list the x most common nouns in each gender (der die das) and then generate example sentences that use each of the nouns and so on.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#74

Post by carlosjobim »

realusername wrote: post #46
Filligree wrote: post #22

Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet , but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's…

Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language. This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.

No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#75

Post by waboremo »

karmasimida wrote: post #47
woeirua wrote: post #18

Call center employees are pretty much as good as gone once the price comes down on GPT4. You can pretty easily give it a good prompt that allows it to answer very specific questions about your company, or interact with external APIs to schedule services, make changes based on the customer's requests, etc. Throw some Speech to Text and Text to Speech services in front and behind it, and voila you have an AI receptioni…

I think call center is already a job that nobody wants. Yes it is a job and it brings bread, but it can be something people really want to avoid and consider as a last resort. Also, at least for peak time, current call center technology is NOT adequate to elastically scale up. The call center UX is basically a huge collection of anti-patterns, to persuade you NOT to talk a human. All in all, as a user, I want to see…

Remote call jobs are a solid job to have these days. A far cry from the horrors of a typical call center, plus if you're someone who struggles with a "normal" physical job, a remote call center position is near the top of your list.

Another important point is that much to the disappointment of users, those call center agents are the only line of defence against fraudulent activity. Going to be very interesting to see how that changes, probably making the user experience much worse.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#77

Post by benlivengood »

Filligree wrote: post #22

Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet , but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's…

We should really start pointing the giant LLMs at animal vocalizations and get cross-species translation.

There's some prior work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-ar...

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#78

Post by ben30 »

I cut and pasted my child’s school’s multi page complaints policy without reading it myself, then asked it to show me the stages I need to follow as a sequence diagram and it can up with this:

@startuml actor Parent participant "Class Teacher" as CT participant "Head of School" as H participant Clerk

== Level 1 ==

Parent -> CT: Informal Complaint CT -> H: Meeting Request H -> CT: Meeting Scheduled CT -> Parent: Meeting Scheduled Parent -> CT: Attend Meeting CT -> H: Meeting Summary H -> Clerk: Meeting Summary Received

== Level 2 ==

Parent -> Clerk: Formal Complaint Clerk -> H: Formal Complaint Received H -> Clerk: Response Preparation Clerk -> Parent: Formal Complaint Response Parent -> Clerk: Request for Level 2 Meeting Clerk -> H: Request for Level 2 Meeting Received H -> Parent: Level 2 Meeting Scheduled @enduml

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#79

Post by arc_of_descent »

shusaku wrote: post #70
arc_of_descent wrote: post #23

Write unit tests, document code, optimize code, explain code. I've tried Python functions and React code. It even converted a class based React component to a functional style component!

Can it really optimize code? And what granularity have you seen it succeed?

Sorry, I really meant refactor here. I did ask it to optimize code, and it came with a suggestion of trimming down my function into a smaller chunk and creating a new function. So it actually refactored it TBH, but I am going to try how I can check if it can optimize code too.

Re: Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

#80

Post by realusername »

carlosjobim wrote: post #74
realusername wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language. This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.

No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.

The bricks are already there, just not perfectly stitched together I give you that, we already have near perfect text translation for some languages, high quality earbuds, near perfect voice synthesis in some research papers.

Sure right now you can't use a product which works very well with those bricks together (I've seen some but it's still unconvincing) but in 5 years maximum this is a solved problem.

I'm even expecting the global English level to peak and then decrease because of that in the next 20 years. Learning foreign languages is very hard and less people would continue it just as a hobby if they have some software doing it for them.

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