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What it feels like to work in AI right now

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#511

Post by donkeyd »

version_five wrote: post #455
rlt wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > questioning the value of a chatbot Original commenter was questioning the value of the entire field. > hasn’t had a real job” This is different than “haven't worked in a 'real' business”.

Ironic given yours and others emphasis on my choosing "chatbot" to summarise llms as a reason to dismiss my comment, along with the rest of the pedantry. The upstream post dismissed / insulted the person for questioning value, which was what I called out. If you really had wanted to get into the "HN rules" game, you could at least have cited "don't be snarky"

> dismissed / insulted the person

That wasn't even remotely my goal and I'm disappointed that my choice of words made it seem like it was. I purposefully added quotes to the word 'real' in my comment since any business is a real business and made it clear it was an assumption, not a fact.

It's just that many tech workers often haven't worked outside of tech and therefore are blind to issues outside of the tech world, like manual data entry, because they assume that must all be automated. It's exactly the same the other way around, people in what I called 'real' businesses are blind to what tech can to to improve business processes because they have no clue about what's available and possible.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#512

Post by fomine3 »

rvz wrote: post #466
fomine3 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English speakers tend to miss a huge use case: Translation.

A 'use-case' done worse with LLMs especially with reliability. Translation is already done without a hallucinating LLM and can be done offline. Summarization of existing text is the *only* safe and serious use-case for LLMs.

Machine translation is already not reliable even without LLMs, so it's not weak point of LLM translation.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#513

Post by valenterry »

jiggawatts wrote: post #395
nwienert wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean Google revolutionized search. Apple revolutionized personal computing. OpenAI revolutionized… rewriting things with slightly different wording? I’ve seen so many breathless people posting “this would have taken me so long to search” and then I type 3 keywords from their massive prompt they crafted and find it instantly on Google. We’re talking 1000x or more faster. I feel like the same is happening in your com…

You can program GPT in English. Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English . ENGLISH! You're complaining about the first nuclear test bomb being impractical and uninteresting. How will this change the world? That huge monstrosity had to be affixed to the top of a test gantry and took years of effort by a veritable army of the best and brightest to make! No way it could change war, or geopolitics, or anything.…

> You can program GPT in English. > Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English. ENGLISH!

What does that mean to "program GPT"? Do you mean program (software) USING GPT?

I thought we already had COBOL, which is pretty much like English so business people can use it. Same for SQL.

And don't we already have lots of low-code or no-code tools? Why do we need to program with ChatGPT if we already are beyond programming?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#514

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

Code things i've used it on: - I've thrown in jsx react components and asked to transform it to tsx - I've thrown in tsx components and asked it to write some tests - I've asked it to make an offline queue's so user requests are stored and saved once online again - I've asked to rewrite tests from enzyme to Jest - I've asked it to add a full screen function to react-native-video, which is annoying.

Often Im doing something else in the meantime, like coding, in a meeting or having a beer.

Finally we can be drunk and code at the same time ;).

Joking aside, it's been a huge productivity boost, and if you ask things properly will write hugely detailed and correct code.

I've also used to understand other languages/coding I was less familier with, for instance c and sql procedures.

Above only works with v4, 3.5 is to inaccurate. But is indeed slow, small things I can do faster.

With writing articles i've been disappointed so far, even corrections or styles I ask to adjust it puts in back in a few questions later.

However writing children stories for helping my kid learn how to read it's really good, in every language. "Write a story for kids of age ... about ... use the following words". Came up with nearly perfect stories my kid loved.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#515

Post by newswasboring »

AI world can be proper dystopian these days. I know someone who accepted a job offer in one of the biggest market research firms in the world. She was making AI models for a high tech company before and was hired to make summarization AIs. Between serving out the (frankly ridiculous) 2 month notice period and joining this new job GPT-4 was launched and prices came down for 3.5. The original plan for building something internally was turned into feed everything to chatGPT and then ask it questions. A junior engineer whipped up this system in a couple of weeks. Its all just API calls after all. Now she spends entire days trying to ask the model the right questions so that it can generate the correct reports. Her entire job has been boiled down to talking to an AI. She is working with the most cutting edge technology, yet its so mundane that everyone is just bored on this project. This could have been a ironically tragic character in a Gibson novel.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#516

Post by donkeyd »

naavis wrote: post #422
donkeyd wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very confidential data, which is why the current implementation is run on-premise and of course I'm definitely not using production data to test GPT capabilities.

That's good! There have recently been news of companies leaking trade secrets and confidential data by sharing it with ChatGPT: https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-workers-leaked-compan...

Well, in the organization I was doing this, they had similar issues before I started, with external consultants doing stupid stuff. Luckily, my team wasn't as stupid as these people and integrity was also very high. Which was very, very necessary considering the data we were working with.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#517

Post by rlt »

sj8822 wrote: post #117
davesque wrote: post #28

I feel like the whole ChatGPT bubble has really highlighted what feel like some fundamental shortcomings in the worldview that is represented in tech. That is, there seems to be a winner take all dynamic baked into the tech world. Maybe this arises from the simple fact that tech places a lot of power in the hands of individuals. But there's an emergent downside to this which is that it makes those who were already mu…

At some point, I became disenchanted with tech and working as a software engineer when I realized that tech doesn't ethically fit into our primitive economic organization right now. It's made me feel bad about myself and the career path I've chosen. Basically, with tech, you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources with a potentially infinite customer base. And this means that this produ…

> you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources

If you can do it with limited resources, then so can anyone else.

(This is an oversimplification, of course)

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#518

Post by ThalesX »

jiggawatts wrote: post #395
nwienert wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean Google revolutionized search. Apple revolutionized personal computing. OpenAI revolutionized… rewriting things with slightly different wording? I’ve seen so many breathless people posting “this would have taken me so long to search” and then I type 3 keywords from their massive prompt they crafted and find it instantly on Google. We’re talking 1000x or more faster. I feel like the same is happening in your com…

You can program GPT in English. Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English . ENGLISH! You're complaining about the first nuclear test bomb being impractical and uninteresting. How will this change the world? That huge monstrosity had to be affixed to the top of a test gantry and took years of effort by a veritable army of the best and brightest to make! No way it could change war, or geopolitics, or anything.…

> You can program GPT in English.

> Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English. ENGLISH!

How?

Let me repeat that: How?

I had a little script that from time to time parses a list of jobs from a specific board, extracts some categories, inserts them into an SQLite and have a frontend that displays them to me in a way I want.

The board has since changed some things which would mean maybe 2 hours of commitment from me to update the script.

How do I program GPT in English. ENGLISH! To do that for me? What are the steps involved? I've been using ChatGPT and GPT-4 for awhile and I can't imagine what the steps are to make this happen without a lot of back and forth. I can't imagine how to program the infrastructure. I can't imagine how the API endpoint is more than a fancy autocomplete. I need help understanding what it means that I can program it in ENGLISH! (I can also program it in my country's language for what it's worth).

> That doesn't mean the world hasn't changed, forever.

I sort of agree with this.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#520

Post by Joeboy »

bionhoward wrote: post #282
cgearhart wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm…no, I’m not doubting the value of the interface. I’m asking what’s the “killer app”. Maybe I should just ask ChatGPT to explain it to me…

It’s programming. The thing is really great at programming, and everything else is icing on the cake. They already got my $20 a month lol

Anecdotally, I've had more writers (screenwriters and copywriters) tell me they're using ChatGPT than programmers. I think people here might underestimate how big a deal it is in "the real world".
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