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

What it feels like to work in AI right now

robotic.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 768 posts

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

#561

Post by brookst »

valenterry wrote: post #513
jiggawatts wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 program…

Not the person you replied to, but I see it the same way. GPT is an English (and other natural language) compiler.

Not in the sense that you get a computer program out (though you can), but in the sense that it can automate anything without even needing a programming language, compiler, and domain specific UX.

Low code and no-code tools still require thinking like a programmer. You define what you need to do, then implement, then get results. GPT often lets you go directly from spec to results.

If the goal is programming, GPT is nothing special. If the goal is quickly reasoning over very abstract instructions, it’s amazing.

The trick is seeing the new use cases. It really does come back to the GUI revolution: if you want to list files in a directory, the CLI is just as good, maybe better. But GUI makes photoshop possible.

GPT makes it possible to say “summarize the status emails I sent over the past year, with one section per quarter and three bullet points per section”. And the magic is that is the programming.

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

#562

Post by alexvoda »

staunton wrote: post #474
rvz wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is summarization "safe"? The summary might be wrong just as well. The use-case is anything where occasional bullshit output is an acceptable downside to speeding up. More reliable outputs will enable more use-cases.

And what is a business that is fine with occasional (or frequent) bullshit output? Fake-news and spam.

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

#563

Post by brookst »

Eisenstein wrote: post #382
SanderNL wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We call that “companies”. We just need to apply what we learned in business school to a different set of workers, slightly deficient workers.

> We just need to apply what we learned in business school Please don't. You've already ruined enough industries. Let the MBAs do finance and Wall Street and leave them out of the chain of command in organizations that make things.

Every time you go to the store and find that the store is still in business and there is food on the shelf, it is because someone went to business school and knows how to optimize demand estimation, pricing, and logistics.

Yes, some MBAs fuck things up. Just like some CS grads fuck things up. But advocating against the study of business is just as naive as advocating against the study of computer science just because there are some bad CS grads.

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

#564

Post by bavila »

version_five wrote: post #288
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…

It's a hype bubble. There's a small group if die-hards in the tech-adjacent VC community that talk it up to no end and attack anyone who disagrees (I just saw a guy ask you if you were "virtue signaling" with your post - lol. And there's lots of people exploring how it could potentially be commercially useful - just like with blockchain. As everyone points out, it's got more going for it than blockchain did because i…

I've got access to GPT-4 at work. There have been many times that I'll encounter a bug while programming, I'll paste my code to GPT, tell it what my code is currently doing, and tell it what I actually want the code to do. It then explains what I'm doing wrong and what I can do to fix it. I've had success with this over 90% of the time. This saves me a significant amount of time that would have otherwise been spent hunting down solutions on Google, Stack Overflow, GitHub issues, etc.

I don't know what else to say other than that I would not willingly go back to life without GPT. The value speaks for itself to me.

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

#565

Post by williamcotton »

avidphantasm wrote: post #558
brookst wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re asking “what’s so big about GUIs? Literally nobody has asked to move a pointer around a screen”. It’s the use cases these thing enable that are important. Today, I wrote a draft product announcement. Only after I was done did I realize I had written it in a really impersonal third person (“users will be able to”). No big deal, but maybe 10-20 minutes of work to make it energetic and second person (“now you can…

I guess if you don’t like writing, this is good for you. However, I like writing. Moreover, many people are lousy at it (not that I couldn’t improve). I’m not sure I want something trained on lots of mediocre writing doing editing for me.

LLMs are trained on language. Not mediocre language. This is why models can be fine-tuned in one language and then see the benefits in other languages. How much longer with this fundamental misunderstanding of these models continue and how often will they be put forth by people who are worried about task X that they enjoy being replaced?

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

#566

Post by williamcotton »

tuatoru wrote: post #541
brookst wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re asking “what’s so big about GUIs? Literally nobody has asked to move a pointer around a screen”. It’s the use cases these thing enable that are important. Today, I wrote a draft product announcement. Only after I was done did I realize I had written it in a really impersonal third person (“users will be able to”). No big deal, but maybe 10-20 minutes of work to make it energetic and second person (“now you can…

Most of the economy involves moving around physical things. Construction, transport, nursing and related health occupations (physiotherapy, home aid, etc.), retail and wholesale logistics. Manufacturing employs another chunk. Services for agriculture, fishing, mining also employ more people than are directly employed in those industries and are mostly to do with machines and equipment. Utilities. Most of the rest is…

Well clearly you’re going to be sitting on the sidelines for the next few years.

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

#567

Post by staunton »

alexvoda wrote: post #562
staunton wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is summarization "safe"? The summary might be wrong just as well. The use-case is anything where occasional bullshit output is an acceptable downside to speeding up. More reliable outputs will enable more use-cases.

And what is a business that is fine with occasional (or frequent) bullshit output? Fake-news and spam.

Every business is fine with some frequency of bullshit output at some level. The question is how often exactly it happens and how much harm the bullshit can cause.

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

#568

Post by newswasboring »

valenterry wrote: post #513
jiggawatts wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 program…

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

A sibling comment already explained the second part of the question, but there is something I find more exciting. You can program GPT, as in you can tell it to change its behavior. The innumerable "jail break" prompts are just programs written in English which modify GPT itself. Like macros in lisp I guess. The first time I truly saw this potential was when someone showed me you don't actually have to change the temperature of chatGPT in code, you can just tell it to give low and high temperature answers in the prompt[1]. That's programming the model itself in english.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34801574

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

#569

Post by Eisenstein »

brookst wrote: post #563
Eisenstein wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just need to apply what we learned in business school Please don't. You've already ruined enough industries. Let the MBAs do finance and Wall Street and leave them out of the chain of command in organizations that make things.

Every time you go to the store and find that the store is still in business and there is food on the shelf, it is because someone went to business school and knows how to optimize demand estimation, pricing, and logistics. Yes, some MBAs fuck things up. Just like some CS grads fuck things up. But advocating against the study of business is just as naive as advocating against the study of computer science just because…

> Every time you go to the store and find that the store is still in business and there is food on the shelf, it is because someone went to business school

Are you contending that business were not successful before Wharton started pumping out MBAs?

> But advocating against the study of business is just as naive as advocating against the study of computer science

I didn't say 'don't study business', I said 'stick to finance'. MBAs tend to end up destroying innovation and productivity for short term growth and stats.

Jack Welch showed what a successfully motivated 'business oriented' leader can do to an innovative and productive legacy organization when given complete control over it. The MBAs happen to just do it on a smaller scale.

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

#570

Post by staunton »

alexvoda wrote: post #560
staunton wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to distribute across many computers which communicate with high latency

LLMs are already running distributed on swarms of computers. A swarm of swarms is just a bigger swarm. So again, what is the actual difference you are imagining? Or is it just that distributed X is fashionable?

Significantly higher latency than you have within a single datacenter. Think "my GPU working with your GPU".
Post reply on HN