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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

#751

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…

Instead of looking at use of an LLM in isolation, consider the value it could have in the future, combined with API's, other models, speech interface, etc.

Sure, it can help you write an email now, but the real magic could be when these things come together in a symphony of intelligence.

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

#752
post #218

One of the most frustrating thing is that GPT-4 training was finished 6 months ago. It might as well be a decade in the current movement of things. What that mean: - OpenAI has such a large head start that they are only worried about safety, world disruption and getting people used to AGI. - The ideas/project you have was tested by them months ago and is probably irrelevant already. - Insiders have a huge advantage.…

Vicuna is much better

I will try it, thanks.

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

#753

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 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…

To add to this, using ChatGPT feels great in the moment, because it seems to work so well. For example, asking it for an itinerary while traveling gives you something that looks great.

However, once you actually start using it and see that the "ten minute walk" is actually an hour walk, or that a full third of the attractions it has shepherded you to are permanently closed, you realize that building that itinerary yourself from scratch using Google or TripAdvisor would take you less time than manually double checking everything ChatGPT says.

It's also quite surprising that people still think ChatGPT is capable of logic. Even for a complete layperson, all it takes is asking it to draw someone's family tree as an ASCII chart to see that text prediction only goes so far and there's not enough of a relational concept in there to comprise knowledge. There are many examples of asking it to solve famous puzzles with minor variations where it fails spectacularly.

The marketing behind ChatGPT is genius, but there is only so far you can go before the honeymoon is over and people start to really question what you brought to the table. Aside from that, ChatGPT isn't unique in what it can do, and others (including open source) are catching up fast.

That being said, I'd still use it for something like language learning (and other types of learning), where follow up queries (such as why you'd use one word instead of another, or how to rephrase something to be more polite) unlock a significant amount of value. It can also be useful to write trivial code, though I doubt a serious professional would do this (for several reasons, such as privacy and liability). Ultimately, ChatGPT fits squarely under "tool" and not under "intelligence".

It seems that as of right now, the killer app of ChatGPT is the boost in views you get by putting it in the title of your YouTube video.

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

#755
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully functional in what way? As far as I can tell, ChatGPT is a box that I put sentences into, and I get grammatically correct sentences that contains topics or words loosely statistically correlated to what were in my sentences, that may or may not be correct and often are not. The box has little to no memory. I honestly don't see what's so useful about this box.

The results are approximately as good as asking an intern, but the response is approximately instantaneous, where an intern takes a week to do anything. And similar to the intern, you can get better results with a bit of guidance and iteration. In short, humans kinda suck. LLMs also kinda suck, but faster than humans.

> humans kinda suck

Agreed, but that's part of my critique. These systems are written by humans and are trained with barely curated data generated by humans. There is the concept of emergence, but I'm not sure how emergence suddenly fixes a terrible foundation full of biases and errors.

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

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler here, opinions my own, etc. From my perspective, Bard went from "literally didn't exist" to "released" over the course of about a month. GP seems correct in that it very much felt like something picked up off the shelf, slightly dusted off, and released. Is it as good as chatGPT? From my testing, no. Is it the pinnacle of what Google can create, given motivation? I'm pretty sure also no. In comparison to the…

Google is in a weird spot. I suspect they are capable of doing so much more, but there is a serious risk to cannibalizing their 99% revenue model (search), which they probably don't yet know if they can monetize in the same way. Unfortunately for them, OpenAI has forced the question down their throat, which I think is exactly what they intended or at least hoped for.

I feel like it's more like that quote/trope

"I don't think about you at all" (from OpenAI's perspective, obviously)

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

#758

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…

There is no killer app because chat gpt is largely useless. It's results might be right, half right, half wrong, or totally wrong. All it's good for is spouting bullshit. It's like talking to a really outgoing, really confident used car salesman.

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

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘ve been using ChatGPT to: - write and explain me more optimised algorithms for certain cryptographic operations - explain funny mathy bits of papers that I don’t understand - plan me a few days of activities for a city holiday So far it’s been great on all accounts!! I was able to get a faster turnaround time in understanding the papers than I would if I were probing a colleague

What gives you confidence its explanations are accurate? > write and explain me more optimised algorithms for certain cryptographic operations This domain in particular strikes me as a poor choice for this approach. "Don't roll your own crypto... but definitely don't let a language model roll it for you, either"

Well it gives me a direction to dig in - often papers use inscrutable notation or seemingly magical variables that I’m not sure where they come from. Will ChatGPT always be right? Probably not - but these are things I can validate better than no info at all!

Re: crypto algorithms, the quert in question was implementing exponentiation for arbitrary sized integers. My own implementation was taking until the heat death of the universe to finish for big integers and I didn’t want to just copypasta an impl from elsewhere.

ChatGPT‘s worked flawlessly and it was able to explain me certain tricks it used in depth (which I could independently verify from other sources).

Would I ship it to prod? Not without a security audit, but that ought to be the case regardless when rolling your own (or even someone else‘s) cryptography :)

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

#760

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 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…

The popularity of ChatGPT revolutionized time. For learning, for many kinds of busywork (it's redefining what is and isn't "busywork), for planning. And most important: we don't know what we have yet because it's still being built. It's a tool. It's not the "capabilities" it's what people get out of it.

You mention blogging from the standpoint of writing it all yourself, and then using a tool to tweak it. That's not the revolutionary part. It's collaborating with the tool to write the post.

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