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My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

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Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is the killer app . It’s a Google killer. It is better than the SEO listicle garbage filling the internet. Even if it’s not always accurate it’s still better in a lot of circumstances. There’s a reason Sundar rushed Bard out of the gate even though it is clearly inferior.

I’ll push back on this, at least in its current iteration. I just asked it to list some restaurants near my apartment (major intersection in San Jose) and it wasn’t particularly close. While there are several restaurants less than half a mile from the intersection, ChatGPT listed restaurants from several miles away. Given the “weights in a matrix” architecture of ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s possible to store enough da…

You're not wrong at all, it doesn't know everything.

But it does know a lot of things and can be super useful. Personally i think search engine is a terrible use case, unless you use the Bing enabled version, or bing chat.

I've used it to write pretty complicated scripts where I had no idea what I was doing, rebuild crusty httpd configs from first principles, explain disassembled code, explain regular code, explain configs, read dmidecode and lspci for me and make a pcie slot report... It's bloody brilliant.

Other: read and translated my blood tests. Accurately!

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is the killer app . It’s a Google killer. It is better than the SEO listicle garbage filling the internet. Even if it’s not always accurate it’s still better in a lot of circumstances. There’s a reason Sundar rushed Bard out of the gate even though it is clearly inferior.

I’ll push back on this, at least in its current iteration. I just asked it to list some restaurants near my apartment (major intersection in San Jose) and it wasn’t particularly close. While there are several restaurants less than half a mile from the intersection, ChatGPT listed restaurants from several miles away. Given the “weights in a matrix” architecture of ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s possible to store enough da…

Tangentially related, I had GPT-4 plan the sightseeing on my latest holiday.

It both picked out the interesting places of note, and then I asked it to plan them in such a way that made sense walking-wise (so I wasn't backtracking) and it did so without a hiccup.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#43

> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.

correct, and this is the reason op is a swe drone (120k toc being a momentary blip), not a cofounder of a company IPOing tomorrow

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#44

> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.

I don't think it's a knock on the approach, but rather highlighting an opposition between outdated tech on one side and ultra-modern, unproven tech on the other.

IOW, hinting that using proven, modern tech would have solved the issues company was having more readily than jumping straight to AI.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like medical transcription There’s no way this is remotely legal, right? Unless it’s some sort of on-prem product? > making wider sections of the populace unemployable faster than new job areas open up This is a real threat to the fabric of society and will require us to rethink things like UBI and taxing the means of production rather labor.

It's not going to happen. There is a huge shortage of people right now. We have WAY more work that needs doing vs available people to do the work.

I disagree; there are millions of unemployed people all over the world that can speak great English, that you can hire right now to do many things remotely.

The problem is that the vast majority of them are unable to do the things you can do with ChatGPT (writing copy, for example).

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#46

I don’t know what to make of stuff like this. On the one hand, AI in its present form is a great learning tool, and little else. So you’d call the CEO a fool. On the other hand, you have the leading AI firm publicly devoting 1/5th of its resources on controlling AI and declaring that we will likely have Superintelligence within this decade. If the latter is right, this CEO might be a genius who was early on a trend,…

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Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#47

> - got the OK to feed entire repos and proprietary information into ChatGPT without a care because “we got the pro version” > Our main product is CRUD app that is designed like something straight out of 2010, complete with outdated frameworks If it's a small startup with a simple CRUD app, why this a problem? 99% startups die from lack of execution, not because someone stole their proprietary secrets or source code.

Simple CRUD apps don't really need a startup to be fair, they could be done as a side project these days.

Depends on how simple's simple. Having the bandwidth to troubleshoot an unexpected problem for a paying customer is a rough line I'd draw between side project and more than a side project.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#48
I was more skeptical with ChatGPT but started paying for it. For better or worse, my company/team uses documents for communication, and it helps me automate the boring stuff - word smithing and clarifying ambiguity.

The flip side of this is those will be summarized with AI for those who don’t care about the fluff. The world is doomed to expansion and compression in this way.

Also, just like the switch to digital cameras from film, my role in writing a document transitions to editor from careful composer.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only. Then those CPU cycles would at least have been doing something of value. If you look at crypto mining computations they don't (on the chains I have looked at) actually compute anything meaningful at all. It's literally just generating random numbers and then (almost always) throwing them away. Like you have Alice who says "Try to guess my number?", and then Bobs around the world go Bob1: "Is it 13?" Alice: "…

Can someone explain why there isn't a blockchain that is powered by users hardware training LLM models all day? Like the worlds best open source trillion parameter model.

Noone has built it and that's because it would be hard to satisfy the needs of a consensus mechanism and also do useful real work.

To understand why that is, you need to understand why they are doing all this generating random numbers nonsense in the first place. They are doing this to establish distributed consensus. You have some chain of blocks b_1... b_2 ... b_3. To make the next block you want to put a bunch of transactions together, calculate their hash and mint it, but there's a problem: In a distributed system, who gets to decide what goes into the block? We all need to agree what b_4 is otherwise the system loses consensus. We can't have me publishing something and calling it b_4 and you publishing something and calling it b_4. The way the "proof of work" mechanism does this is by everyone guessing random numbers until someone chooses the right number at which point that person has the right to mint b_4.[1]. If you wanted that computation (instead of being just choosing random numbers) to do something useful, you'd have to figure out a way to decide what the correct number is without knowing it beforehand. Otherwise you might train your ML model just fine but your computation couldn't be used to establish who gets to mint the next block so wouldn't work in a proof of work consensus algorithm.

People have done this with distributed computations where doing the computation is hard but checking the computation is easy. For example finding large Mersenne primes, is extremely expensive but once you have a big number, checking whether or not it is a Mersenne prime is very cheap. But training an ML model isn't that kind of computation.

[1] Proof of stake just picks who gets to do it randomly from a pool of people who have staked, which is why it is so much more efficient.

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