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

ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

d3.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 282 posts

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#171

Post by emmender1 »

The output of many professions is bag-of-words emotional persuation. eg. politicians, consultants, sociologists, psychologists, writers, economists, tv talking heads, media in general.

A characteristic of these professions is that there is no accountability for output they produce. It is not like a profession that builds an engine for a car. They can bullshit with confidence and get away with it.

chatGPT will replace all of them - as chatGPT itself can bullshit with the best of them.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#172

Post by fragmede »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #109
djtango wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha it's fun to dunk on management consultants but I think the magic is they are like pop music producers. Somehow they're able to make the C suite hoover up LLM shovelware the same way top producers can take super obvious music and sell I V vi IV but when we try the same chords it's uninspired and no one wants to listen to it

Or, you have a break out hit like the Spice Girls. If it was so bad, then why do people listen? There is still a market. Does the market suck? Full of idiots? Your argument ends up being that successful things are bad, because humans are just idiots and thus if something is successful it is because it is just liked by idiots. As much as I might agree generally, it doesn't get you far.

Back then, payola meant that people listened whatever the labels wanted to make popular. it's very much an intentional, manufacturered factory.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#173

Post by barrysteve »

olalonde wrote: post #50

HN is so bad at predictions. Just a few months ago HN was awash with comments that confidently claimed LLMs were no more than stochastic parrots and unlikely to amount to anything. > I can't help but think the next AI winter is around the corner. [0] Yeah, right. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325

Wrong animal. Stochastic horses.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#174

Post by benreesman »

baq wrote: post #165
qingcharles wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try asking it for specifically NLP-ized text and it does it very well... (but then tells you not to use it as it is "unethical")

You aren't talking about the NLP the GP is talking about.

Ok now I’m /r/TooAfraidToAsk… NLP means something else relevant to probabilistic language models?

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#175

Post by fragmede »

flir wrote: post #81
iterminate wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material... If you're measuring based on output, sure, but... the value of any knowledge worker is primarily driven by the input, that is, a client doesn't want "10 ideas" they want "10 [valuable] ideas [informed by the understanding of the business and the market they're operating in]". If a management consultant said "boa…

So you ask for 20 ideas and filter. Even if you throw away 19, it's still useful.

Even if you throw all of them away, the point is the human is simply more effective in their role. Just breaking the ice, the writer's block; anything to get out of the creative rut that we all fall in, is worth its weight in GPUs.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#176

Post by ResearchCode »

Xcelerate wrote: post #88
olalonde wrote: post #50

HN is so bad at predictions. Just a few months ago HN was awash with comments that confidently claimed LLMs were no more than stochastic parrots and unlikely to amount to anything. > I can't help but think the next AI winter is around the corner. [0] Yeah, right. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325

We’re going to have legit AGI that can outperform humans in every way and HN will still find something to complain about. I love the tech news on here, but the constant cynicism on everything is exhausting.

Have "AGI" outperform truck drivers first. They said autonomous trucks would replace all truck drivers by 2018.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#177

Post by FeepingCreature »

aofjfdgnionio wrote: post #166
benreesman wrote: post #46

LLMs are stunningly good at language tasks: almost all of what us old-timers called NLP is just crushed these days. Summarization, Q&A, sentiment, the list goes on and on. Truly remarkable stuff. And where there isn’t a bright line around “fact”, and where it doesn’t need to come together like a Pynchon novel, the generative stuff is smoking hot: short-form fiction, opinion pieces, product copy? Massive productivity…

I don't buy it. LLMs cannot do anything reliably, no matter how constrained the domain. Their outputs are of acceptable quality when back to a person who will use their human brain to paper over the cracks. People can recognize when the output is garbage, figure out minor ambiguities, and subconsciously correct minor factual or logical errors. But I would never feed LLM results directly into another computer program…

Would you feed human output directly into a computer program?

I'm just saying, we invented backspace for a reason. LLMs have no backspace. It's insane they work as well as they do.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#178

Post by Hippocrates »

This is hilarious. As impressive as GPT-3/4 has been at writing, what's more shocking is just how bullshity-y human writing is.. And a "business consultant" is the epitome of a role requiring bullshit writing. Chat GPT could certainly out business-consultant the very best business consultants.

Sometimes to be taken seriously at work, you need to take some concise idea or data and fluff it up into a multiple pages or a slide deck JUST so that others can immediately see how much work you put in.

The ideal role for chatgpt at this moment is probably to take concise writings and to expand it into something way larger and full of filler. On the receiving end, people will endure your long-winded document or slide deck, recognize you "put in the work", and then feed it back into chatGPT to get the original key points summarized.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#180

Post by ResearchCode »

olalonde wrote: post #121
toxik wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comment is going to go down as a HN hall of fame like that guy who said Dropbox is trivially replaced by rsync or something.

Probably. I have a habit of bookmarkung predictions I see on HN to revisit them later and most of those related to LLMs are aging very badly.

The claim that large language models would replace software engineers this year is aging very badly.
Post reply on HN