ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#231

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #202

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

Sounds like you are tunnel visioning in your analysis of the music? There are so many more things to it than the chord progression. On the songwriting side, there's the lyrics which have both a phonetic and a semantic component. There's also the fact that many people will mishear the lyrics and their evaluation of them will be based on the mishearing. There's the melody. Does it work together with the chords to highl…

Are you trying to tell me that "starbucks lovers" was intentional?

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#232

Post by ofjcihen » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #68

More details in this blog post by a Wharton professor: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the... My questions to naysayers: * Do you or anyone you know use GPT-4 (not the free GPT-3.5) to do productive tasks like coding and found it to help in many cases? * If you insist it’s useless, why do millions of people pay $20 a month to access GPT-4 and plugins?

Obviously anecdata, but:

1: I’ve been scripting for 5 years using Python. I purchased a subscription to use GPT4 to see if it could assist me.

In the end it took me more time to fix its mistakes than to just apply my knowledge of knowing what to Google and reading docs.

Additionally the largest hurdle I encountered was when it hallucinated a package that didn’t exist and I spent time trying to find it.

2: I don’t know about most people but I’m terrible at cancelling services that are “cheap”. I used ChatGPT for a few hours that first month and didn’t cancel it for another 5 months.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#233

Post by norir » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

I mean I'm not sure that this is that far from the truth in some domains, though it depends on how you define idiocy. There is, for example, a market for demolition derbies. Of course all of us are idiots in some ways so we should be careful about whom we disparage.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#234

Post by lambdaba » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

klabb3 wrote: post #221

Hippocrates wrote: post #178

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…

> As impressive as GPT-3/4 has been at writing, what's more shocking is just how bullshity-y human writing is.. Yeah. Most people have focused on what LLMs can do, but I think it’s equally if not more interesting what can they not do, and why? When we say LLMs can generate text we’re painting brush strokes as broad as a 10-lane highway. Apparently we have quite limited vocabulary about what writing actually is, and s…

To me it looks very analogous to AI-generated "art", it's very easy to generate some generally esthetically pleasing visuals, but the depth of the art stays in proportion with the input effort... Which is often not much. All of this shouldn't be very surprising really, and there's still a lot of usefulness to it, if only for depreciating the low-quality copy-paste productions and making the really unique and novel ones even more valuable.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#235

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

jakey_bakey wrote: post #17

> Two distinct patterns of AI use emerged: “Centaurs,” who divided and delegated tasks between themselves and the AI, and “Cyborgs,” who integrated their workflow with the AI. It was nice of them to explain that the article was total horse dung before having to read the whole paper

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#236

Post by majormajor » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #190

mlinhares wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s insane that people think producing pop music is easy. Competing on the pop music market is a cutthroat business with a lot of competition and the good ones get their price back in gold. When Scorpions wanted to be resurrected they hired Desmond Child to produce them and he absolutely crushed. These people are very good at what they do and there are very few of them.

The perception is that success in the field is driven largely by factors other than the quality of music. It'd be extremely interesting to see a Richard Bachman / Steven King [1] type experiment with a Desmond Child, Max Martin, or whoever else. Keep their existence completely out of the picture, and have them scout and produce talented no-name, but require the no-name to use only the sort of avenues that would be op…

A lot of the public believes that what you're talking about already happens, for what it's worth. "Industry plants."

Something can be extremely catchy yet widely panned as low quality in music, so even within "just the music" there are several dimensions at play regardless of marketing, etc. Such as whether it's timed right - are there enough people ready for that song at that time?

The idea that "most people will just listen and be fans of whatever the big media companies put out there" doesn't stand up much examination or conversation with "most people."

People do often make breakthroughs on soundcloud, TikTok, whatever - do you think having the invisible support of a Max Martin would lower their chances? You'd need to do your experiment a hundred times or thousand times or so before you could really compare the success rate of your plants to the rest of the crowd, but it's hard for me to believe that they wouldn't have an advantage. The music industry isn't known for their charity, if they could get away with not paying those people without another label beating them in the market, why would they?

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#237

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

johndhi wrote: post #227

highwaylights wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Your ideas are bad. 2) Spreadsheets exist. 3) No-one cares about your marketing copy. 4) No-one finds your c-suite babble inspirational. This is almost perfect input to an LLM exactly because of how low value it is in the first place.

Often the benefit of management consultants is they help the company feel better about firing or laying off people. Actually a robot would be perfect at that. No one likes doing layoffs but chat gpt won't mind

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#238

Post by airstrike » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #211

hutzlibu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are not worthless for programming. You just cannot expect it to ship a full programm for you, but for generating functions with limited scope, I found it very useful. How to make use of a new and common libary for example. But of course you have to check and test. And for text I know people who use it succesfully (professionally) to generate texts for them as a summary from some data. They still have to proof re…

I've been using it for code review. I just paste some of my code in and ask the AI to critique it, suggest ideas and improvements. Makes for a less lonely coding experience. Wish I could point it to my git repositories and have it review the entire projects. I've had mixed experiences with getting it to generate new code. It produced good node.js command line application code. It didn't do so well at writing a progra…

This mirrors my experience. Very helpful writing node.js application code, but struggles to walk through simple operations in assembly. My hunch is that the tokenization process really hurts keeping the 1s and 0s straight.

It's been hit or miss with rust. It's super helpful in decrypting compilation errors, decent with "core rust" and less helpful with 3rd party libraries like the cursive TUI crate

Which comes as no surprise, really, as there's certainly less training data on the cursive crate than, say, expressjs

Also FWIW I have actually pointed it at entire git repos with the WebPilot plugin within ChatGPT and it could explain what the repo did, but getting it to actually incorporate the source files as it wrote new code didn't work quite so well (I pointed it to https://github.com/kean/Get and it would frequently fall back to writing native Swift code for HTTP requests instead of using the library)

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#239

Post by p1esk » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #206

corysama wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more expensive the cover the better. “I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?” There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be p…

> their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear Sounds like an extremely nice job.

Not really.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#240

Post by dsign » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

brap wrote: post #162

awestroke wrote: post #5

Not surprised. It's frighteningly good, and a perfect match for programming. I often ask GPT4 to write code for something, and try if it works, but I seldom copy and paste the code it writes - I rewrite it myself to fit into the context of the codebase. But it saves me a lot of time when I am unsure about how to do something. Other times I don't like the suggestion at all, but that's useful as well, as it often clari…

I used ChatGPT yesterday for code for the first time. I gave it a nontrivial task I couldn’t google a solution for, and wasn’t sure it was even possible: Given a python object, give me a list of functions that received this object as an argument. I cannot modify the existing code, only how the object is structured. It gave me a few ideas that didn’t quite work (e.g modifying the functions or wrapping them in decorato…

> The crazy thing is that I don’t believe it encountered anything like this in its training set, it was able to put pieces together which is near human level. When asked, it easily explained the shortcomings of this solution (e.g interfering with the debugger).

I have seen similar things. So, no, it's not regurgitating from its training data-set. The NN has some capacity for reasoning. That capacity is necessarily limited given that it's feed-forward only and computing is still expensive. But it doesn't take much imagination to see where things are going.

I'm an atheist, but I have this feeling we will need to start believing in "And [man] shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven and over the animals and over all the earth and over all the creeping things that creep upon the earth"[1] more than we believe in merit as the measuring stick of social justice, if we were to apply that stick to non-human things.

[^1]: Genesis 1:26-27, Torah