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Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#12How do you know if these LLMs are stating facts instead of hallucinating? Also, where would these things learn about new topics?
>How do you know if these LLMs are stating facts instead of hallucinating? At runtime. When trying to do something I know is even slightly unusual I don't even bother with ChatGPT and friends.
Even at runtime I don't trust the results worth much. A large part of the act of programming is identifying and handling corner-cases. You never manage to handle EVERY corner case, and the missed ones result in frustrating debugging sessions. But a competent programmer can cover enough cases up front that the time spent debugging is manageable.
But when I see people say things like "Look! I used GPT to write a functioning webapp!" - I worry that people get a false sense of "It works!" from pasting GPTs code into their compiler and seeing roughly the results they expect. That's great, but GPT in its current form spends exactly zero time "thinking" about corner cases - It's just a black box that repeatedly spits out "most likely next token". So maybe that app works 90% of the time. Or 95%. Or 99%. But you don't have much of a way to tell the difference without rigorous testing that includes thorough and well-articulated test cases. But in order to do that, you need to understand the problem you're solving in a very detailed way, and how your code reacts to it. And in order to do that, you need to... know how to write the program.
I think this latest wave of LLMs and generative AI is really awesome tech, and I play with it every day, because it's just so cool. But seeing people trust programs written with them worries me. Some day someone is gonna copy/pasta some LLM generated code into mission critical software, trusting it implicitly, and cause a tragedy.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the business model that would ensure the authors (whose work is necessary to train the LLM) get paid (considering everyone will just pay MS for using the LLM, and MS would not pay authors)?
Who says the authors will always be human? LLMs have the potential to write their own books. There will be a time when humans and LLMs work in tandem, and eventually the LLMs will get good enough to write the book itself and the human just edits and provides the raw source material. This does not seem particularly far away.
Why are you being downvoted?
This is now SOP for plenty of PMs and TechDoc teams at a couple large companies, and on the roadmap for others.
The act of transcribing is low value and should be automated, but the act of creating and moderating abstract ideas is still something in the human domain.
Reuters has been doing this since the early 2000s btw at their R&D lab in Bangalore.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#14Tech books will still be useful in the future in a few ways: - When you're first learning a topic, ChatGPT isn't as useful because you don't really know what questions to ask. It's useful to get a broad overview guided by an expert so you can learn the concepts, and more importantly the vocabulary, which you can then use to dive deeper into parts you're interested in with ChatGPT. - For really new stuff, ChatGPT obvi…
For new things, ChatGPT is a big improvement over internet searches because of how it can generate examples and respond to followup questions. I've been able to ramp up insanely quickly on new tools with it. Even before CGPT existed, I've always felt like online searches/examples can get me 75% of the way there (i.e. good enough) in way less time than reading a book. As nice as the O'Reilly media is, I've got too man…
O'Reilly transformed into a learning platform a while back. They still publish books, which are great for going deep, but their selling point is that you get unlimited access to a good chunk of the tech publishers' books, videos, live events, etc., and it's all searchable. ChatGPT will give you specific answers if you know what to ask, but personally, I'd rather learn from the experts building it. It might seem spendy, but chances are your company already has an account and you just need to ask around for access or if you're indy, they usually have yearly promos. I think it's about what you'd typically spend monthly on books.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#15I think eventually these books will end up becoming training data for LLM's but at the moment, a human plus a machine is far more powerful than either one in isolation.
You still have time to derive some utility from them. Additionally, you can use ChatGPT to help you learn the material faster.
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#16Writing a book on a topic is an art unto itself. Even most technical books have a coherent narrative, carefully crafted to bring the reader from point A to point B.
If you want a quick reference on a well-known topic, then sure, use an LLM. Or a search engine. Chances are it will even answer you correctly (but also chances are it won't, and if it is a new topic for yourself - strap in, you're in for a ride).
But if you want to really understand something, then you will have to do your research, and a lot of this research has already been summarized into tangible artifacts optimized for your consumption which LLMs would never be able to replicate.
Even if you can convince one to regurgitate a book verbatim, the narrative thread would be lost unless you weave it yourself with your prompts - but would you, the learner, be able to do re-enact the narrative better or even on the same level than the original author who posessed the knowledge on the topic?
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How do you know if these LLMs are stating facts instead of hallucinating? At runtime. When trying to do something I know is even slightly unusual I don't even bother with ChatGPT and friends.
Even at runtime I don't trust the results worth much. A large part of the act of programming is identifying and handling corner-cases. You never manage to handle EVERY corner case, and the missed ones result in frustrating debugging sessions. But a competent programmer can cover enough cases up front that the time spent debugging is manageable. But when I see people say things like "Look! I used GPT to write a functi…
So tell the LLM you want it to handle corner cases and it will add code to handle them. It can also generate unit tests for those corner cases. LLMs have fundamentally changed programming. There's still skill required to do it well, but we're a long ways from Borland TurboC on DOS.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#18AI doesn't make writing obsolete, it makes it even more important because human inputs are necessary for all existing systems.
What is the business model that would ensure the authors (whose work is necessary to train the LLM) get paid (considering everyone will just pay MS for using the LLM, and MS would not pay authors)?
There is no money in creation. You can do with that what you will.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who says the authors will always be human? LLMs have the potential to write their own books. There will be a time when humans and LLMs work in tandem, and eventually the LLMs will get good enough to write the book itself and the human just edits and provides the raw source material. This does not seem particularly far away.
Why are you being downvoted? This is now SOP for plenty of PMs and TechDoc teams at a couple large companies, and on the roadmap for others. The act of transcribing is low value and should be automated, but the act of creating and moderating abstract ideas is still something in the human domain. Reuters has been doing this since the early 2000s btw at their R&D lab in Bangalore.
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#20I had the same thought a while ago. My personal conclusion was - there is a place for well-written books that bring the reader along a step by step process to understand a topic and impart knowledge such that they can make their own opinions from then on. Example - Designing Data Intensive Applications, Effectice C++ etc from my personal collection.
There are other books to the tune of “Docker Cookbook” “Java Pocket reference” etc, that will lose their relevance when LLMs could do that job of digesting existing info into easily usable form.