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

Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

salon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 164 posts

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#111

Post by mediaman »

jhp123 wrote: post #68
substation13 wrote: post #4

It's really easy to get an LLM to hallucinate by asking an open ended question - the type typically answered by a Google search or checking Wikiedpia. However, this is not the best application of LLMs. This criticism is getting old. LLMs are great at: - Text synthesis given all of the facts in a prompt (expand these bullet points) - Summarization (condense this text) - Data extraction (fit this data into this schema)…

LLMs also hallucinate during summarization tasks, adding topics that were not in the original

I've built internal systems that do summarization based on knowledge retrieval systems for specific nonpublic corporate information.

With GPT-4, I find very little hallucinating. It very rarely deviates from the source material. Every time I've found something unexpected, there was a problem in the source material provided to the model.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#112

Post by galaxytachyon »

laserlight wrote: post #91
galaxytachyon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When only a few of them followed the hype, yes, it can possibly go nowhere. But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real. An easy example is the first iPhone. Another more negative example is bitcoin which even though it is probably a scam, its values and influence on society has massively grown more than what i…

> But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real. This is a perfect description of cryptocoins and similar technologies. I've witnessed literally illiterate people buying coins and selling the idea to others.

I know. I mentioned that crypto is a disappointment technologically. But it doesn't change the fact that it still brought massive profits and significantly impacted society. For worse but still... The point is with this much momentum behind a single tech, it will surge forward regardless of whether it has true merits that can live up to its hype or not.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#113

Post by mrguyorama »

daveguy wrote: post #94
cl42 wrote: post #14

The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse. The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines. So it goes. I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing thing…

One of the biggest problems in AI for the last 60 years is the grounding problem. The ability of a model to be rooted in objective reality. In other words, for one of these LLMs to understand when they are being accurate vs hallucinating. None of the current crop of LLMs has come close to solving this problem. On the contrary, they make the problem blatantly obvious. No LLMs will achieve AGI until this is solved suff…

A LANGUAGE model cannot solve this because truth and fiction is not a property of LANGUAGE

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#114

Post by esjeon »

keskival wrote: post #90

Large Language Models aren't a silver bullet – they don't solve all your problems. But they are a holy grail – as a universal common sense module they give IT systems a capability they never had before, a capability which has been sought after from since computers became a thing, a capacity for common sense. We now have that capacity and that alone will revolutionize the world. The chatbots aren't about chat, they ar…

> a capacity for common sense.

Uh, nope. Being able to spur out text is far from understanding what common sense is. If it did have the common sense, why would OpenAI struggle so much with filtering? Because the model doesn't comprehend what it generates. It's only capable of interpolate textual data it witnessed. The sense of common sense is merely an illusion created by the brain, which also loves interpolating whatever there are.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#115

Post by rdedev »

keskival wrote: post #90

Large Language Models aren't a silver bullet – they don't solve all your problems. But they are a holy grail – as a universal common sense module they give IT systems a capability they never had before, a capability which has been sought after from since computers became a thing, a capacity for common sense. We now have that capacity and that alone will revolutionize the world. The chatbots aren't about chat, they ar…

It's pretty straightforward to build an RL environment for closed systems like chess but I don't think it's close enough for an AGI to learn. Like RLHF uses human feedback. Unless we come up with a way to scale that process AGI by this year doesn't seem possible

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#116

Post by mrguyorama »

wnevets wrote: post #92
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Safari on your phone was mind blowing and immediately useful. Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

> Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone. So it did even less than I gave it credit for.

You are completely ignoring the reality that Apple products are considered better than peer products even if they are objectively equal. The public doesn't care if Apple wasn't the first company to put a web browser on a phone. The public knows that they like their iPod, and the marketing for the iPhone made it compelling.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#117

Post by PartiallyTyped »

twelve40 wrote: post #100
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot and chatgpt are some of the services i am perfectly content paying for. ChatGPT is a great way to delve into new topics, and for that alone it’s worth it.

> ChatGPT is a great way to delve into new topics Like bears in space? ))) seems like a great way to delve into known topics so that you are able to catch it when it starts to confidently and plausibly hallucinate

Basically I described the problem I am trying to solve; I ask it to behave as a seasoned professor of comp sci or w/e depending on my hunch, we go back and forth where I ask questions, add constraints to the system, and in turn it gives me ideas into what I should look into more.

It's the Socratic method on steroids, where the student is probing a possibly fallible professor with the library of Alexandria at their hands.

It is by no means perfect, but it allows me to identify what general field I am going into, what I should read about it, what core concepts are important, how to expand my knowledge, and most importantly, helps me better formulate the problem by asking questions or failing to understand what I want to convey.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#118

Post by sumtechguy »

tempestn wrote: post #79
Nullabillity wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers were already commonplace in phones for years at that point. Maybe things were more dire in the US?

Browsers in other phones sucked. I'd owned high-end "smart" phones before the first iPhone and ultimately went back to a flip phone because they just weren't worth using. Usability of the first iPhone browser was a huge leap forward. Ironically, that was largely because it let you more easily use sites built for desktop, due to the larger screen space and ease of pinch to zoom. Those older phones would have been some…

At the time you pretty much had palm and wince and feature phones. Of the three wince was probably the better of the interfaces (but that was a mater of taste). Data was expensive to buy on most carriers. Which all the other carriers mimicked within a couple of months of iPhone coming out. The iPhone was decently better than the other two and the 'unlimited data plan' and the bling bling of 'apple'. Also the browser being worth anything. The built in ones for all the others were junk.

Then people started sideloading and basically showed Apple they needed a store which they quickly came up with. Getting an application on the other two platforms at the time was mind numbingly bad (activesync was to put it mildly awful to use). In some cases you needed to get the carrier involved (better have a few months to validate and a few hundred thousand dollars to pay for it).

Also that screen they used was way better than what any other phone out there had at the time. Most of the top end phones needed a stylus and itty bitty keyboard to be any sort of useful.

I would say it was not until the droidx came out that anyone had anything that approached how cool the iphone was.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#119

Post by mediaman »

mbgerring wrote: post #20
jonwinstanley wrote: post #2

Sure, anyone that uses ChatGPT knows it's currently not perfect. But there's a presumption that these tools are going to keep improving over time. Which is presumably why the AI hype is so strong. Whether AI ends up displacing people from their jobs in the long term, well, that's impossible to know. Just because no technological advancement has ever done that in the past doesn't mean it will never happen in the futur…

As long as the accuracy of an LLM’s output is unknowable, there’s going to be a pretty hard limit on the kinds of jobs these tools can “replace”. And its not at all clear that this fundamental problem can be fixed at all with the current approach.

The mistake is in believing that LLM's output should be deterministic to be useful.

Human output is not deterministic.

Fields with text-heavy output are already being upended by this. Being able to summarize long legal briefs, identify contract problems, do classification of discovery documents, or even write first drafts of common legal forms is already upending the legal discipline.

Chat-based customer support agents are seeing 25% productivity improvements based on two-year-old models for new employees, according to a study published in NBER.

Things like BabyAGI and other sequential "do anything" tools appear to be close to useless now, and unfortunately that is what is catching a lot of hype on Twitter. But actual industry applications are much quieter (often NDA) and much more impactful.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#120

Post by sillysaurusx »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #110
sillysaurusx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential. > We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain…

There is likely a definitional gap here. Sentience is unnecessary for intelligence for my definition of intelligence, but agreeing on a common definition has been tough when we understand it so poorly. I happen to also disagree with "caring" (requires definition) being relevant to sentience, defined as the ability to perceive or feel things.

I’m sympathetic to these arguments, but AGI to me is Data from Star Trek. I think most people would agree.

He has curiosity. The current gen of AIs don’t. They don’t even ask questions, let alone remember anything.

He has a capacity to get bored. He tries out guitar just because he wants to. He paints. He’s frustrated when the details aren’t right.

A lot of these traits are human. But that’s the whole point — we’re trying to make a wo/man in a machine.

I’ve never understood the hype, and I’m a researcher. It seems to me that there is a vast gulf between what AIs are capable of and anything that makes being human, human.

I believe they’ll get progressively better at intellectual tasks, though. That will be really disruptive.

Post reply on HN