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

21–30 of 164 posts

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

#21

Post by wnevets »

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…

A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.

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

#22

Post by galaxytachyon »

As the hype phase has passed (probably), now we will see a bit of overcorrection with these dismissive articles. Sure, LLMs as they are now aren't anywhere close to true AGI and even Microsoft admitted it. But its potential is not something anyone can ignore. The capabilities of LLMs has already been successfully used by millions of people and startups. It is a groundbreaking improvement that makes at least one field of study nearly obsolete (NLP). It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less.

With the multimodal models coming next and still exabytes of videos, games, sound, musics, etc. data to train them, we aren't peaking yet. Sure, it isn't the holy grail. But it is a really valuable treasure that only a few exist, to use the same analogy. To view it so dismissively because of some drawbacks, which are entirely obvious and can be accounted for, is just arrogance.

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

#23

Post by ARandumGuy »

This reminds of all the hype for self-driving cars a few years back. Self-driving systems performed well for 95% of driving, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the last 5% was ironed out.

Turns out, the last 5% was both extremely difficult, and extremely important. It turns out that a self driving car that randomly makes dangerous maneuvers isn't desirable. Similarly, a LLM that occasionally outputs plausible sounding bullshit quickly turns from a useful tool to something actively harmful.

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

#24

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

wnevets wrote: post #21
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…

A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.

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

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

#25

Post by classified »

beambot wrote: post #8
jostmey wrote: post #3

This critique asserts that ChatGPT propagates inaccuracies. While there may be instances where this holds true, the given example does not substantiate this claim. The article alleges that ChatGPT stated Russia has launched bears into space, an assertion that is evidently false. However, my own interaction with ChatGPT 4.0 contradicts this. When I posed the same question, the AI unequivocally responded that no nation…

Water Bears (tardigrades) have gone to space: https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/water-bears-in-space

We've known that since Star Trek Discovery.

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

#26

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Yesterday, I had a sticky Swift/iOS issue.

Checked SO, Apple Discussions, etc. Then, on a whim, I asked ChatGPT for a suggestion.

> They are also prone to confident assertions of statements that are blatantly false.

It suggested something that referenced a nonexistent property of a standard UIKit class. It wouldn't even compile.

It was quite positive that this would fix my issue.

After refreshing a couple of times (and also mentioning the first one sucked), it finally gave me something that still didn't work, but gave me an avenue that I could explore, and that finally yielded the solution.

I suspect that the reason for the confident assertion that included an illegal property, was because it was trained on Swift code that was extended (I do that a lot, myself. In fact, I ended up creating my own extension that added the nonexistent property).

Modern programming languages allow you to extend even language primitive types, and JavaScript has allowed that kind of thing for many years.

It may be a while before we can entirely trust ChatGPT to give us all the answers.

To be fair, however, it did help me to land upon the correct solution, but I still had to fire up some candlepower of my own.

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

#27

Post by kgwgk »

wnevets wrote: post #21
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…

A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.

> the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day

That's why it barely got over six million units sold.

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

#28

Post by 3-cheese-sundae »

wnevets wrote: post #21
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…

A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.

I had a Motorola Q at the time and the first iPhone was light years beyond it, even if the only metric used to compare was browsing the internet. Most sites were barely functional in Windows Mobile IE.

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

#30

Post by marban »

wnevets wrote: post #21
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…

A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.

An iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator. Not so bad if you ask me.
Post reply on HN