How do you know if these LLMs are stating facts instead of hallucinating? Also, where would these things learn about new topics?
You can/should try it out yourself. The same with textbook.
Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#22I 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…
I am with you on this one.
But I think many tech books carrying some of flavor of being a manual, especially those centered around some particular library/framework, thinking of 'XX in Action' series.
Ones that talk about more abstract ideas, like on the art of developing/testing software, will continue to thrive. However, I think the bread and butter for the tech publishing industry are those manual books, which follow a relative mature format of writing, and are produced in bulk each year. If they are going away, this might speak trouble for the whole industry.
But that is just my hypothesis for now, I hope the industry find a way to sustain itself.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#23Writing 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 y…
> 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?
Maybe. The author needs to write in a way that makes the book digestible to most people. Prompts allow me to get a version that's tailor-made for me.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#24I think it's changing them. You still need a person to think of the topics we want to talk about, that are interesting to talk about. But AI can help gather the info around these topics. If we 100% rely on AI for topics and content our content will be flat and not interesting.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#25Published works are more authoritative. With ChatGPT you're getting something broader, more creative, and possibly wrong.
A book is also helpful when you don't know what you don't know.
LLMs will help on specific problems sure. But there can be entire swaths of options and entire areas you may not have considered.
Java for example has some nice native support for multithreading. However, threads have never been the only option for asynchronous work, and many of the options are situational. Knowing those options can help tremendously in implementation.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#26Earlier 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.
A big part of book sales comes from the personality of the author and their pitches to the audience.
An LLM has no charisma and the time of buying a book from an AI being "cool" has already come and gone.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That doesn't work. It can't think through corner cases, because LLMs don't think. They aren't actually synthesizing or revising anything.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#28Writing 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 y…
Agreed completely.
LLMs are making the quick jot to Stack Overflow obsolete, which solves your immediate problems using the least amount of brainpower.
They are also making reference-style documentation and long-form books more important than ever, since you still need to learn things and correct your own knowledge biases.
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#29Earlier 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.
Wild prediction, but even if we pretend it happens it does not answer my question. What’s the business model, again?
Re: Ask HN: Is ChatGPT making tech publishing obsolete?
#30Earlier 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)?
There is no money in creation. You can do with that what you will.
A controversial statement without any backing arguments. Even if it is true in some limited ways thanks to ChatGPT, remember that right as we speak someone is getting paid big bucks for creating ChatGPT. Do with that what you will.