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ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

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Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#291

Post by steveBK123 »

ravenstine wrote: post #189
steveBK123 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will find a niche, but first it will get all blown out of proportion like voice assistants did. Everything was going to be voice, voice OS, no more phones, blah blah blah. Half the time I use mine, I am swearing at it for screwing up. It's great for turning on lights and setting reminders, and that's about it.. 7 years later.

I find it funny people are still using these voice "assistants" despite the frequent frustration. Alexa gets it wrong more than half the time when people I know try to use it, but they seem to still want to believe.

All of these “AI/ML” driven products seem to have a whizz-bang initial release where they seem 80% ready and then never come close to the remaining 5/10/15/20%

Hell I used dragon naturally speaking in the late 90s and the stuff now doesn’t even feel 10x better despite billions invested and 10000x the compute.

Self driving cars feels similar. Always five year away from mass market.

We can tune to be pretty good most of the time, but being fully good enough all the time out to a bunch of 9s just ends up being a moonshot by comparison.

Really curious how much better in what dimensions these generative / LLMs will actually get in 5/10/15 years.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#292

Post by codeisawesome »

the_af wrote: post #249

Since this article was written by Ted Chiang, just for fun I asked ChatGPT to summarize the plot of "Understand". Apparently ChatGPT thinks "Understand" is about the government who is pursuing someone called Gary Whittle who has superintelligence (well, at least it got one detail right). When challenged ("no, the government is not the antagonist, but there is one person ...") ChatGPT amends its summary to this: > "Ge…

To stretch the thumbnail analogy from other threads, that feels like the “thumbnail” returned was a horse when you asked it to snapshot a car. Got the “mode of transport” intention correctly but gave you super inaccurate details..

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#293

Post by paulclinger »

nneonneo wrote: post #84

This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing. This sentence in particular: > Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. It seems obvious that future GPTs should not be trained on the current GPT's output, just as future DALL-Es should…

> This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing.

This is not a surprise, as the author is Ted Chiang, who is the award winning novelist and the author of "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", "Tower of Babylon" and other science fiction works. I had a pleasure of once having coffee with him while talking about his thoughts on some of the topics in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", which is a very enjoyable book that may be of interest to some HN readers.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#294

Post by javajosh »

paulclinger wrote: post #293
nneonneo wrote: post #84

This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing. This sentence in particular: > Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. It seems obvious that future GPTs should not be trained on the current GPT's output, just as future DALL-Es should…

> This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing. This is not a surprise, as the author is Ted Chiang, who is the award winning novelist and the author of "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", "Tower of Babylon" and other science fiction works. I had a pleasure of once having coffee with him while talking about his thoughts on some of the topics in "The Lifecycle of Softwar…

Chiang's short stories are beautiful; he reminds me of Stanislaw Lem, brilliant, creative, and ahead of his time. I was surprised they made Arrival into a movie (and that it was as good as it was).

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#295

Post by Agentlien »

rxhernandez wrote: post #264
pegasus wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he misses in this analogy is that part of what produces the "blur" is the superimposing of many relevan paragraphs found on the web into one. This mechanism can be very useful, because it could average out errors and give one a less one-sided perspective on a particular issue. It doesn't always work like this, but hopefully it will more and more. Also, even more useful is to do a cluster analysis of the existant…

If anything, the average has far more errors in it. It's a trope on Reddit that experts get downvoted while amateurs who reflect the consensus of other amateurs get upvoted and repeated. Amateurs tend to outnumber experts in real life anyways, having their opinions become more authoritative (because some "AI" repeats it) is probably not a great direction to head in.

This is very frustrating. Some smaller communities on Reddit have a high concentration of domain experts and they're great.

One community in particular is huge and mainly consists of beginners. They regularly drown out and downvote the few who actually know the subject matter. To add insult to injury they even mock experts with caricatures based around how they disagree with the amateurs.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#296

Post by havercosine »

thundergolfer wrote: post #45

> ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it. “‘blur’ tool for paragraphs” is such a good way of describing the most prominent and remarkable skill of ChatGPT. It is fun, but so obviously trades off against what makes paragraphs great. It is apt that this essay against Chat…

The blur is addictive because it feeds a feedback loop: rather than tiring out your brain on understanding one thing in detail, you can watch two summaries and have a vague sense of understanding. It allows to jump to next novelty, always feeding the system 1 of the brain but system 2 is rarely brought in picture.

I wonder if this will lead to a stratification of work in the society: lot of jobs can operate on the blur. "Just give me enough to get my job done". But fewer (critical and hopefully highly paid) people will be engaged in a profession where understanding the details is the job and there's no way around it.

In Asimov's foundation novel this is a recurring theme: they can't find people who can work on designing or maintaining nuclear power. This eventually leads to stagnation. AI tools can prevent this stagnation only if mankind uses the freeing of mental burden with the help of AI to work on higher set of problems. But if the tools are used merely as butlers then the pessimistic outcome is more likely.

The general tendency to lack of details can also give edge in some cases. Imagine if everyone is using similar AI tools to understand company annual reports which gives a nice, tiktok style summary. Then an investor doing the dirty work to go through the details may find things that are missed by the 'algo'.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#297

Post by amake »

eurekin wrote: post #183
thundergolfer wrote: post #45

> ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it. “‘blur’ tool for paragraphs” is such a good way of describing the most prominent and remarkable skill of ChatGPT. It is fun, but so obviously trades off against what makes paragraphs great. It is apt that this essay against Chat…

That reminds me... There is a interestingly relevant japaneese phrase for, to put it nicely, not a bright or sharp person: baka. Supposedly, if I'm remembering last discussion with a japaneese speaker correctly, the same stem is used for "blur", or "blurry" (bokeh, bokeshi). Which is kind of interesting parallel here

baka and boke are unrelated words.

The overlap is that the verb "bokeru" and its root "boke" can be used to describe someone losing their mental faculties e.g. through age or disease such as Alzheimer's, and by extension it can be used as an insult to mean "stupid" as well. But etymologically there is no connection.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#298

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

pessimizer wrote: post #232
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auto-spellcheckers make me a better writer, it's just a fact, I tend to misspell a lot. I don't know how one of the great literature writers would use ChatGPT, otherwise I would be a great literature writer, but I can tell you that lots of writers around 1920-1950 wrote love letters to their typewriters, from André Breton and other surrealists [1] to Isaac Asimov, Gabriel García Márquez, and so on. And plenty of edit…

Better spellers aren't better writers. Spelling is an editor's assistant's job. You might as well say that a better pencil sharpener makes you a better writer.

Absolutely untrue, all the energy not spent trying to figure out how to spell a tricky word is energy saved, and if at least one iota of that energy goes into improving the writing itself, better spellcheckers make you a better writer, in the least the writing will be actually readable. Haven't written with a pencil to need sharpening in a decade or so, but it certainly can't be helpful to be annoyed at a pencil unable to write. Lots of writers emphasize routine in order to be a good writer, from Immanuel Kant, for whom routine leads even to better thinking, to James Patterson, for whom routine means being able to write a book in every day ending with y. Having tools not only not break the routine, but enhance it, is paramount.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#300

Post by runald »

This submission got buried quickly to third page, despite having lots of comments and high karma point. It really makes me think that HN (or everywhere else) is being astroturfed by a movement that pushes hard for the anthromorphized stochastic parrot.
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