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The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

saulcosta.com

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#31
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that other sources are infallible? Almost every source is wrong sometimes. ChatGPT is as good as my professors were in college. They would regularly say things that were just completely incorrect but were knowledgeable and correct often enough to be helpful.

How do you know that ChatGPT is as good as your professors in college? How do you know that they aren't just as good as a cable news pundit? Or a relatively uninformed Reddit commenter?

How do you compare anybody like that?

All I'm saying is that ChatGPT is knowledgeable. It has absorbed a ton of information and can distribute that information fairly well. I don't think that can be argued with.

Yes, it's completely wrong sometimes but the exact same can be said for any human (my professors, the cable news pundit, average redditor).

To say I can't learn from it doesn't make any sense. I have learned everything from flawed sources. We all have.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#32
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that other sources are infallible? Almost every source is wrong sometimes. ChatGPT is as good as my professors were in college. They would regularly say things that were just completely incorrect but were knowledgeable and correct often enough to be helpful.

Reminds me of people being up in arms when Wikipedia turned up because anyone could contribute. Seems like the same thing is still happening.

It is quite similar, isn't it? To say that a potentially flawed source of information is worthless is a silly extreme.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#33
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that other sources are infallible? Almost every source is wrong sometimes. ChatGPT is as good as my professors were in college. They would regularly say things that were just completely incorrect but were knowledgeable and correct often enough to be helpful.

Reminds me of people being up in arms when Wikipedia turned up because anyone could contribute. Seems like the same thing is still happening.

Wikipedia works since the world is full of pedantic sticklers. If you remove the pedantic sticklers then wikipedia would no longer work, it would just be full of bias or bullshit, so we should be thankful for all the pedantic sticklers out there.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#34
post #2

This is terrible. The idea of ChatGPT being able to fill in gaps of not knowing what you don’t know is appealing, but you need to actually know something about the topic to evaluate ChatGPTs ability. This is just spewing pure nonsense, and the author thinks he has learned something from it.

> but you need to actually know something about the topic to evaluate ChatGPTs ability. I don't necessarily think you have to, but you have to be ready to look up further, more trustworthy sources after your discussion with ChatGPT.

spoiler: the vast vast vast vast vast majority absolutely will not ever do that

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a quibble, but "hundreds of millions of people" seems high by an order of magnitude or two. That would be around 1 in every 20 people in the world. But this is known. Has OpenAI released usage figures?

> ChatGPT has more than 100 million users within the first two months of its launch and has more than 13 million daily visitors as of 2023. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...

I'm on a one-person crusade against that 100m user number. It comes from a report released by a company that gathers analytics from people who were convinced to install dodgy browser extensions!

I made some notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/19/how-chatgpt-kicked-off... - I think ChatGPT had 30m users by Feb 3rd (a date later than that 100m number), because "two people with knowledge of the figures" leaked that to Kevin Roose at the NY Times.

I'm sure it's gone up a bunch since then. Maybe it has hit 100m even - but I don't think that original 100m number should be trusted by anyone.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#36
post #9
post #2

This is terrible. The idea of ChatGPT being able to fill in gaps of not knowing what you don’t know is appealing, but you need to actually know something about the topic to evaluate ChatGPTs ability. This is just spewing pure nonsense, and the author thinks he has learned something from it.

Do you think that other sources are infallible? Almost every source is wrong sometimes. ChatGPT is as good as my professors were in college. They would regularly say things that were just completely incorrect but were knowledgeable and correct often enough to be helpful.

Unfortunately this says more about your alma mater than anything else.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#37
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part? This was 3 years ago. The tools are much better now. Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots': https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52860247

The claim might be true but this evidence does not establish it. A company having planned to replace a kind of job with AI is quite distinct from the number of that kind of job falling as a result of AI.

I agree, millions is entirely unknowable right now, but there were two distinct statements and you didn’t say which you wanted a citation for, so I supplied a citation for the verifiable statement and asked which you were challenging.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#38
post #2

This is terrible. The idea of ChatGPT being able to fill in gaps of not knowing what you don’t know is appealing, but you need to actually know something about the topic to evaluate ChatGPTs ability. This is just spewing pure nonsense, and the author thinks he has learned something from it.

This. If you've been following GPT at all you'd be crazy to try to use it to learn new things. It's very clear the output is not accurate, and prone to hallucination, and requires an already knowledgable user to judge its veracity and validity.

I was worried something like this would happen. AI will usher in a dark age thanks to overfitting and convenience and naivety. It's going to be like the current info literacy crisis raised to the nth degree.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#39
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that ChatGPT is as good as your professors in college? How do you know that they aren't just as good as a cable news pundit? Or a relatively uninformed Reddit commenter?

How do you compare anybody like that? All I'm saying is that ChatGPT is knowledgeable. It has absorbed a ton of information and can distribute that information fairly well. I don't think that can be argued with. Yes, it's completely wrong sometimes but the exact same can be said for any human (my professors, the cable news pundit, average redditor). To say I can't learn from it doesn't make any sense. I have learned…

> How do you compare anybody like that?

I was thinking maybe you had some specific metrics or examples in mind since it's your own comparison...

The rest of your post reads like the old "there are two possible outcomes therefore the odds are 50/50" probability fallacy.

Do I believe it's more useful than chatroullette? Yes. Does that mean it's as useful as a college professor on a given subject? That's a very different claim, and would need some serious evaluation and demonstration.

Re: The Role of AI in Accelerating Skill Development

#40

> In contrast to AI’s many benefits is the fact that it will displace millions of people around the world from their current workplace roles, especially those in white-collar jobs such as customer service, copywriting, and computer programming. It has already started to do so. Citation needed.

GPT-4 has increased my work output just over 10-fold. That is 9 jobs which will not exist because of GPT-4.
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