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The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

economist.com

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Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#31

Post by porridgeraisin »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17
azinman2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The printing press takes your ideas that you already wrote and increases distribution. Deep research is writing the text for you. That’s completely different.

I disagree, it’s just another step in the automation of knowledge distribution that’s been going on for a long long time. Every step someone has lamented that we lost something, maybe starting with speech itself, and the invention of writing taking away from oral tradition, scrolls, books, the printing press, the World Wide Web, etc… I was just wowing to myself the other day that a local 70b 4q 40GB model on my Mac b…

Just saying that for 24GB you can get all of wikipedia losslessly compressed on your laptop.

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#32

Post by visarga »

bruce511 wrote: post #30
aeternum wrote: post #6

We could fix it all with a single law: All federally funded research papers must be published with full open access. The issue is the models can mostly only access abstracts (same as the majority of humans!) and thus we are back to the dark ages where knowledge is hoarded by the aristocrats in their ivory towers of academia.

Right now, today, nothing stops academia from publishing every paper they write to be open to all. The internet is there and publishing is free. The fact that they don't implies that they perceive some value is provided by publishing in the traditional way. Assuming that journals die as a result of your law (why would people pay for a journal anymore?) is it worth considering that value (perceived or real) before adv…

> they perceive some value is provided by publishing in the traditional way

Yes, but it provides value only for scientist careers, not for science.

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#33

Post by Foobar8568 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17
azinman2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The printing press takes your ideas that you already wrote and increases distribution. Deep research is writing the text for you. That’s completely different.

I disagree, it’s just another step in the automation of knowledge distribution that’s been going on for a long long time. Every step someone has lamented that we lost something, maybe starting with speech itself, and the invention of writing taking away from oral tradition, scrolls, books, the printing press, the World Wide Web, etc… I was just wowing to myself the other day that a local 70b 4q 40GB model on my Mac b…

While the 400B "knowledge" is reliable and replaces most of my googling, the 70B are not, nor their "reasoning".

So until we can have these models locally, running at 10-20token /sec minimum...

I am fairly hype up over gen AI but we are only at the start of this revolution, and will require a few more years for niche domains, or company knowledge (RAG doesn't cut it, fine tuning too expensive) and we aren't tackling all the media related.

And because of hallucinations,which they require to work, they can't be reliable at 100% or be truly use without supervision.

I feel it looks like internet back in the 90s, we were saying it as a new way to connect people, share knowledge, only to have echo chambers and porn distribution as few take away. I kid I kid.

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#34

Post by visarga »

azinman2 wrote: post #3

The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. This will be most dramatic for the youth in both school learning as well as in the field. Unfortunately I don’t realistically see another path in any reasonable time unless the world takes a radical turn away from AI (extremely unlikely).

> The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier.

Wasn't the same thing when we switched from books to web? We lost the ability for long reads, and instead just search and click directly to specific information, losing the larger context. And we adapted, we have a whole search culture, reputation systems, new patterns of interaction with information.

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#35

Post by [deleted] »

azinman2 wrote: post #14
Workaccount2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The models that exist right now would still be considered alpha LLMs. Even a half decent video game takes longer to make than the time since GPT3.5 launched. If they still are at this level in 2-3 years, then yeah, it will likely cause a bunch of bad downstream effects. But at least recognize that it is still a few years too early to judge.

Students are already using it for their homework, now.

[deleted]

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#36

Post by nestorD »

hi_hi wrote: post #11

We know the limitations of current LLM AI. I didn't read the article. Is there anything in these "dangers" that isn't currently known, mainly hallucination related? All these anti LLM articles are starting to become as tiresome as the pro LLM ones.

Yes.

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#37

Post by azinman2 »

visarga wrote: post #34
azinman2 wrote: post #3

The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. This will be most dramatic for the youth in both school learning as well as in the field. Unfortunately I don’t realistically see another path in any reasonable time unless the world takes a radical turn away from AI (extremely unlikely).

> The world is going to become stupider because it’s easier. Wasn't the same thing when we switched from books to web? We lost the ability for long reads, and instead just search and click directly to specific information, losing the larger context. And we adapted, we have a whole search culture, reputation systems, new patterns of interaction with information.

Web didn’t really replace long reads. You didn’t have a searchable question that you’d previously read hundreds of pages for. More and more short form content started coming out, then social media, all of which both replaced books as entertainment while simultaneously reducing attention span. But it’s not just online media - look at modern tv/film and watch old… the cuts were so much slower previously. That’s probably caused by the changes from web/social media, more than the other way around.

However the extent that the web could replace your work is very minimal because you’d be copy/pasting some existing untailored source. Now, we can take your tailored question / task and have it just completed for you. Doing is a huge part of learning, and if you don’t do, you won’t learn.

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#38

Post by tehjoker »

visarga wrote: post #32
bruce511 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, today, nothing stops academia from publishing every paper they write to be open to all. The internet is there and publishing is free. The fact that they don't implies that they perceive some value is provided by publishing in the traditional way. Assuming that journals die as a result of your law (why would people pay for a journal anymore?) is it worth considering that value (perceived or real) before adv…

> they perceive some value is provided by publishing in the traditional way Yes, but it provides value only for scientist careers, not for science.

well it also gives some indication of what to read too, hard to filter a firehose on top of your dayjob, but it’s hard to believe that it needs to be this expensive

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#39

Post by molteanu »

I have another idea! It's just an idea or a feeling.

My feeling is that work interaction has decreased lately, with all these assistants. I, for one, don't get any questions and don't have any technical interactions not even with junior developers. I don't get asked "how can I implement this, give me some clues" or "do you know a book or some articles I can read on this or that subject?"

I feel the slack channels have also kinda dried up. There's the occasional meme or dog pictures but very little technical discussion, asking for an opinion, framing one's ideas and thoughts on a subject in writing, exchanging opinions with others, etc.

There is still the occasional code review, sure. At this point, I can spot the code written with AI. It has the same feel, the same verbosity, always the same try/catch for everything, always awaits everything, same doxygen-style of comments, always assigning variables for everything. I gave my opinions in the beginning, some things were adapted. But it's a loosing battle. AI can write code faster than I can review it.

Three years ago, some colleagues would ask on slack to proofread their client-facing documents. Now they don't.

Tldr: human interaction is decreasing due to people not needing help from other people that often, similarly to ordering your food and not knocking on your neighbors door to ask for a slice of bread since you've ran out of and everything is closed (we did that, and the neighbors too, 30 years ago)

Re: The danger of relying on OpenAI's Deep Research

#40

Post by azinman2 »

yunwal wrote: post #19
azinman2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because all your writing is being done for you. All your homework is done for you. You go to start coding as an engineer, you just copy/paste from an AI until it runs. No need to think, no need to try to figure it out for yourself, no need to learn anything.

Great, go get yourself 4 phds and a 600k/year job if ai can do everything for you! Meanwhile the rest of us in the real world will continue understanding the limits of the tools we use.

1 PhD was enough for me.

I think you’re vastly overestimating the amount of work people either want to do or pay for. A worse version that’s nearly free or instant will win regardless of limitations the majority of the time.

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