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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

hedgehogreview.com

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Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#41

Post by jiggawatts »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

Something I noticed a long time ago is that going from 90% correct to 95% correct is not a 5% difference, it’s a 2x difference. As you approach 100%, the last few 0.01% error rates going away make a qualitative difference.

“Computer” used to be a job, and human error rates are on the order of 1-2% no matter what level of training or experience they had. Work had to be done in triplicate and cross-checked if it mattered.

Digital computers are down to error rates roughly 10e-15 to 10e-22 and are hence treated as nearly infallible. We regularly write code routines where a trillion steps have to be executed flawlessly in sequence for things not to explode!

AIs can now output maybe 1K to 2K tokens in a sequence before they make a mistake. That’s 99.9% to 99.95%! Better than human already.

Don’t believe me?

Write me a 500 line program with pen and paper (not pencil!) and have it work the first time!

I’ve seen Gemini Pro 2.5 do this in a useful way.

As the error rates drop, the length of usefully correct sequences will get to 10K, then 100K, and maybe… who knows?

There was just a press release today about Gemini Diffusion that can alter already-generated tokens to correct mistakes.

Error rates will drop.

Useful output length will go up.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#42

Post by wiseowise »

AI is gimmick, smartphones are gimmick, computers are gimmick, automation is gimmick, books are gimmick, only %MY_ENLIGHTMENT% is not.

Seriously, I understand saying something lime this about crypto or whatever meme of the day, but even current LLMs are literal magic. Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as

> Malesic argues that AI hype—especially in education—is a shallow gimmick: it overpromises revolutionary change but delivers banal, low-value outputs. True teaching thrives on slow, sacrificial human labor and deep discussion, which no AI shortcut can replicate.

Hardly any revolutionary thought.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#43

Post by babyent »

For AI to be useful, it needs smart humans to progress its knowledge base.

An educators job (like an actual teacher) should be to help people (key) progress and be smarter humans.

Deal with progress.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#44

Post by badmintonbaseba »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I mostly use it as a replacement of a search engine and exploration, mostly for subjects that I'm learning from scratch, and I don't have a good grasp of the official documentation and good keywords yet. It competes with searching for guides in traditional search engines, but that's easy to beat with today's SEO infested web.

Its quality seems to vary wildly between various subjects, but annoyingly it presents itself with uniform confidence.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#45

Post by bsaul »

loveparade wrote: post #23
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I use LLMs to check solutions for graduate level math and physics problem I'm working on. Can I 100% trust their final output? Of course not, but I know enough about the domain to tell whether they discovered mistakes in my solutions or not. And they do a pretty good job and have found mistakes in my reasoning many times. I also use them for various coding tasks and they, together with agent frameworks, regularly do…

i could have written all of this myself. I use it exactly for the same purposes ( except i don't do undergrad physics, just maths) and with the same outcome.

It's also pretty useful for brainstorming : talking to AI helps you refine your thoughts. It probably won't give you any innovative idea, only a survey of mainstream ones, but it's a pretty good start for thinking about a problem.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#46

Post by bushbaba »

About 60% of my job is writing. Writing slack, writing code, writing design docs, writing strategies, writing calibrations.

ChatGPT has allowed me to write 50%+ faster with 50%+ better quality. It’s been one of the largest productivity boosts in the last 10+ years.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#47

Post by cess11 »

ddxv wrote: post #3

I personally feel like some of the AI hype is driven by it's ability to create flashy demos which become dead end projects. It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what? I think in the same way that image generation is akin to clipart (wildly useful, but lacking in depth and meaning)…

"It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what?"

Which we already had, it's just a 'git clone https://github.com/whatevs/huh' away, or doing one of millions of tutorials on whatever topic. Pretty much everyone who can build something out of Elixir/Phoenix has a chat app, an e-commerce store and a scraping platform just laying around.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#48

Post by itchyjunk »

jrflowers wrote: post #37
liamwire wrote: post #19

I read the entire essay. It comes across wholly uninspired. Some thoughts: > But do the apologists even believe it themselves? Latham, the professor of strategy, gives away the game at the end of his reverie. “None of this can happen, though,” he writes, “if professors and administrators continue to have their heads in the sand.” So it’s not inevitable after all? Whoops. This self-assured ‘gotcha’ attitude is pungent…

> Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper. >Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point? I like that you point out here that the author clearly has a strong opinion, and then immediately say that the act of expressing that opinion may suggest that they do not hold that opinion at all.…

This sounds like the "self-assured gotcha" the parent is frowning about.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#50

Post by bsaul »

Hoasi wrote: post #26
admissionsguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong. Have been wondering this ever since 1 week after the initial ChatGPT release. My cynical take is that most people don't do real work (i.e. one that is objectively evaluated against reality), so are not able to see the difference between a gimmick and the real thing. Most people are in the business of making impressions,…

> It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out. But then again, it's not as if markets always rewarded real work either.

Ultimately markets do ask the only relevant question : are people going to pay for LLMs' output.
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