I wish GPT4 had never happened • Hacker News Board

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#491

Post by _fat_santa » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #156

Funny thing - I've been using ChatGPT as a programming assistant. My experience with it is that the more knowledgeable I am at the domain, the more useful it is. It often generates code that won't compile or won't run correctly, but that sort of goes in the correct direction, enough that I can spot the blunders and refine my questions. Quite often I even learn a few new things when using it to explore libraries and f…

By this logic, Priya (the subject of the authors post) would not loose her job but rather just become more productive at her job. And I think that's the key to this whole "GPT4 is taking our jobs argument" that people need to understand, GPT is a bit like Autopilot in a Tesla, it can do the work for you but you still need a trained person there to guide it.

Folks like Priya will not loose their jobs IMO, the company would still need them to provide that last line of validation on data because you just can't blindly trust GPT (I don't know if we will ever be able to bindly trust it), rather the scenario I see is that their team at work would actually be able to stay on top of their assignments instead of constantly being overworked.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#492

Post by pavlov » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

kofejnik wrote: post #473

HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

Define “fairly”

The grandparent comment does contain a definition:

“A […] system that […] would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier”

That would be a fair system regardless of the specifics of how it’s achieved.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#493

Post by ImHereToVote » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

blibble wrote: post #142

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you need to let go of the idea that humanity actually has direct control of how things unfold. Instead focus on your own situation. The idea there is a possibility of an “actual strategy” is I think the real flaw. Government can try to regulate products but given the 8 billion people and numerous advanced economies on the planet any locations that attempts to restrict products that use LLMs for proposed harm…

> Government can try to regulate products but given the 8 billion people and numerous advanced economies on the planet any locations that attempts to restrict products that use LLMs for proposed harm instead of realized harm will probably put themselves at a disadvantage. we put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with child labour laws too data privacy law, banning slavery, emission laws, etc. to have a fair and…

>we put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with child labour laws too

You are in luck. We are about to do an Atlas Shrugged on this in many states. We now have kids working in meat packing plants.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/08/arkansas-bil...

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/feb/17/underage-child-l...

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#494

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

jmerz wrote: post #373

mort96 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.

I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was. You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war. If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd…

People have a profound recency bias. I wonder if it's that people don't study history enough but I'm always amazed at posts like the grandparent's, which talk about oligarchs today discounting the influence of, you know, actual oligarchs, as in those few who legitimately ruled over others.

The system we have today is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#495

Post by AJ007 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

TrueDuality wrote: post #309

netbioserror wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair. I've been through some of that befo…

I think your response is equally naive. I am still largely undecided on whether something like a universal basic income would actually be a net positive for society, but the fallacy that receiving a fixed income immediately means that people won't do something productive with their time is ridiculous. I can't imagine _not_ working, I develop open source software in my free time and I would spend more time producing s…

It isn't about productivity by itself. It is about aligning production with consumption. It is wildly naive of Westerners to believe there is so much excess production in the world that we can just pay people to not work. The US got their "UBI" in 2020, and it was Americans sitting around while foreigners labored in factories, docks, and ships to produce and deliver the consumed products.

Yes, there is a tremendous amount of waste in the global economy, but if we want to improve quality of life then we should focus on the mechanisms which cause that waste in the first place (e.g. targeting GDP growth.) If we solved those excesses (a very tall order), then why would it be fair for one group to be over-consume at the cost of another groups over-production?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#496

Post by paulcole » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

netbioserror wrote: post #86

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #29

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair. I've been through some of that befo…

> Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working

Only because it’s the only thing they know. If “work” wasn’t a constant in human life you’d see people adapt to finding meaning and fulfillment in something else.

> Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair

I’ve taken multiple year hiatuses from work (living very cheaply) and they are the best years of my life. Wake up, go for a run/walk, go to the gym, read a book, go to the coffeeshop, make lunch, go to the movies, go on dates, use the internet. Absolutely incredible.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#497

Post by renonce » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #227

hparadiz wrote: post #93

I asked GPT4 to write me a simple document. Took like 9 tries and I had to proof read it and make adjustments. And that's with a simple paragraph in a written language. Forget about doing the header and the footer properly. It's silly that I have to spell it out on HN of all places. Writing code is much more complex. There's a reason we call the job "Software Engineer". GPT doesn't know what it doesn't know. It doesn…

When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far... We are just barely touching digital general intelligence, and we're not even using API enabled versions that use tooling. And that's what we have today. Tell me, what is AI going to do tomorrow? >If you're worried about GPT taking over your job you just show your own lack of knowledge and experience. Oh, I'm glad you popped ou…

> Oh, I'm glad you popped out of the womb fully trained. As for the rest of us we have to go through a learning curve of gaining experience that takes years.

You did pop out of the womb fully trained to use ChatGPT. Now you're left with the task of using it correctly and spotting its mistakes, which is a subject that by definition can only be done by humans.

Right now ChatGPT is as much as its training data and it doesn't understand what it's not trained to understand. A lot of real-world experience remain in human brains and not recorded in any digital form.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#498

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #398

pixl97 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see LLM models not as the end of society, This is because you're used to normal technological development scaling. Unfortunately with AI we are unsure at this point if our old paradigms still apply. What happens with society really depends on where we are on the technology growth curve. If LLMs plateau for a while and we don't see significant growth in their abilities, then we'll just see pretty massive technologi…

That's because you're used to normal technological development hype. Every few years a shiny new toy enters the hype cycle, only to fall out of favor as things stop advancing as people expected. LLMs are impressive at natural language processing (which is a damn hard problem to solve), and can both parse and generate natural language at a satisfactory level. It's an interesting facet of AI, but it also has some glari…

as a curiosity - which technological hype of the last 20 years does AI / LLMs most remind you of?

Surely there are differences between some of them, or are they all the same to you?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#499

Post by ImHereToVote » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

Nifty3929 wrote: post #487

ImHereToVote wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really is the way. What use are politicians if they don't make laws that make people's lives easier. To bad the United States isn't a democracy like many European countries are.

How does blocking Uber make people's lives easier? Or did you just mean easier for the taxi drivers because they can extract political rents using the government as their tool, at the expense of broader society?

I think having stronger conditions for the working class will be great for society since there will be more consumers for all that added productivity.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#500

Post by EamonnMR » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

crop_rotation wrote: post #182

adhocmobility wrote: post #123

Hi everyone, author of the article here. I'm sorry if the article sounds overly pessimistic. I'm not making any claims with this article. I'm not proposing anything either. I do think technological progress is a good thing, even in this case. But I wrote this blog because I did have an emotional response to this technology, and wanted to pen down my thoughts. Its one thing to look at a report about the economic impac…

Thank you for penning down your emotional response. HN is mostly in denial of anything ChatGPT (most people haven't used GPT4 and keep pasting results of GPT3.5). The thing is that there is nothing other than denial that people can express. Saying that their jobs will become much less relevant is just too hard for almost anyone to swallow. People in this thread keep talking about productivity improvements, not realis…

UBI is about as likely to happen as OpenAI deleting GPT4 and never training another model, so if we're picking patiently absurd scenarios I pick that one.