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What it feels like to work in AI right now

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#541

Post by tuatoru »

brookst wrote: post #180
cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

You’re asking “what’s so big about GUIs? Literally nobody has asked to move a pointer around a screen”. It’s the use cases these thing enable that are important. Today, I wrote a draft product announcement. Only after I was done did I realize I had written it in a really impersonal third person (“users will be able to”). No big deal, but maybe 10-20 minutes of work to make it energetic and second person (“now you can…

Most of the economy involves moving around physical things. Construction, transport, nursing and related health occupations (physiotherapy, home aid, etc.), retail and wholesale logistics. Manufacturing employs another chunk. Services for agriculture, fishing, mining also employ more people than are directly employed in those industries and are mostly to do with machines and equipment. Utilities.

Most of the rest is high-touch. People want interactions with humans for important stuff, not with AI. Remote teaching was an unmitigated disaster for most school students: how will AI teachers do, do you think? Attempts at robot police and security guards haven't gone down very well to date. It'll be a while before there are AI EMTs and firemen.

So there are grounds for skepticism.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#542

Post by revelio »

fock wrote: post #279
rcpt wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah great interview style. It's non stop content.

I wonder if we saw the same video - or maybe it is just ChatGPT being "great" in the wild? I see one guy asking another guy simple questions and getting weaselwords for an answer.

The interviewer and his questions is in some way more impressive than the answers, which is weird.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#543

Post by adammarples »

ThalesX wrote: post #518
jiggawatts wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can program GPT in English. Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English . ENGLISH! You're complaining about the first nuclear test bomb being impractical and uninteresting. How will this change the world? That huge monstrosity had to be affixed to the top of a test gantry and took years of effort by a veritable army of the best and brightest to make! No way it could change war, or geopolitics, or anything.…

> You can program GPT in English. > Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English. ENGLISH! How? Let me repeat that: How? I had a little script that from time to time parses a list of jobs from a specific board, extracts some categories, inserts them into an SQLite and have a frontend that displays them to me in a way I want. The board has since changed some things which would mean maybe 2 hours of commitment fr…

Honestly don't think it will be long before gpt can read this comment, then politely ask you for the urls of the job board and your git repo and 2 seconds later you will have a pull request to review

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#544

Post by NikolaNovak »

rimliu wrote: post #10
NikolaNovak wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you mean; but as external observer to both, I see crypto as having failed to provide or prove any particularly productive use; and chatGPT, for all its flaws, has been useful to me daily for last 2 months - and not in some crazy make-money-in-suspicious-ways sense, but like learning french and python and figuring out new concepts and stuff. But that's sample n=1 I suppose, there are both people that believ…

I wonder how much of usefulness of ChatGPT that some report is caused by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect Because it is new, and cool, and fascinating people are spending a bit more time with a bit more focus on the task with it compared to the old ways, hence the productivity increase. Once the novelty wears off…

possibly. But I find it the opposite - there's more and more use I find in it as time passes. I am encouraging my friends to play with it, to figure out for themselves when it's useful and when it's not.

For me, It's like having a learning companion, and it makes it easier for me to tackle new things when I can "brainstorm" and ask random (basic) questions.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#545

Post by RHSman2 »

davesque wrote: post #45
RHSman2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature, not just tech

Is it though? I remember feeling much more positive about society roughly 20 years ago.

20 years ago was the Golden Years. We thought it was just like that but no. It isn’t.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#546

Post by alexvoda »

jiggawatts wrote: post #395
nwienert wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean Google revolutionized search. Apple revolutionized personal computing. OpenAI revolutionized… rewriting things with slightly different wording? I’ve seen so many breathless people posting “this would have taken me so long to search” and then I type 3 keywords from their massive prompt they crafted and find it instantly on Google. We’re talking 1000x or more faster. I feel like the same is happening in your com…

You can program GPT in English. Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English . ENGLISH! You're complaining about the first nuclear test bomb being impractical and uninteresting. How will this change the world? That huge monstrosity had to be affixed to the top of a test gantry and took years of effort by a veritable army of the best and brightest to make! No way it could change war, or geopolitics, or anything.…

You can't program GTP in anything if you can't program.

If your prompt is garbage then the output will be garbage and if you don't know how to program you won't even realize the output was garbage.

It's not the language part of programming language that is hard. It's the programming part because it means you have to have a good understanding of what you want. Just like a human programmer won't read your mind an AI programmer won't read your mind either.

But I can already foresee bosses dismissing employees that raise issues (performance, maintainability, scalability, etc., etc.) by saying "Look, the AI can do it. So if it can do it you can do it too.". I foresee this because I have already seen it.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#547

Post by version_five »

donkeyd wrote: post #511
version_five wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic given yours and others emphasis on my choosing "chatbot" to summarise llms as a reason to dismiss my comment, along with the rest of the pedantry. The upstream post dismissed / insulted the person for questioning value, which was what I called out. If you really had wanted to get into the "HN rules" game, you could at least have cited "don't be snarky"

> dismissed / insulted the person That wasn't even remotely my goal and I'm disappointed that my choice of words made it seem like it was. I purposefully added quotes to the word 'real' in my comment since any business is a real business and made it clear it was an assumption, not a fact. It's just that many tech workers often haven't worked outside of tech and therefore are blind to issues outside of the tech world,…

Fair enough, thanks for clarifying.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#548

Post by IanCal »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #436
snowe2010 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT 4 is quite astounding. It might be wrong on occasion, but it will easily point you in the right direction most of the time. It still messes up, but like a twentieth of what 3.5 did. Honestly it is like an incredible rubber ducky for me. Not only can I just talk like I’m talking to a rubber duck but I can get fast, mostly informed, feedback that unblocks me. If I have a bunch of things competing for my attention I…

Is a 95% reduction in errors an exaggeration or is it really that much better? Might just need to drop the $20/mo if it's really improved that much.

My only kind of quantitative answer is that I had 3.5 creating ember templates & data and it would get the templates mostly ok after a couple of iterations of fixing errors, almost never on the first shot (if ever). Often wouldn't quite get it in two, and data structures would often be kinda there but not quite. Required a lot more care with the prompts. 4 gave me working things every time first time (except only where it did things that were fine in a template but not currently supported by the custom framework I'm using them in), and didn't need as much hand holding.

Qualitatively, it's wildly different from gpt-3.5-turbo for discussions. 3.5 feels a little formulaic after a while with some kinds of questions. 4 is much more like talking to an intelligent person. It's not perfect, but I'm flipping between discussing a sporting thing, then medical malpractice, legal issues, technical specifications and it's doing extremely well.

If it's affordable for you, I'd really recommend trying it.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#549

Post by IanCal »

revelio wrote: post #535
AussieWog93 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 95% reduction in errors an exaggeration or is it really that much better? Might just need to drop the $20/mo if it's really improved that much.

I'm a recent convert, been experimenting with converting one PL to another. GPT-3.5 will get the gist of what the code is doing, and then provide what looks like a direct translation but differs in numerous details whilst having a bunch of other problems. GPT-4 does a correct translation, almost every time. It kills me that there's a waiting list for the API. I have put together some tools to integrate 3.5 into my wo…

I recently finally got access to 4 in the API, it's good. It's much better imo at following the system prompt too. Faster than you see in chatgpt I think, not as fast as 3.5-turbo but definitely less tedious.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#550

Post by alfor »

mach1ne wrote: post #280
alfor wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is human level intelligence, it’s not just novel and cool, it’s the thing. Remember, GPT-4 training was finished 6 months ago. Listen to people at OpenAI, their concern is: disruption to the world, UBI, getting people used to superintelligence as part of our world. I think they have quite a few things in the pipeline. So yes ads optimisation/recommendations still need to be reliable for the time being, but fo…

GPT-4 is not human level intelligence, nor is is above or below. It’s quite a different kind of intelligence not entirely comparable to humans. That’s probably why we’re moving the AGI goalpost; we visualize AGI as a robot human, but these machines may simply be founded on too different principles to ever receive that honor.

I think it’s mostly different because they crippled the public version for now: no internet access, everything is done in one pass. In our mind we get an idea, we inspect it, we try different variations, we simulate how it will be perceive(consciousness). In this way we iterate before putting the information out. This is not difficult and is getting added on to it externally.

Chat GPT is just to get us used to the idea, it’s the toy version.

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