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We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

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Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#61

Post by mikeyjk »

fintechie wrote: post #39

> ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. This bs generator speeded up my coding by 10-20x. It's like a superpower... not talking about ChatGPT specifically but its stochastic parrot cousin (Copilot).

How has it sped up your writing of software?

It's not integrated into an IDE like GH co-pilot yet is it?

I only find I reach for it for stuff like navigating some curly regex or forgetting date time format syntax for the millionth time. But I would be very keen to understand if I'm missing out.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#62

Post by qup »

> but it can only draw on the (admittedly vast) proportion of the internet it ingested at training time.

And whatever information you feed it, which at least for me, is far more important than some facts it's already learned. Usually I'm having it perform a task with some data in the working buffer.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#63

Post by ZephyrBlu »

fintechie wrote: post #39

> ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. This bs generator speeded up my coding by 10-20x. It's like a superpower... not talking about ChatGPT specifically but its stochastic parrot cousin (Copilot).

Do you mean that you can build software 10-20x faster, or that you can literally write code 10-20x faster?

I find it very hard to believe you can build software 10-20x faster with GPT, since the majority of building software isn't writing code.

I'm also curious what you're programming that can be completely offloaded to GPT.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#64

Post by snickerbockers »

WalterSear wrote: post #57
snickerbockers wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How functional does the code have to be before it's no longer a hallucination? IDK, I haven't tried copilot, but does the code it generates work on the first try with no human intervention? >What if we are all not much more than only drawing "on the (admittedly vast) proportion of [our experiences] ingested at training time? ugh, this argument again. Despite the machine learning community using words such as "traini…

> does the code it generates work on the first try with no human intervention? Sometimes, it certainly does. Does your code always work on the first try with no intervention?

Not always on the first time, but when there's a problem I don't need somebody else to intervene and make it work for me.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#66

Post by gremlinsinc »

turkeygizzard wrote: post #42
fintechie wrote: post #39

> ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. This bs generator speeded up my coding by 10-20x. It's like a superpower... not talking about ChatGPT specifically but its stochastic parrot cousin (Copilot).

GPT has been great for exploring new frameworks too. Copilot is amazing when I know what roughly what I'm doing, but GPT is like personalized framework / API documentation at times

I want an openai window manager.

I could leave my webcam on, it'll maybe regularly notify me its on, and hopefully block taking pictures, instead it'll basically just watch my eye movements and know which screen to focus on, and take voice prompts to find the window and subwindow i.e. chrome+hackernews tab, or vscode+filename. It'd basically be like vim but for outside the terminal and without memorizing shortcuts and it'd have a listening mode so I can just ask it questions whenever and it'll maybe even interface with copilot and give extra 'context' to things.

This is what i want, basically a mini-version of "HER" to give me more super powers until it takes my job, lol.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#67

Post by WalterSear »

eropple wrote: post #9
WalterSear wrote: post #2

> If it produces plausible articles or computer code it means the inevitable hallucinations are becoming harder to spot. How functional does the code have to be before it's no longer a hallucination? What if we are all not much more than only drawing "on the (admittedly vast) proportion of [our experiences] ingested at training time?

> How functional does the code have to be before it's no longer a hallucination? At all, preferably. Hallucinating `the_hard_bit()` from a library that doesn't exist isn't particularly useful. (That said, I do use GitHub Copilot, because when it's looking at actually related stuff, that's pretty good. Should we just hand an unbounded search and ingest to ChatGPT? Probably not!)

It doesn't always do that: it frequently outputs working code.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#68

Post by [deleted] »

fsckboy wrote: post #52

the most irritating thing about this piece is the headline, a headline only a GPT could write. Shakespeare's famous opening, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" is the lead-in to a speech by Antony in which he very much praises Caesar and buries his enemies.

[deleted]

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#69

Post by LAC-Tech »

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT

Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learning from human feedback helps prevent the model from producing hate speech, but it still can't change the underlying language patterns learned from the internet, which include conspiracy theories. The dangers of these models go deeper than bias and discrimination and despite claims of "artificial general intelligence", the concept is inseparable from ideas of innate supremacy and hierarchy. Companies like OpenAI receive billions in investment for these technologies, not for actual AI, but to replace or precaritize human workers. AI is a political project and should be seen as such.

Which quickly allows me to ascertain the article wasn't worth reading in the first place.

Thanks ChatGPT!

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#70

Post by alfalfasprout »

fintechie wrote: post #39

> ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. This bs generator speeded up my coding by 10-20x. It's like a superpower... not talking about ChatGPT specifically but its stochastic parrot cousin (Copilot).

I find this interesting. There's a few things ChatGPT has been useful for with coding but in general I've found it to produce outright incorrect answers and it can't really reason about higher level problems. Even for spark questions in scala it generates code w/ totally made up methods or code that doesn't work properly.

Its writing style is also pretty tedious for many prompts.

I've noticed "full stack" folks really enjoying ChatGPT but dedicated infra and ML folks (not working on toy problems) finding it less valuable.

A good chunk of my work involves talking to folks, understanding requirements, putting together design docs, etc. vs. actual coding. I've found it not particularly valuable even for doc writing.

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