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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

#71

Post by alfalfasprout »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #63
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.

Posted elsewhere, but this is what I suspect is happening. Folks that are primarily slapping together a lot of code are benefitting from ChatGPT. It's pretty useless for the other stuff except maybe boilerplate stuff for a design doc.

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

#72

Post by WalterSear »

wpietri wrote: post #38
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? From LLMs, at least, I expect it will always be a hallucination. Code is never the point. Code is the working medium by which people solve problems for other people. One way to see this is to realize that code bases on their own are generally worthless in the sense that people rarely pay much money for them. They pay for users. They pay…

> Another way to look at it: imagine that a manager looks at ChatGPT and says, "At last, I can fire all the programmers. Fuck those guys." They set out to build an app. How long do you think it will take before they are forced to admit defeat and hire somebody who can read and edit the code?

How is this different from "At last, I can fire all [those senior programmers and hire junior ones, and keep a team lead around, to keep them on track]. Fuck those guys."?

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

#73

Post by herpdyderp »

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 does Copilot help you code faster? I've watched some coworkers use it but it appears to be more distraction than help, as they accept CoPilot suggestions and then have to rewrite it all anyway.

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

#74

Post by at_a_remove »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #44

It has lots of value. But it's not the AI it pretends to be. Mostly because we and it can't always tell what's fact or fiction and it has 0 cognition. It's up to us to figure out where it can add value. It's way too early to announce its death. It's a super charged Cliff Clavin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Clavin

Little known fact, Wheels, most of these "AIs" are really just hallucination machines with a lot of cross-referencing. Most of their inputs were Philip K. Dick, the artwork of J.K. Potter, and Duran Duran lyrics.

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

#75

Post by cataphract »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

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 learnin…

I found the article so devoid of insight, just a regurgitation of clichés from the left, that I was left wondering if it was written by ChatGPT.

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

#76

Post by ZephyrBlu »

wpietri wrote: post #38
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? From LLMs, at least, I expect it will always be a hallucination. Code is never the point. Code is the working medium by which people solve problems for other people. One way to see this is to realize that code bases on their own are generally worthless in the sense that people rarely pay much money for them. They pay for users. They pay…

> One way to see this is to realize that code bases on their own are generally worthless in the sense that people rarely pay much money for them. They pay for users. They pay for teams. But they don't generally pay for raw code

This is something I've thought for a while. If Google's source code was leaked tomorrow, would it even matter? Almost certainly not, and most people probably couldn't do much with it either.

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

#77

Post by qup »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #23
labrador wrote: post #3

I don't get the point of this article. ChatGPT and it's ilk are not going away. They are here, now, and our friends and families will start using them very soon. I have a contrarian view from this article that ChatGPT is actually good for the mainstream audience because it will teach them to think about how trust worthy the information is coming from a machine. Most people will understand they have to take what is be…

There's no cat and no bag - just statistical sleight of hand. The people playing the trick know this, and are just collecting investor dollars while they can (and astroturfing every HN article that explains what it is). Relying on the output of chatgpt is no different than doing a rain dance and expecting it to rain.

I'd say it's more like relying on a minimum wage employee. It gets right (what I'm asking it to do) most of the time, but not always, and you gotta check up on it.

I don't understand why people act like it has to be 100% reliable to be useful.

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

#78

Post by WalterSear »

snickerbockers wrote: post #64
WalterSear wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've seen at least one demonstration where the user re-fed problematic generated text into chat-GPT and successfully asked it to find the problem.

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

#79

Post by alfalfasprout »

grp000 wrote: post #50
albntomat0 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy concerns and ChatGPT have different failure modes. If ChatGPT fabricates a link or makes something up, there's a potential feedback mechanism. E.g. I ask ChatGPT to explain a science term, and then I get told that my understanding is incorrect in class when I use the ChatGPT definition. It doesn't exist for every use case, but I'm hopeful everyone will be "bitten" once by ChatGPT etc., and then folks will ver…

This doesn't seem much different to me than how people should use wikipedia. It looks like it will be a useful tool to use, you just can't be careless.

Wikipedia has moderation and standards for sourcing, etc. that has made it generally very reliable. ChatGPT is a fancy parrot that sounds reliable. To actually verify that its output is correct requires more work and cross-referencing sources, etc.
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