I think a lot of people on here are for some reason believers in the idea that if a technology has detractors, then it must be another case of the steam engine, human flight, or some other technology that had doubters before completely revolutionizing our world. In reality, there is no such law of the universe that says that some technology will be wildly successful because it is heavily controversial, and, in some cases, it turns out that a lot people were correct in predicting a technology's short/long term uselessness (crypto, web3, AR). Every time some article is posted highlighting AI's shortcomings in relation to its posited ubiquity in professional settings about 10 people wax poetic about how the internet/cars/etc. were doubted heavily, when they clearly are not similar in nearly any regard. I wish we could appreciate new technology without blowing its applications out of proportion and then being disappointed when it falls short of an impossible bar, which is my main gripe with both AI doomers and people who are entirely dismissive of the technology (despite basically nobody saying anything of the sort).
Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.
I had a Motorola Q at the time and the first iPhone was light years beyond it, even if the only metric used to compare was browsing the internet. Most sites were barely functional in Windows Mobile IE.
But it had no apps, the analogy works, the iPhone did some things great (web browser:rewrite X in the style of y or whatever) and had some gotchas that seemed like a big deal at the time but were then resolved, or everyone realised it was so good they didn't matter (maybe no keyboard: hallucinations, we thought this was a problem but it's not, and no apps:no knowledge of current events, easy fix)
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#83The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse. The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines. So it goes. I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing thing…
> Unions are already pushing back on AI (truckers, federal employees in Canada, writers in Hollywood) and maybe rightly so.
Interesting bit of historical trivia: In the US, the main truck driver's union is the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. What is a teamster? Historically, it was a person who wrangled a team of horses or oxen to pull a wagon. That profession was effectively eliminated by the creation of the internal combustion engine.
Two of the other main trades that were involved in the rise of unions are longshoremen and stevedores. The former pull cargo off ships and get it onto land. The latter organize cargo on the ships.
The creation of shipping containers dramatically reduced the need for those jobs, leading to some of the longest strikes in the US. While the unions technically "won", the strikes mostly incentivizing shipping companies to push even farther into mechanization so that they were less reliant on labor. There are far fewer dockworkers and longshoremen today than there were before containerization.
Change is hard.
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#84The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse. The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines. So it goes. I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing thing…
A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.
I'm not sure "bad" is fair. But the app ecosystem wasn't really developed, the network connectivity wasn't great, and there were probably a lot of other shortcomings especially in retrospect. I had a Treo at the time and didn't upgrade for a few years to the 3GS which, as I recall, was when the iPhone really took off.
The iPod had a somewhat similar trajectory. The first gen version was pretty much just another MP3 player and iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first.
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#85I'm trying to imagine a few next generations from now.
Then imagine full voice recognition and voice synthesis attached to it, on every phone, every watch, every car.
The news, the headlines, on every page you visit is going to be custom re-written by AI for every bit of data they can get on you, even your IP address if they have nothing else.
Any job not replaced by AI is going to be AI-assisted, it is inevitable.
Wendy's is already replacing order-takers with AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888362
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#86It's really easy to get an LLM to hallucinate by asking an open ended question - the type typically answered by a Google search or checking Wikiedpia. However, this is not the best application of LLMs. This criticism is getting old. LLMs are great at: - Text synthesis given all of the facts in a prompt (expand these bullet points) - Summarization (condense this text) - Data extraction (fit this data into this schema)…
Regarding the last point: What I still find the most entertaining is how easily you can change its personality, especially via the system prompt. You can get it to be rather snarky, even sometimes insulting, which makes for hilarious IRC bots.
In less then 20 tokens, you can get ChatGPT simply via the web interface to become snarky and swearing like a drunken sailor.
And it is indeed hilarious at times.
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#87The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse. The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines. So it goes. I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing thing…
> I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say. Yes, because people think that LLMs are almost AGI based on the social media reactions and can't imagine they still have unknown/unsolved problems. But if we take a look at the 14 years of self driving car development, it becomes clear ho…
> Yes, because people think that LLMs are almost AGI....
Surprise, surprise... this has happened before:
> Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear his opinion that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human being and any life form for that matter.[29] In the independent documentary film Plug & Pray (2010) Weizenbaum said that only people who misunderstood ELIZA called it a sensation.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#Response_and_legacy
And, it's easy to see why. You can talk the damn thing, and it talks back! People love to anthropomorphize things, anyway, but if you can talk to it and it talks back, people think there's got to be something to it.
This time, though, is a little different. GPT-3 and GPT-4 actually do behave like they understand natural language to a great extent. That makes them directly analogous to Searle's Chinese room construct, and suggests that they could actually pass the Turing test (if suitably fine-tuned).
This is great, because, as you say, it's amazing. But I also think it's not good enough, because the fact that GPT-4 may be able to pass the Turing test really says more to me about the limitations of the Turing test than anything else. Likewise with the Chinese room analogy: we know what's in the box, and we know it shouldn't be trusted.
But, you're not going to get that kind of analysis from the general public.
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#88I think a lot of people on here are for some reason believers in the idea that if a technology has detractors, then it must be another case of the steam engine, human flight, or some other technology that had doubters before completely revolutionizing our world. In reality, there is no such law of the universe that says that some technology will be wildly successful because it is heavily controversial, and, in some c…
a couple observations in favor of AGI getting here quicker than we anticipate:
ChatGPT isn't an LLM it's a product(blackbox) with one part being an LLM.
Go, Chess, Dota 2 would be better examples of things that AI mastered.
"NVIDIA GPU computing has given the industry a path forward -- and will provide a 1,000X speed-up by 2025"
LLM agents do seem to work better than LLMs on their own.
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Browsers were already commonplace in phones for years at that point. Maybe things were more dire in the US?
Most feature phone browsers were very limited compared to what Safari supported (almost the full web experience at the time). You'd have to look at other "smartphone" class devices for something comparable, and those were not common (EDIT: among consumers) in the US at the time.
We must have been on a completely different web. It was several generations later before they even began to approach the "full web experience"
Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research
#90Large Language Models aren't a silver bullet – they don't solve all your problems. But they are a holy grail – as a universal common sense module they give IT systems a capability they never had before, a capability which has been sought after from since computers became a thing, a capacity for common sense.
We now have that capacity and that alone will revolutionize the world. The chatbots aren't about chat, they are about common sense.
Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential.
We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI.