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Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

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Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#91

Post by laserlight »

galaxytachyon wrote: post #74
ARandumGuy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less. Corporations and governments have thrown tons of money into technologies that ended up going nowhere. We're only a few years out from everyone dumping their money into "blockchain solutions", which turned out to go nowhere. Investors and government stakeholders are easily swayed…

When only a few of them followed the hype, yes, it can possibly go nowhere. But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real. An easy example is the first iPhone. Another more negative example is bitcoin which even though it is probably a scam, its values and influence on society has massively grown more than what i…

> But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real.

This is a perfect description of cryptocoins and similar technologies. I've witnessed literally illiterate people buying coins and selling the idea to others.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#92

Post by wnevets »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #24
wnevets wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

What? Safari on your phone was mind blowing and immediately useful. Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

> Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

So it did even less than I gave it credit for.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#93

Post by idopmstuff »

methodical wrote: post #81

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 c…

> 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.

I think that's a misinterpretation - I don't think that it's a revolutionary technology because it has detractors or because it's controversial; I think it's revolutionary because of its capabilities. Those comparisons just serve to point out that there are plenty of historical examples of people criticizing things that turned out to be revolutionary, and the same may well turn out to be the case here.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#94

Post by daveguy »

cl42 wrote: post #14

The 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…

One of the biggest problems in AI for the last 60 years is the grounding problem. The ability of a model to be rooted in objective reality. In other words, for one of these LLMs to understand when they are being accurate vs hallucinating. None of the current crop of LLMs has come close to solving this problem. On the contrary, they make the problem blatantly obvious. No LLMs will achieve AGI until this is solved sufficiently that the answers of an LLM can be depended on without complete independent secondary verification.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#95

Post by mediaman »

munificent wrote: post #83
cl42 wrote: post #14

The 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…

More on the port workers: today you'll find that skilled union port workers are extremely well-paid. Workers in the cranes that pull containers off the ship, for example, are paid >$300k.

They are quite skilled, but so are many other skilled tradespeople. Electricians and machinists for example do not make that kind of money despite their skill. So why do crane operators make so much?

When containerization, and subsequently other types of automation, hit ports, the union resisted fiercely but ultimately had to work out a deal with the port operators.

That deal was to reward the most tenured union tradespeople with much larger pay packages, at the cost of the less experienced tradespeople, who would have to find different work.

This agreement became agreeable to both sides, since the operators could still massively reduce the workforce, and the only price they'd have to pay would be high salaries for the union workers who remained. And the union was able to reward their longest tenured members.

It's hard to fault the union for this: the alternative was likely both huge reduction in workforce and less attractive pay, so they at least got good pay out of it for the remaining workers. But it made a lot of the less tenured union workers resentful because they felt the union sacrificed them in favor of the union 'insiders'.

The book 'The Box' by Marc Levinson is a great coverage of this topic, if steel shipping containers are the sort of thing that get you going.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#96

Post by ravenstine »

teawrecks wrote: post #18

is there anyone claiming ChatGPT is the "holy grail" of AI research? it's pretty cool. it's an important step. it's far from the holy grail.

Morons, maybe?

Thing is, there will always be morons. LLMs are just the latest thing to be moronic about. That's why I really don't appreciate these downer articles very much. I think LLMs are awesome and they've now become a part of my everyday life, but it's a little much to say they're the "holy grail."

At the same time, ChatGPT does deserve hype. It's an achievement that we've essentially invented the ship's computer from Star Trek, and have it available for free or at an affordable price to everyone. When people reduce ChatGPT down to little more than statistics, I don't think they actually understand the technology or cognition at even a basic level, and a lot of the critiques towards ChatGPT come off as butthurtedness.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#97

Post by somesortofthing »

cl42 wrote: post #14

The 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…

The difference here is that steam engines were "less powerful than a horse" in an easily quantifiable, easily diagnosable way. They produced fewer newtons of force. You could tell this was the case because your mechanism just wouldn't move when you wanted it to. Most new technologies followed this pattern, they quantifiably underperformed alternatives until the field matured. But AI doesn't act like a dumb human who's missing information or is inept at the task presented to them. It doesn't refuse to answer if you give it a question that's too hard for it or requires info that it doesn't have in the training dataset, it confidently makes stuff up and then covers up for the fact that it made stuff up by burying it in marketing copy and extraneous info such that you need to be an expert in the topic you're using AI for to even tell that it failed. Better AI models do help with this, but they simultaneously improve the AI's obfuscation abilities to the point where fatal flaws in its output are going to be even harder to catch than they are now with human review. It doesn't have the same risk calculus as a human, it doesn't care whether the marketing copy you're writing describes your product as wonderful and perfect or if it's providing you completely bogus legal advice that'll land you in jail for a decade if you follow it.

And this is all before we even bring up the topic of prompt injection, a problem so intrinsic to the technology that OpenAI doesn't even take bug reports on it because bug reports "are for problems that can be fixed".

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#98

Post by nerpderp82 »

keskival wrote: post #90

Large 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 ar…

Wait until they can watch TV to learn (I am serious). If you imbue them with competitive play, oh boy. We just gotta figure out what they think funny is.

Re: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

#100

Post by twelve40 »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #41
slashdev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it almost on a daily basis now, and I pay for the monthly subscription. It’s not magic, but it can save me a lot of time sometimes. I use it in my job as a software engineer, and I mostly use it to create unit tests. The code usually needs a lot of love, but it gets me started.

Copilot and chatgpt are some of the services i am perfectly content paying for. ChatGPT is a great way to delve into new topics, and for that alone it’s worth it.

> ChatGPT is a great way to delve into new topics

Like bears in space? ))) seems like a great way to delve into known topics so that you are able to catch it when it starts to confidently and plausibly hallucinate

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