Typing is pretty easy and not the bottleneck of software development. That's why readable variables are better than abbreviations.
Judicious use of abstractions helps with that as well.
I think where things like copilot might shine is being a JIT educator of coding practices but they should be part of your thinking process and not replace it.
The risk with over relying on crutches is substituting the knowledge and intentionality of development.
There's a balance, and one that needs to be sought.
I'm not sceptical about the power, but I am about the claims of people who want to cash in or simply say "it's awesome" and allow no discussion. That means that you get to detail projects trying to use GPT models as some sort of authority that doesnt need to justify why it's better than some alternative. If you argue against it you're "not seeing the opportunity".
It's not a new battle, fighting hype and separating the actual capabilities of a tech and the lies or misconceptions. It's hard to get people to see short Vs long term.
So the question is, is it coming? And I think this is where "it's just autocomplete" comes into play. Can you get from a really sophisticated autocomplete system to AGI? Look to the past of humanity. Our intelligence drove the epitome of human knowledge being 'bash stone, poke with pointy part' to putting a man on the moon. Now imagine we were able to seed a ChatGPT style program with all of the expressed knowledge of humanity from that former time. Where would it lead us? Your answer here is going to be driven largely be whether or not what you think what we're seeing today is "just autocomplete."
Of course, we won’t stop here, but as one of the seeds from which AGI will spring, I truly believe it will be seen as a historical innovation in the same league as early search engines, crypto (yes, unironically), or even the internet itself.
We’ve been here before. Our sense of place in the universe was first upset by the heliocentric model (we’re not as special as we thought), then the theory of general relativity (not as correct as we thought), then quantum mechanics (not even living in a deterministic universe, really). With all these fantastic discoveries behind us, now seems like the right time to learn that we’re not as smart as we thought either.
This is not at all clear to me.
Proof or at least citation somewhere?
But comparing the current AI situation, and its parroting LLM models, to the Copernic revolution is so over the top that it's absurd.
Sam Bankman, meet Sam Altman?
In a way, though, the “parrot” moniker is apt. The (long aspirational) Turing Test was originally called the “imitation game”, and what’s better at imitation than a parrot? Apparently, it’s ChatGPT - I never did see a parrot write code.
The experience of losing a mate might very well be a deeper kind of pain for them than humans are capable of feeling.
However, he's dead wrong if he thinks AI is all hype and no substance.
Yes, AI is being exploited and hyped up by corporations. Yes, most workers are going to get screwed, as usual.
But there is so much potential in AI... even if it's not "truly intelligent" (yet). At the very least it's a tool that can boost creativity. Playing around with Midjourney made a believer out of me. I've been a life long artist, and midjourney just blew me away. It's nothing short of amazing, and just about as close to magic as anything I've ever seen a computer do.
AI is a completely transformative technology. People like Doctorow can dig their heels in and scream against the hurricane, but it's utterly futile. The world will adopt this technology anyway, and it will transform the world (for the better or for the worse). It already has, and the transformation will only accelerate.
It doesn't help that major non-technical consulting firms have been producing nonsense for years about the coming "fourth industrial revolution" (AI/ML, IoT, VR. self-driving etc.) These people are usually wrong.
The difference is that ChatGPT, midjourney, copilot etc. are just legitimately useful. Being able to transcribe, translate, summarise and process audio and text data is useful. Being able to generate a regex or SQL query is useful. There are obviously questions about how much closer this gets us to AGI, but the tech has inarguable utility in a way that cryptocurrencies never did.
Ever thought about the stock market? There are big computing centers with "AI" automatically scooping up the next potential trend based on all kinds of information to make trading decisions.
I think it was CNN that did some articles with ChatGPT, but the kicker was that once they opened up about that there was a fine line below it: They've been using something similar for much longer already and even said it is used more widely (i.e. not just CNN).
So, "AI" is already there, going to stay, and will continue to be used in increasingly more places.
Is there hype around "AI"? Definitively, especially by those who have no clue about anything. Is it as unfounded as crypto? No, because crypto was garbage from the start.
Amazing to see the totally different attitude of HN to AI vs Blockchain.
AI can actually become a huge NEGATIVE value for the Web, as swarms of AI turn every forum including this one into a dark forest
As AI text generation gets better, will it really matter if you're talking to a human or a machine?
---
Once upon a time, there was a man named Dan who loved nothing more than spending his days at Disneyland's Magic Kingdom. He had always been an avid fan of the park, and he had made countless memories there over the years.
But one day, everything changed for Dan. He had been so caught up in his online life that he had neglected his real-life relationships and experiences, and as a result, he had lost all of his Whuffie, the online karma points that he had accrued.
Dan was devastated. He had always prided himself on being well-liked and respected in online communities, and he couldn't believe that he had let himself fall so far. He felt like a failure, and he didn't know how to pick himself up and move forward.
But then, one day, Dan decided to return to Disneyland's Magic Kingdom. He figured that he could at least find some solace and happiness there, even if he had lost everything else.
As soon as he stepped into the park, Dan felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. He remembered all the good times he had spent there, and he felt a glimmer of hope that he could regain some of what he had lost.
As he wandered through the park, Dan began to notice all the little things that he had taken for granted before. The smell of popcorn, the sound of laughter, the sight of children's faces lighting up with wonder and joy. He realized that there was so much more to life than just online popularity, and that he had been missing out on so much by focusing solely on that.
Dan spent the whole day at Disneyland's Magic Kingdom, riding rides, watching shows, and just taking in the magic of the place. And when he left that evening, he felt a sense of peace and contentment that he hadn't felt in a long time.
Over time, Dan began to build himself back up again. He reconnected with old friends, pursued new hobbies, and started to live his life in the real world instead of just online. And while he never regained all of his Whuffie, he didn't really care anymore. He had found something much more important: happiness and fulfillment in the real world. And he knew that he had Disneyland's Magic Kingdom to thank for showing him the way.
If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really. They still revolutionized the world though, so do you want to be a buggy whip manufacturer, or a computer (the job, mostly employing women, prior to the advent of the digital computer and auto calculating spreadsheets, who performed the math for spreadsheets at accounting firms)? Or do you want to at least be aware of incoming trends.
Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry. Meanwhile, anybody with a phone number can make an openAI account and try out ChatGPT. Some, like our carpenter, will walk away thinking it's neat but ultimately useless. Others simply won't be impressed, for whatever reason. Some will see immediate uses for it in their life and can't live without it again. Don't expect them to speak up about it either, they're too busy using it to write emails and make plans to be bothered to convince the haters.
Are you freaking serious? Carpenters use computers all the time. Ever heard of CAD? Calculators? Talking to customers via email? Ordering materials, researching, I'm shocked actually this is how naive people are ?
Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry.
What exactly is the use case for ChatGPT? I mean it can do a bunch of different things, but to what degree really depends on a great deal of factors, so I don't really get your point.
I actually think maybe this will be a problem for ChatGPT as a product in the future. It doesn't really do anything especially well and it's not clear when you should trust it to be correct. Maybe it will get 99.9% accurate soon, until then, will be interesting to see what actually happens when the novelty wears off.
I do remember walking home from my friends house after using a VR headset about 6 years ago and thinking, well that's it, I'm going into the matrix. It's been 6 years and I've never had the need to use one again. Maybe when designing our house I would've liked to have put one on for 10 minutes to walk through the plans.
ChatGPT I has had a similar effect for me, I used it, it was fun, didn't really have that much daily use for it, now it's just a tool, like many in my toolbag, I pull out of I can think of a good use for it, it sometimes yields good results, then I move on.
Edit: Please if you down vote, I'd like to hear why, don't hate on people for having a difference of opinion.
Anywhere you need text written, it can generate something. Like you said, it might not be correct, but you can read what it tells you, you don't need to copy paste it verbatim.
Rather than asking it a question, feed it some bullet points and watch it convert it into paragraphs. Read the paragraphs and remove anything extra it added. It probably saved you 10-20 minutes and lots of frustration depending on how much you hate writing.
If you can't see the use for yourself, that's fine. But I really don't believe that you can't see how it would be useful to other people.
I find it hilarious to compare with crypto, where the majority of projects are purely about speculation.
You just described most humans. Imagine someone gave you access to a free digital workforce that you can only interact with through chat; it’s text in, text out, they only do what you say, and although you’re conversing with middle-tier experts they don’t have internet access or even a paper or pen handy so you have to take any facts or hard numbers they reference with a grain of salt. What is the use case for that?
What I’m getting at here is that ChatGPT doesn’t have a single clear use case. OpenAI is positioning themselves to be vendors of foundational AGI and it will be up to the market to create specialized fine-tuned models with higher levels of agency and built-in accountability.
You wrote:
> I'm shocked actually this is how naive people are ?
There was no need for name calling, and this is mentioned in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Moreover, let's assume that since I've made it to this site that I'm not a complete idiot (well, I mean, I can be, sometimes), and that it's entirely possible for me to make my claim, while also being well aware of the fact that carpenters use email and the Internet these days. I did some renovations to my home a few months back and, surprise surprise, we used email, along with texting for communicating. (We even used gasp pictures in these emails.) So maybe I'm trying to make a deeper point about the intersection of carpentry and computers that you maybe missed?
Right it's just a tool, one which doesn't get much daily use by you. Which is totally fine. But say your job was to hammer in nails all day long, would you ask about the use case for screwdrivers? At your hammering job there are no screws, so screwdrivers must be totally useless, right?
This is such a disingenuous strawman. You've just responded to a long argument with a lazy faux dismissal based on personality and animosity.
The criticism are well laid out and sourced. It's about the hype and lies around it, not the tech itself. I appreciate the tech and dislike the lies and misunderstandings.
If you just dismiss me as "a hater" you're part of the lie.
> Pundits and critics have a vested interest in predicting the future the way their readers want, but your time machine is as good as mine - it only goes 1 second per second and we'll get to the future at the same time.
Except that's a lie. And when the insights of people who stop and think instead of just buying into claims unquestionably are proven right years down the line we hear the old "oh, hindsight is 20 20". That's not accurate. We can reflect on things when they happen. No need to wait.
> If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really.
False dichotomy. If you think chatgpt is solving a problem by generating text, are you qualified to judge that text for accuracy, could you have produced that text yourself? Why is it that chatgpt beats you, typing speed? Thinking speed? What are the risks of overlooking things by virtue of allegedly being handed an answer.
Wizards can be useful but also dangerous. The point is to reflect about it and not dismiss anyone who doesn't just hype it up.
> Or do you want to at least be aware of incoming trends.
Your whole argument seems aimed at some luddite strawman when in reality it's people who love tech, love new things, appreciate Chatgpt and others forms of ML, but see the BS flying around and want to stay intentional and have conversations grounded in reality.
> Don't expect them to speak up about it either, they're too busy using it to write emails and make plans to be bothered to convince the haters.
Another empty dismissal. People are using it so any related criticism is "haters". Implicitly your whole comment just wants to, instead of engage in the conversation, derail it and dismiss it.
Reminder, when there's hype, everyone and their mother wants to "cash in on the hype". It doesn't matter if they need to sell you a bridge. Going into specific and reasoned arguments is more productive, specially in a place like HN that should foster discussion instead of squashing it like parent poster is doing.
He denigrates ChatGPT as glorified auto complete but in the end, auto complete is... actually pretty useful?
I do appreciate him bringing in Ted Chiang, I love that quote - "it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism".
I haven't been exposed to Pluralistic before so maybe that's just his style there, but I think the difference between the hype around crypto and the hype around ChatGPT is that people in the world of finance are able to intuit where crypto fits, but people outside that world can't really appreciate that. ChatGPT; anyone who uses English can create their own account and play with it and see what the computer is doing. Sometimes hype is actually justified.
Crypto really didn't solve so many problems in such an immediately visible way.
AI has some immediate and fully practical uses, it's completely different. Stable Diffusion with Control Net/Art AI's are game changers for art creation. AI artwork is already winning awards.
Generative AI's are evolving so rapidly. ElevenLabs Voice AI is absolutely amazing, we are planning to use them over hiring any voice actors for internal presentations going forward.
AI generated Seinfeld was watched by millions,and I thought it was pretty damn good.
The flexibilities and immediate usefulness of neural net AI's is just astounding, and to think we are still in the beginning of the paradigm shift.
Those weren't products sold from techies to techies (the way Blockchain made some people money) either. And those products were end-user facing- it solved problems for them, too.
And I know a lot of people who are making money solving real problems for people outside of tech.
Equating AI and blockchain is a common HN commentariat fallacy.
https://www.siemens-healthineers.com/magnetic-resonance-imag...
It’s also clear the author doesn’t actually know how LLMs work and is parroting information, e.g. “…it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average.” is just not correct, and, frankly, suggests the author hasn’t even observed what autocomplete does.
I completely respect the view that there’s more to being human than pattern matching text, but I also am open to the possibility consciousness may not actually be that much more than stochastic parrots.
- It’s reductive. The model may be architecturally relatively simple, at least insofar as humans are involved, but the data that was used train it is anything but. Code is data, data is code. The model is more than its architecture. It’s all the weights and biases within.
- It’s qualitatively wrong. The temperature settings change it from a predictive system (auto complete) to a generative one (digital assistant).
- It’s quantitatively ignorant. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. For that matter, how do you speak if not one word at a time? It happens that the model generates one token at a time as well, but the million dollar question remains: what chain of reasoning did it have to follow to come up with that token? Just because it‘s only outputting a single token doesn’t mean it’s not “thinking” about the structure of the sentence, paragraph, or the entire document - several tokens ahead, to say the least. Indeed, having been trained on a such a large internet corpus it has the capacity to model entire personalities and all the quirks and neuroses that go on behind the scenes.
So, yes, it is a bad take. That being said, it’s still a useful one because it encourages people to think about the models as tools, which is exactly correct given how they’re structured. So I still describe them as such.
You put thinking in quotes, so what exactly do you mean by thinking? Where does it do it? When?
AI as autocomplete is a perfect summarization of both what it does and how it does it. Anything more, including models “thinking”, is strategic PR aimed to make the public happy with their mouths gaping while they take all intellectual property ever published online and monetize it without paying the author.
The general reaction of people to all this has been one of the most interesting things about it imo. Earlier versions were generally just fun and sometimes amazing but suddenly so many are going out of their ways to play it down. Of course there are valid criticisms and worthy discussions but some of it feels like more than that.
I think one side of it is that for the first time many people are genuinely comparing bots to humans, which by itself is kind of mind blowing.
Another side seems to be more about "controlling" something new and scary. Maybe that thing is tangible, like the tools themselves, or maybe it's just the idea that we're not that special.
(The LLMs do: I asked ChatGPT for some sarcastic and dismissive phrases for language models and it gave me back “mindless mimics”, “algorithmic babblers”, “robotic regurgitators”, “synthetic chatterboxes”, and my personal favorite: “soulless scribble-bots”.)
Writers and liberals arts are under the automation threat for the first time ever.
So, when will ChatGPT write a credible self-critical article?
Oh wait, it really cannot. It can only transform text. The difference between writing and producing text does indeed exist.
Now it’s like, “it can’t write a credible and coherent article“. Well, GPT3 does fine on paragraphs, and whole articles are literally the very next incremental step from that, so probably GPT4 will be able to do that. And when does that come out? Like next week?
Crypto can actually help people transact trustlessly, let communities govern themselves without a king etc.
Whereas AI swarms can generate bullshit at scale and turn every forum into a dark forest, with 99% bot-generated content deployed to silence or distract groups of people whose viewpoint is to be buried.
One has the potential to quickly destroy all the systems we rely on, including public discourse, voting, and so on. I would say that is far worse than a few silly smart contracts.
Not every craze is the next big thing, but for LLMs it’s still too soon to say anything with certainty. The people comparing LLMs to autocomplete have no more legitimacy than people who think LLMs are the first coming of AGI.
I found it humorous that the author couldn’t help but anthropomortise ChatGPT by calling it ”fully automated supremely confident liar”. Calling it a liar implies intent to deceive. Strange to ascribe intent to an autocomplete.
The funny thing being, it isn't that clear how the (personal) computer revolution worked out: The IBM PC was envisioned as a dumb smart terminal that would rely on mainframe integration for anything serious business. This model clearly failed with the advent of i386, as tasks were increasingly done locally and exclusively so. That model failed clearly, as computers are now dumb smart terminals that are connected to mainframes (AKA "the cloud")…
Similarly, the Internet revolution would connect everyone on equal standing and equal reach, decentralized, as opposed to the ideas of information utilities that has been proposed previously, an idea that clearly failed. Now this idea has clearly failed, as the Internet has become a centralized information utility run by a few companies for the majority of its use…
For what it's worth: a lot of "office work" is repetitive bullshit that could be done just as well with decent automation or assisting "artificial intelligence" (=lawyers writing letters, ...).
Or programmers writing lots of boilerplate or really simple code.
They don't call them code monkeys for nothing...
I will say that crypto is a big reason why AI is blowing up, though. It primed people to believing in tech-backed get rich quick schemes. That’s why I avoid all ex-crypto “entrepreneurs” turned AI aficionados who couldn’t backpropagate their way through a paper bag.
This article claims “AI is not intelligent”— and I’ll counter with, “what is intelligence?” And further, say that we somehow prove LLMs aren’t “thinking” as humans do, but they still give (eventually) a near perfect illusion that they do — what does it matter that it’s not “really thinking?” I feel like crazy AI cultist at times when discussing this, but my main (admittedly petty) point is that such strong confidence about similarity or dissimilarity of human thinking to LLMs is unfounded.
It’s like we are comparing the insides of two black boxes and trying to make absolute claims on them.
So sure... if you want to point to hype statements that are silly, you'll find them. If you want to find monopolies investing I gpt to preserve their monopolies, you'll find them. If you want analogies to stuff that has empty hype in the past, you'll find those analogies.
I'm old enough to remember the hype, and anti-hype around the early web... The information superhighway. Anti-hype had all the same arguments there.
It really doesn't matter what we think about chatgpt's answers to philosophical questions, or it's ability to write poetry. Those are just novelties and parlour games.
What matters is that autocomplete is useful, and that means it's going to be used. Well use it for writing emails. Well use it to code. Well use it to summarize, tabulate... It'll bring video game characters to life. Some of these will be significant. Others will be profitable. Others will be harmful.
What autocomplete isn't, is a dud. The thing works.
it's true that certain types of scammers and influencers have started jumping on LLMs en masse now that shilling cryptocurrencies isn't so lucrative.
i think that if it appears from your perspective like there is a brand-new LLM hype bubble that just appeared this year to substitute for the previous cryptocurrency hype bubble, you're in a bad part of the information ecosystem.
The concern right now is widespread deployment of really crappy systems. ChatGPT can probably outperform the average call center staffer now. That's going to be a problem.
The tooling around an area that impacts the daily life of knowledge workers (probably everyone on this site) just got much better.
Crypto was overhyped; this does not seem to be the case.
but he is without being fully self-aware about it starting to go down the same road that doomed Chomsky,
being so compelled by a compelling frame of critique, that it necessarily becomes the first and insidiously becomes the only real lens he views things through.
One of his tenets is that Technology is Hype. This may be true, but not all technology is hype; and the fact that hype is regularly an outgrowth of other equally intelligence observers finding reason to be excited, is something he is far too breezily dismissive of.
I welcome a critical and sardonic voice, and the regular deflation of the over-inflated,
but he is starting to predictably be derisive too quickly and too broadly, and to assume bad faith (or naiviety) too widely.
He's a smart monkey, but there are other smart monkeys, and AI in specific is one area where he's beginning to genuinely miss the scale of the disequilibrium coming.
This is a shame because many of his most passionately-held convictions and campaigns are going to be significantly impacted by AI.
He has a window and a pulpit to shine a bright light on the intersections where real change is accelerating or otherwise changing the landscape of some of the things he is most concerned about.
He's missing it.
If it's useless, it can hardly replace jobs, can it?
I mean, SURE, you could (still can) actually use crypto for things like purchases, contracts, data tracking, and what have you - but in the crypto bubble people were solely buying and holding to sell at a profit. Zero actual use, all speculation.
At least with the current ML, we daily see new tools and other cool stuff.
If I'm honest, I'm more terrified of crypto going mainstream than AI going rogue. The crypto utopia is a world where everything can be fractionalized and financialized and monetized.
We already live in a world that's extremely hyper-financialized. Crypto can add a layer ontop and financialize it to a degree that it could completely perverse human motivations.
So yeah, I'll take the AI bubble.
Personally, I use ChatGPT everyday. I use it in ways that weren't possible through mere google searches. It does some of the thinking and synthesis of different ideas and patterns for me. I work faster as a result. I work in languages and frameworks I didn't know before in a matter of minutes instead of days.
Is there AI hype? Yes. Am I starting to see patterns in the responses, and lots of errors, which makes me realise this is a bit more limited than I thought? Yes. Are there lots of gimmicky use cases? Absolutely.
Is it still crazy useful, and game changing for lots of industries in fundamental ways? Yes!
Source: project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015.
