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0 pointsmodriano3y ago0 comments

As the past decade has shown us, moving fast and breaking things to secure unfathomable wealth has caused or enabled or perpetrated:

* Genocide against the Rohingya [0] * A grotesquely unqualified reality TV character became President by a razor thin vote margin across three states because Facebook gave away the data of 87M US users to Cambridge Analytica [1], and that grotesquely unqualified President packed the Supreme Court and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives by mismanaging COVID, * Illegally surveilled non-users and logged out users, compiling and selling our browser histories to third parties in ways that violate wiretapping statutes and incurring $90M fines [2]

Etc.

I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month, but the "let's build the future as fast as possible and learn nothing from the past decade regarding the potential harms of being disgustingly irresponsible" mindset is a toxic cancer that belongs in the bin.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-el...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-mil...

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thorax3y ago· 1 in thread

> I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month

Why do you think that? Competition? Can you elaborate?

modrianoOP3y ago

Oh, a lot of reasons. For one, I'm a data scientist and I am intimately familiar with the machinery under the hood. The hype is pushing expectations far beyond the capabilities of the machinery/algorithms at work, and OpenAI is heavily incentivized to pump up this hype cycle after the last hype cycle flopped when Bing/Sydney started confidently providing worthless information (ie "hallucinating"), returning hostile or manipulative responses, and that weird stuff Kevin Roose observed. As a data scientist, I have developed a very keen detector for unsubstantiated hype over the past decade.

I've tried to find examples of ChatGPT doing impressive things that I could use in my own workflows, but everything I've found seems like it would cut an hour of googling down to 15 minutes of prompt generation and 40 minutes of validation.

And my biggest concern is copyright and license related. If I use code that comes out of AI-assistants, am I going to have to rip up codebases because we discover that GPT-4 or other LLMs are spitting out implementations from codebases with incompatible licenses? How will this shake out when a case inevitably gets to the Supreme Court?

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