Comment on ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year agoPersonally, having been in Tech for almost 3 decades I am massivelly skeptical when the usual suspects put out yet another incredible claim backed up by nothing, and worse in an area I actually have quite a lot of knowledge in, and it gets picked up by mindless fanboys who don’t have the expertise to understand jack-shit about what they’re talking and greedy fuckers using salesspeak because they stand to personally gain if enough usefull idiots jump into the hype train.
You don’t even need to be old enough to remember that “revolution in human transportation” was how the Segway was announced: all it takes is to look at the claims about Bitcoin and the blockchain and remember the fraud-ridden shitshow the whole area became.
As I see it, anybody who is not skeptical towards “yet another ‘world changing’ claim from the usual types” is either dumb as a doorknob, young and naive or a greedy fucker invested in it trying to make money out of any “suckers” that jump into that hype train.
SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I’ve been working on AI projects on and off for about 30 years now. Honestly, for most of that time I didn’t think neural nets were the way to go, so when LLMs and transformers got popular, I was super skeptical. After learning the architecture and using them myself, I’m convinced they’re part of but not the whole solution to AGI. As they are now, yes, they are world changing. They’re capable of improving productivity in a wide range of industries. That seems pretty world changing to me. There are already products out there proving this (GitHub Copilot, jasper, even ChatGPT). You’re welcome to downplay it and be skeptical, but I’d highly recommend giving it an honest try. If you’re right then you’ll have more to back up your opinion, and if you’re wrong, you’ll have learned to use the tech and won’t be left behind.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In my experience they’re a great tool to wrap and unwrap knowledge in and from language envelopes with different characteristics and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they replace certain jobs which deal mostly with communicating with people (for example, I suspect the kind of news reporting of news agencies doesn’t really need human writters to compose articles, just data in bullet point format an LLM to turn it into a “story”).
What LLMs are not is AGI.
Whilst I’ve been on and off on the whole “might they be the starting point from which AGI comes” (which is really down to the question “what is intelligence”), what I am certain is nobody who is trully knowledgeable about can honestly and assuredly state that “they are the seed from which AGI will come”, and that kind of crap (or worse, people just stating LLMs already are intelligent) is almost all of the hype we get about AI at the moment.
At the moment and judging by the developments we are seeing, I’m more inclined to think that at least the reasoning part of intelligence won’t be solved by this path, though the intuition part of it might as that stuff is mainly about pattern recognition.
SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Yeah, I generally agree there. And you’re right. Nobody knows if they’ll really be the starting point for AGI because nobody knows how to make AGI.
In terms of usefulness, I do use it for knowledge retrieval and have a very good success rate with that. Yes, I have to double check certain things to make sure it didn’t make them up, but on the whole, GPT4 is right a large percentage of the times. Just yesterday I’d been Googling to find a specific law or regulation on whether airlines were required to refund passengers. I spent half an hour with no luck. ChatGPT with GPT4 pointed me to the exact document down to the right subsection on the first try. If you try that with GPT3.5 or really anything else out there, there’s a much higher rate of failure, and I suspect a lot of people who use the “it gets stuff wrong” argument probably haven’t spent much time with GPT4. Not saying it’s perfect-- it still confidently says incorrect things and will even double down if you press it, but 4 is really impressive.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s a good point.
I’ve been thinking about the possibility of LLM revolutionizing search (basically search engines) which are not autoritative sources of information (far from) but they’ll get you much faster to things.
LLM’s do have most of the same information as they do, add the whole extra level of being able to use natural language to query it in a more natural way and due to their massive training sets, even if one’s question is slightly incorrect the nearest cluster of textual tokens in the token space (an oversimplified descriptions of how LLMs work, I know) to said incorrect question might very well be were the correct questions and answers are so you get the correct answer (and funnilly enough the more naturally one poses the question the better).
However as a direct provider of answers, certainly in a professional setting, it quickly becomes something that produces more work than it saves, because you always have to check the answers since there are no cues about how certain or uncertain that result was.
I suspect many of not most of us also had human colleagues who were just like that: delivering event the most “this is a wild guess” answer to somebody’s question as an assured “this is how the way things are”, and I suspect also that most of of those who had such colleagues quickly learned to not go to them for answers.
This is why I doubt it will do things like revolutionizing programming or in fact replace humans in producing things in hard-knowledge domains, though it might very well replace humans whose work is to wrap things up in the appropriate language for the target audience (I suspect it’s going to revolutionize the production of highly segmented and even individually targetted propaganda in social networks)