[layer8]

In the current state, everything the AI knows is stuff that people have written on the internet. It doesn’t seem to come up with new insights or judgements on its own. If people stop writing, AI won’t learn anything new (unless you turn it into AlphaZero for $DEVTOPIC).

ChatGPT certainly saves time, but it becomes useless roughly at the same point where I would remain stuck after exhausting what Google Search turns up. That is, knowledge or conceptual topics that are hard to find on the web. At least for technical topics, ChatGPT doesn’t expand the scope of what you can find out without it, it merely speeds up the process.

[BigJono]

It doesn't come up with anything new, but it can combine two existing things when there's no good Google results at the intersection of them.

I've been using ChatGPT to help learn WebGPU. There's basically nothing on the web about WebGPU except a couple of shitty half finished tutorials that don't explain anything. The spec is still changing so half the code in them is wrong.

ChatGPT can take a current code example from code using WebGPU (which it has completely incorrect knowledge about since the spec has changed since the training data cutoff), and explain it anyway. Presumably using it's knowledge about Javascript and the underlying graphics APIs (Vulkan, DX12, Metal). It's applying general concepts to new code, and doing it pretty well.

I'm not sure how much value this actually has. I may have just stumbled upon the one thing it's actually useful for. I actually think code generation itself is useless. I'm massively short on Copilot, in fact, I think it's actively making people worse programmers because it encourages a workflow that produces more code and less understanding. Good programming is about less lines of code and more understanding.

My initial read on ChatGPT is that it can potentially help with that, especially where Google results get thin. (And also that everyone using it to generate code to copy/paste is an idiot and missing the point, basically).

[bamboozled]

I'm not sure if we're saying a similar thing here but to me, it's basically another search engine.

I'm honestly using it like a search engine at this point. Currently I think I'll probably end up reverting to Google and Stack Overflow because what I don't like about ChatGPT is that it doesn't provide any other opinions or options / insights. It's like a colleague who thinks they know everything ha

It's a super cool thing to play with though..

[ngcc_hk]

May be.

But like alpha go to zero, if there is certain rules it can learn itself and no more or large amount of writing by human is needed.

Also, one may worry not how intelligent they are but the noise vs info ratio that will kill a lot of web site. The problem is not lie but lie mix with truth or belief … then you do not know and shut off.

[jjeaff]

One avenue that chatGPT has, and I'm not sure if it is being utilized at all yet, would be the ability to feed it the unimaginably huge body of information locked behind copyrighted textbooks, books, academic papers and other pay walled information.

Imagine the knowledge that could be accessed by feeding all that information into an ai engine like chat gpt. Presumably, it would not break copyright rules anymore than a regular human reading a bunch of papers behind a paywall and regurgitating the learned information.

[throwaway14356]

Its not stealing your writings its sharing the conclusion in its own words like you can legally do a book review.

It wont be just like search as we burn all the books (websites) on the www. Each website needs a human to pay for it and to lure at least some traffic to it.

This preservation after death has its downsides too. It will turn into the steroids v of stack overflow outdated answers.

It will be (or already is) brilliant at combining things writing humanly readable code in your favorite language and bake the same in lower ones that are perhaps oddly stable.

So I guess we will finally be able to do away with all popular languages and use them for pseudocode only⸮

[shakes_mcjunkie]

Why would copyright holders let that happen? Also, how is the model trainer getting access to all of this material?

[layer8]

Google Books is a large corpus that at least Google has access to.