[dsabanin]

I have to say, I find all the comments dismissing ChatGPT hilarious. I read them in a funny grandpa voice. However, we should look past the insignificant details. The main achievement is that we now have a really capable unstructured text-to-computer interface. We can hook it up to anything and it will give us answers with whatever properties we desire, in whatever shape we can think of.

[nprateem]

I know, all those frusty old grumpyboots who actually want the thing to return factually accurate answers and valid code.

Just be happy with plausible sounding answers people. Sheesh!

[dsabanin]

Did you actually ever receive 100% factually correct answers from anything before for anything other than strictly mathematical statements?

Regardless, I find it silly to focus on the small flaws when we're witnessing a foundational shift in what kind of problems we can solve.

[nprateem]

But they're not small flaws if you're relying on it to eg replace a person's job.

If i ask it for the dimensions of a product and it gives the wrong figures it should just tell me it doesn't know instead of inventing something.

That's the problem. It doesn't tell you when something is wrong so you can never trust if it's right unless you happen to know the field. That makes it far less useful.

[aliqot]

I've had a few instances where it returned bad code or was unable to solve a challenge, however most were fixed by better prompts, or by clarifying prompts. In a way I think there is a two-way "learning" process going on here. I'm training it how to give me what I ask for, and it trains me how to ask for what I want it to give me.

[macNchz]

The tricky bit IMO is when you’re at the threshold of being able to identify errors it makes. I tested some situations a while ago where I asked for some physics calculations functions. I’m an experienced programmer but haven’t really done anything with physics since high school 20 years ago. The code returned looked plausible and would run, but going through it line by line and looking up the real formulas it turned out to be super wrong.

[dwild]

People can be wrong and can sound quite plausible too.

The key is to verify... and that's true for AI and people too, though for sure that's not something people are used to do sadly.

[alexandrius]

Right? Devs are so butthurt that, are dismissing this all together. It’s called denial.

[1970-01-01]

You've conflated the critical detail. No garbage-out is the critically significant problem with AI. Right now, ChatGPT is the ability to generate structured results from whatever format we can think of to whatever format we can think of. They may or may not be correct.

[dsabanin]

It is only a critically significant problem for some applications. People have already come up with a variety of potential solutions for this problem, for different classes of problems, including integration with Wolfram Alpha.

However, verifying results is and will always be important. Iterating on the prompts and alternative paths is also important.

But even as it is right now, it is very useful to a lot of people. Remember, a lot of people accepted self-driving cars that can drive themselves off roads and crash into trailers, even paid extra for it, while this is just text generation for now.

I see that it is going to transform everything. No technical revolution has ever been more readily apparent. We now have an interface to talk to computers that can translate unstructured raw language into other formats. This is the real innovation that will unlock the power of more specialized, more advanced models in the near future.

[aliqot]

What escapes a lot of people is that ChatGPT was a battle won in the UI/UX real first and foremost. GPT3 was old news, but throw a new paradigm and interface on it and here we are.

[stevenhuang]

Incorrect. ChatGPT is markedly more capable than GPT3 because of its improved model (instructgpt and supervised fine tuning). Anyone who has played with both can attest to that.

It's not merely UI changes.

[lm28469]

Just like Siri was about to revolutionize the world and it now is at best a shortcut to set a timer ?

Or like crypto was about to revolutionize the world in 2010 ?

Or maybe like we would have fully autonomous cars "in two years" in 2012 ?

I might be a pessimistic grandpa but it's not worse than a blind technophile

[dsabanin]

Okay, the bets are placed. Let's come back to this conversation in a year.

[lm28469]

I set my reminder ;)