[Berniek]

I worked for a while in a fundamental neuroscience research environment. Basically there was one supplier of VERY expensive equipment in the field. But research groups that shelled out lots of money were now restricted to only research subjects the machine could do. This actually change the focus from fundamental exploration research to directed research. I think ChatGPT is the same. It will limit what most people believe AI is and what it is used for. (On a basic level isn't it just data mining on a grand scale?) The fundamental problem of "truth" is not considered important in the hype. If it can't deliver anything that you know absolutely to be "truth" without having to verify it then it is just a shiny new toy. I think the headlines and hype are generated to gloss over the shortcomings of this field in general. (is it a sign of the times whats that other media generated hype that makes money ----blockchain?)

[throwawaycopter]

This is actually an interesting reply, and something I did not consider.

To me, the most impressive part of ChatGPT was not that it could give mostly correct answers to known problems. In a sense, internet search could do it already (just in a much more cumbersome way), with similar degrees of correctness.

The most impressive part for me was actually how seamlessly it parses and produces fluent natural language. Text generated by it reads like something a human would type.

So far I didn't try to fool it by purposefully asking something ambiguous (something that is a characteristic of natural languages), or ask about something that has an ambiguous answer to see how it handles it, but so far I'm impressed.

But I never considered that people may restrict the research of AI to language models due to the rampant success of this avenue of research. I hope this is not the outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised (i.e. the success of ChatGPT works as a blackhole for investment in the area, with everyone racing to cash in on it).