[terminal_d]

The adoption of the so-called "Software 2.0" depends on how influential OpenAI is as a company. The majority of the use-cases of GPT-3 are only about "remixing" information, and the "notoriety" of the AI is (IMO) mostly a publicity stunt; I'm assuming that there are prompts for personalities / jokes / poems / etc that are never shown to the end-user and are hailed as an "organic outcome" of the model. Obviously, no one can check for these right now. Seems to me that microsoft has taken a few leaves out of the OpenAI playbook and applied them (rather chaotically).

So when you're looking at actually writing software that needs to be dependable / modifiable / bug free, you'd need a massive overhaul of whatever software stack is being used, so there's very little human-assisting "cruft", and instead you'd want a lot of supporting material for a model, which might look like something written in languages used for formal verification of programs.

The promise of GOFAI was about having a human-understandable bottom-to-top framework, and the current "AI" paradigm is at odds with it. The "formal verification" assumption, then, skews towards GOFAI. But since there has to be some human support for the current not-there-yet AI to write software, we might see yet another abstraction layer based on NN / something newer in the years to come.

[willio58]

> the "notoriety" of the AI is (IMO) mostly a publicity stunt

Have you _used_ ChatGPT? I mean not just asking it random factoids but using it to genuinely help you with something. Are you aware that it's hit 100 million users faster than Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok did? It's not a perfect product but it's hard to argue with those numbers. I work at a startup and most people I work with use ChatGPT daily. I'm talking project managers, devs, personal assistants, etc. I guess that's all to say OpenAI is influential as heck _already_, now imagine 5 years down the line if they play their cards right.

[MisterBastahrd]

Do you know WHY it hit 100M so quickly?

Because it was covered on the news and social media incessantly. You could get 100M people to follow a taco stand if it got a free month of news coverage which breathlessly covered the ingredients and had literally thousands of Tiktok and Youtube grifters telling you how the chalupas were gonna change everything.

[terminal_d]

>Have you _used_ ChatGPT?

I have, and I didn't find it to be useful for anything I did. I can do what it does with a search engine and trusty C-f. Also, TTS exists.

It's 50% tech and 50% marketing (and I doubt it's 50% tech at that), it's not gonna upend anything. Except maybe increase the authenticity of online scams and make people get more degrees in machine learning. And yeah, make the people that rely on it bound as it degrades their skills.

It's basically the "internet is educationally useful" argument. At some point everyone's gotta use it but you can live without it just fine. And even though people tout its usefulness for everything good, the majority of data transferred is porno.