[abeppu]

The ungrounded breathless excitement of this piece is so grating.

> It's clear that prompting as the way to interact with AI models is here to stay. We wrote about it some months ago as something that might soon happen, and it became even more true than we thought.

Can we reel it in a bit? The jump from "true for some months" to "here to stay" is probably premature.

>Imagine a future where your browser's AI can actively change your experience of the internet entirely. For example, you may prompt this browser to display every website in dark-mode (even those that don't support the option),

Dark-mode browser extensions have been a thing for a while, and don't require any AI.

> If a website is completely malleable to the point that the data it holds can be re-shaped into something else, then you can almost see a website as an application programming interface (API).

... or you could open the developer tab and look at the API requests it's already making. API mashups were a buzzy thing more than a decade ago.

ML is doing new and exciting things right now, but this is acting like re-skinning something is a bold new frontier. 20+ years ago, custom skins for the media player app was fun. Don't try to sell it as a new landscape of possibilities in 2023.

[ya1sec]

Sure, this has been possible all along, and I've been using plain old python and javascript to do it. The essence of hacking is in effect making things "malleable to the point that the data it holds can be re-shaped into something else".

That said, I don't have a problem with re-skinning it as something of a bold new frontier. Honestly, it might be useful to express that sentiment at somewhat frequently - maybe it inspires someone who hadn't had that thought before. The advent of LLMs also makes this type of hacking accessible to non-programmers.

[contextfree]

One thing I do think ChatGPT has been good for is reducing the "learning overhead" of making use of a lot of different APIs - this makes extensibility, scriptability, end-user programming etc. more attractive, although other problems like maintenance costs are still there. Automating the injection of arbitrary outside customizations into third-party systems not designed for it seems like a hard problem with or without LLMs, but I guess it's worth someone giving it a shot and seeing how far they get.

[danShumway]

It reminds me a lot of the hype around self-driving cars. Technology that's impressive, and has made a huge leap forward, but where people all kind of assumed everything was about to fall into place to change everything and were so breathlessly excited about how driving was about to change forever and then it just... didn't.

There's tons of stuff to be excited about with ML, but I've literally never seen this kind of wild level of industry buzz before in my life about a product that frankly... doesn't work particularly well for a lot of the things it's being used for?

"Prompt generation is here to stay"

Is it? There are some real downsides to having every single interaction with a computer happen in natural language form. I thought that voice assistants were here to stay and only I found them kind of annoying to use. Fast forward, that whole interface change turned out to be a lot smaller and a lot less universal than people thought it would be too.

I don't know how to talk about the genuinely exciting things happening with ML right now when it's all drowned out by this extreme level of hype. I've never seen anything like it before, and it really just does not seem deserved. People are glossing over the fact that pretty much every single implementation of a conversational model on the market has had serious downsides that limit its effectiveness for tasks like code generation, answers, search, etc...

I'm seriously thinking about taking a break from tech news for a while because I feel like I'm drowning in people speculating about AI and how it's going to change literally everything, but a lot of it is just speculation and not much else.

---

Here's the thing: the author wants to talk about dark mode, then fine. It would take maybe a week to build an extension that did what the author is theorizing. Take the page source, feed it into GPT-3, tell it to output a stylesheet that will turn on dark mode, and then insert it into the page. If it works so reliably, stop talking about it and build it. And then we can compare the results and see if it's revolutionary. I'm surrounded by AI tech demos that ask me to think about the possibilities, but all I can see are tech demos. People keep on telling me "okay, but imagine once it's refined." Okay, refine it.

Again, there's exciting stuff happening, it's just being drowned by people saying "finally I can do X". Okay, go do it if you're so confident that X is going to work. The level of hype to actual substance is so wildly unbalanced right now. It's really exhausting, I feel like I need to go live in a cabin for half a year until everybody calms down and starts focusing in on what this technology will actually be good for.