[alfalfasprout]

I wouldn't be remotely so quick to throw in the towel. ML research tends to operate in "jumps" and plateaus. At this point, the concepts behind the big LLMs are relatively well known and the bottleneck is cost of compute + cost of training data. Thing is, cost of compute keeps coming down.

OpenAI's "win" wasn't even so much in the research but in the design of ChatGPT as an interface. Its own model makes the same kinds of egregious mistakes as google and FB's own LLMs. Also, OpenAI was willing to just deal with the ethical fallout of releasing it into the wild with the ability to generate authoritative sounding falsehoods.

I suspect we're going to go back to a period soon where a lot of the innovation we're seeing is around interfaces and infra to make interacting with LLMs natural and applying them to product use cases where they make sense.

[simonh]

I really don't blame OpenAI for ethical issues over opening up access to ChatGPT. They're not claiming it's responses are factually correct, and arguably by making it openly available they have done more than anyone else to raise awareness of the risks and limitations of LLMs. We need access to these things to make informed decisions of what are or are not appropriate uses.

Microsoft and Google are a different story, they're specifically pushing these as authoritative sources of information. If we hadn't had access to ChatGPT and the ability to learn it's ins and outs, it might have taken longer to expose so may of the flaws in the Microsoft and Google services.

[zht]

What are they claiming regarding the correctness of the responses?

[simonh]

The OpenAI disclaimer is pretty comprehensive. Basically nothing.