[Bjorkbat]

I'm kind of skeptical of this simply because people were saying the same thing about chatbots back when there was a lot of hype around Messenger. Sure, they weren't as advanced as what we have now, but they were fundamentally capable of the same things.

Not only did the hype not pan out, but it feels as if they were completely forgotten.

In a nutshell that's why I'm still largely dismissive of anything related to GPT. It's 2016-2018 all over again. Same tech demos. Same promises. Same hype. I honestly can't see the big fundamental breakthroughs or major shifts. I just see improvements, but not game-changing ones.

[swalling]

This is a healthy skepticism but the difference was that using Messenger chatbots was a disjointed, clunky experience that felt slower than just a few taps in the OpenTable app. Not to mention that their natural language understanding was only marginally better than Siri at best.

In this scenario, it seems dramatically faster to type or speak "Find me a dinner reservation for 4 tomorrow at a Thai or Vietnamese restaurant near me." than to browse Google Maps or OpenTable. It then comes down to the quality and personalization of the results, and ChatGPT has a leg up on Google here just due to the fact that their results are not filled with ads and garbage SEO bait.

[golol]

>but they were fundamentally capable of the same things.

This is not the case. The difference between current state of the art NLP and chatbots 3 years ago is so massive, it has to be seen as qualitative. Pre GPT-3 computers did not understand language and no commerical chatbot had any AI. Now computers can understand language.

[riku_iki]

> Now computers can understand language.

"understand"

[int_19h]

If I tell it to do X, and it does X, for all practical purposes it means that it understood what I said.

[riku_iki]

it was taught to react in specific way on specific word, the same thing you can train dog to bark on "quantum physics" phrase.

[int_19h]

It can invent words, and then correctly use them to compose.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35268950

[riku_iki]

it can invent words, because gpt is amazing pattern extrapolator.

[pixl97]

Well if it can bark out the right answer its an impressive damned dog...

[riku_iki]

the thing it doesn't bark right answer very often, but bark non-sense because was training on predicting next word in sentence.

[dan_mctree]

At this point ChatGPT is blowing our human ability to use language so far out of the water on so many levels, I'd argue we should start putting quotes around our human ability to "understand" language. GPT-4 has already eclipsed us when it comes to language

[nmca]

This time it works.

[fullshark]

Yeah being able to generate media/text is what excites me about these models, more than using my voice or a text input to do X instead of a webpage which has a GUI and buttons and text boxes.