[ronsor]

Large language models are fundamentally incompatible with EU bureaucracy. This has two possible endings: the EU adjusts its regulations, or companies operate outside of the EU and they are left behind.

(Yes, the EU can, in theory, fine a foreign company, but they probably won't ever see that money.)

[ClumsyPilot]

Why do you have certainty that in the next 5 years these models will bring more good than harm?

[Miraste]

He didn't say anything about good, he said the EU would be left behind. LLMs will absolutely increase the capabilities and powers of organizations that use them. I don't think that's debatable. Whether it's for good is a separate question.

[input_sh]

> LLMs will absolutely increase the capabilities and powers of organizations that use them. I don't think that's debatable.

I very much think that's debatable, but time will tell.

[getwiththeprog]

It could be like getting another country to manufature all of your goods. It works at the beginning, you get everything you want, and then lose the capacity to make things yourself.

[Miraste]

I'd be interested to hear why. From using it and testing plugins, GPT-4 is a significant advantage right now, with no additional developments.

[input_sh]

Significant advantage to do what?

Can you blindly trust it to do anything without you being there to correct it? Even when it's not giving you bullshit, it gives the most uncreative, boilerplate output that any human will quickly learn to instantly dismiss. Like the myriad of HN accounts that tried to use it to post comments and that the rest of us instantly recognised as bots.

I'm not saying it's useless, it certainly has its use cases, but the best it can do is supplement humans (give ideas for a blog post, find an answer to an unconventionally asked question by sifting through docs), I'm not buying that it's ever gonna replace millions of us or that it brings significant advantage over a worker using a traditional search engine and good judgement.

I know it's too soon to make a definitive statement like this, but I'm not impressed at all. I'd compare it more to tech whose point of usefulness is always X years away (blockchain, self-driving cars) than to tech that truly revolutionised the world (Google, Wikipedia, smartphones). But again, time will tell.

[Miraste]

I'm basing these answers off what I've seen GPT-4 do. It's not better than human experts at anything. It is better than mid-level humans, and given access to corporate databases in can replace them by doing nothing more than supplementing experts, like dictation software vs secretaries. For example: I've seen a plugin that gives GPT access to Github repos, with which it can learn corporate styles and architectures and write new code to match. You do have to double check it, but since it can explain its own work and edit accordingly this is a fast process. This can be applied to technical documentation and knowledge bases too, and that alone is enough to displace quite a few jobs.

Self-driving cars are a good analogy, because if they only worked, they would be revolutionary (blockchains have no uses I've ever seen). And GPT-4, from what I've seen, works.

[kolinko]

How are they incompatible exactly? They don't break any EU laws afaik.

Italy's issue was with the chat service and GDPR - it would be a simple fix if OpenAI wanted to.

[oceanplexian]

With the exception of some unicorns like Spotify, the EU failed a long time ago. To this day 90% of tech innovation is still coming out of California, OpenAI is just one example out of thousands.

[toomuchtodo]

Stable Diffusion came out of Germany.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378561