[marginalia_nu]

While that is true, LLMs are (like blockchains) difficult to understand for laypeople, and this is (as it was with blockchains) used to compel gullible investors with FOMO to invest in some highly questionable enterprises that make no goddamn sense.

[Workaccount2]

ChatGPT passes the "my mom can use it" test with flying colors. It's extremely accessible.

[bamboozled]

“Mum why did you sell our family home at half the price it’s worth ?!?!, ChatGPT told me it was a good price son!!!”

[bugglebeetle]

My extremely technically-challenged mom called me out of the blue to tell me about how she was using ChatGPT at work, which was my “holy shit” moment with LLMs.

[MaKey]

"holy shit" in the sense of "holy shit, soon everything will get polluted by hallucinated but convincingly sounding bullshit"?

LLMs hallucinate so you have to check everything they spit out. But their outputs sound convincing and people are lazy...

[Vespasian]

I'm curious. If you are willing to talk about it what did she use it for?

[bugglebeetle]

She has a learning disability from a TBI she sustained as a kid and has a hard time writing long documents. Most of her work doesn’t involve doing this, but when she does, she can now draft an outline and have ChatGPT help her flesh things out.

[Vespasian]

That's a terrific use case. I love seeing technology enabling people to do things they weren't able to do before.

Especially if it's technology about which I'm still somewhat sceptical.

[marginalia_nu]

Right, now try to explain to her how it works.

[teucris]

Does the average person generally understand how the internet works? The economy? Their own muscles?

We understand things enough to know how to use them. Yes, this means the unknown parts can be used to scam people, but that’s true with anything.

[marginalia_nu]

We did see a lot of that scam artistry with regards to the Internet. That was the Dot Com bubble.

The two necessary components seem to be novelty/hype and inscrutable inner workings.

[Tostino]

"It's an overpowered autocomplete that was trained to have a conversation rather than completing your thoughts."

[jimbokun]

This Economist article is an excellent explainer.