[cl42]

The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse.

The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines.

So it goes.

I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say.

Early adopters will use the technology and do amazing things with it. Unions are already pushing back on AI (truckers, federal employees in Canada, writers in Hollywood) and maybe rightly so. At the same time, dismissing these technologies because they don't meet your high standards yet is probably foolish.

[magicalist]

There's a strong argument for its actual merits but this particular line of argument isn't convincing.

> The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse.

> The first electric motors were written off as being less powerful than steam engines

And the first Segways were written off, the first NFTs were written off, etc.

(in fact, we've seen this same argument for blockchains changing everything real soon now :)

[MrPatan]

The first segways were written off... and now you have electric scooters on demand on every city of the planet.

The first NFTs were written off... by you and other writter-offers. If you didn't write them off back then and minted some you'd have made a pretty penny by now.

I don't know, I'm not sure those examples strengthen your case.

[Gud]

Electric scooters and Segways are hardly the same thing. Plus, I doubt the Segway came before either the electric scooter(and electric bike).

And that some people made money on NFTs doesn't make them useful. For a brief moment, a lot of people got scammed so others could prosper. Hardly a world changing technology(at least not for the better)

[feanix]

Have you ever thought about where that money came from? Someone had to lose money for someone to get money. You do know that, right?

[munificent]

> Unions are already pushing back on AI (truckers, federal employees in Canada, writers in Hollywood) and maybe rightly so.

Interesting bit of historical trivia: In the US, the main truck driver's union is the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. What is a teamster? Historically, it was a person who wrangled a team of horses or oxen to pull a wagon. That profession was effectively eliminated by the creation of the internal combustion engine.

Two of the other main trades that were involved in the rise of unions are longshoremen and stevedores. The former pull cargo off ships and get it onto land. The latter organize cargo on the ships.

The creation of shipping containers dramatically reduced the need for those jobs, leading to some of the longest strikes in the US. While the unions technically "won", the strikes mostly incentivizing shipping companies to push even farther into mechanization so that they were less reliant on labor. There are far fewer dockworkers and longshoremen today than there were before containerization.

Change is hard.

[mediaman]

More on the port workers: today you'll find that skilled union port workers are extremely well-paid. Workers in the cranes that pull containers off the ship, for example, are paid >$300k.

They are quite skilled, but so are many other skilled tradespeople. Electricians and machinists for example do not make that kind of money despite their skill. So why do crane operators make so much?

When containerization, and subsequently other types of automation, hit ports, the union resisted fiercely but ultimately had to work out a deal with the port operators.

That deal was to reward the most tenured union tradespeople with much larger pay packages, at the cost of the less experienced tradespeople, who would have to find different work.

This agreement became agreeable to both sides, since the operators could still massively reduce the workforce, and the only price they'd have to pay would be high salaries for the union workers who remained. And the union was able to reward their longest tenured members.

It's hard to fault the union for this: the alternative was likely both huge reduction in workforce and less attractive pay, so they at least got good pay out of it for the remaining workers. But it made a lot of the less tenured union workers resentful because they felt the union sacrificed them in favor of the union 'insiders'.

The book 'The Box' by Marc Levinson is a great coverage of this topic, if steel shipping containers are the sort of thing that get you going.

[slashdev]

I use it almost on a daily basis now, and I pay for the monthly subscription. It’s not magic, but it can save me a lot of time sometimes. I use it in my job as a software engineer, and I mostly use it to create unit tests. The code usually needs a lot of love, but it gets me started.

[PartiallyTyped]

Copilot and chatgpt are some of the services i am perfectly content paying for.

ChatGPT is a great way to delve into new topics, and for that alone it’s worth it.

[twelve40]

> ChatGPT is a great way to delve into new topics

Like bears in space? ))) seems like a great way to delve into known topics so that you are able to catch it when it starts to confidently and plausibly hallucinate

[PartiallyTyped]

Basically I described the problem I am trying to solve; I ask it to behave as a seasoned professor of comp sci or w/e depending on my hunch, we go back and forth where I ask questions, add constraints to the system, and in turn it gives me ideas into what I should look into more.

It's the Socratic method on steroids, where the student is probing a possibly fallible professor with the library of Alexandria at their hands.

It is by no means perfect, but it allows me to identify what general field I am going into, what I should read about it, what core concepts are important, how to expand my knowledge, and most importantly, helps me better formulate the problem by asking questions or failing to understand what I want to convey.

[PartiallyTyped]

Who tf downvotes something like this?

By all means, HN has lost it.

[throw_nbvc1234]

And we should blindly trust anything you read on the internet written by a real person? It's still valuable as a "search engine" with a different interface, especially if you can describe the problem but don't know the words to search for. For me that's a common issue when jumping into a new space.

[twelve40]

no, you should not blindly trust anything you read on the internet, why did you think that? If anything, ChatGPT is actually doubling down on this "i'm the single authority" mode.

google, while far from perfection, gives me a selection of links that i can scan and see for myself which one of them makes more sense.

even looking for something stupid and potentially spammy like "chili soup recipe", i learned there are different opinions on how to make it, and i learned that apparently in Texas using beans is considered somewhat of a blasphemy. GPT did not mention any of that, just authoritatively barfed out one random recipe without any nuance or even any sources at all.

[throw_nbvc1234]

So what would happen if you tried the recipe and then asked ChatGPT to change it based on your feedback. They're different tools and different interfaces.

If you already know what you want "Chili soup" then doing a classic search and looking up all the options is probably the best bet. If you don't know what you want (i have all these ingredients make me a recipe or I kind of liked this but want it to be <different>) then the aggregation that LLM's do is more suited.

Or you combine the two. Ask ChatGPT a question to figure out what you want, what are some areas to dive into more. The do the classic search research and primary sources to fill in the details. This is what I mean by blindly trusting the output, the best description I've heard is that it's a digital intern.

[jstarfish]

At least there is usually a comments section on websites where people can call out bullshit.

If you're not an expert in your field, GPT will successfully lie to you. There's no second opinion.

Rather than a feelings filter, it needs an integrity filter.

[hammyhavoc]

There is a trend now of not having a comment section because it reduces server overhead by being able to serve a completely static page, and also directs the outrage and moderation required for it to social media, thus driving further traffic and reducing work required to deal with the fallout of it.

LLMs don't lie, that implies they have intent and is giving too much credibility to the idea that AGI may happen. They get things wrong because it's trying to use the wrong tool for the task at hand. It's a next word prediction engine, and that's not very useful for most things. By their very nature, they "hallucinate", but they don't really hallucinate, they just give the wrong output because it is just an LLM.

[hecksideci_1]

ChatGPT uses the word "delve" a lot. If it wasn't for the lowercase "i" in your message, I would have been skeptical that this was a message generated by chatGPT. Perhaps your speech tendencies are merging with those of ChatGPT. Before too long your independent thoughts and writings may accidentally be flagged by GPT detectors, haha.

[dpflan]

Copilot Chat will probably be something you’ll like. Have you used it? There is a waitlist.

https://github.com/github-copilot/chat_waitlist_signup/join

[asimjalis]

“Admission to the private beta for GitHub Copilot chat is limited and requires an active subscription to GitHub Copilot. Signing up does not guarantee access.“

[ethanbond]

Curious if you've queried ChatGPT on topics that are not new to you and been impressed with its conveyance of relevant information?

I think there's value here, but I also think people are way overestimating the quality of the "knowledge" they think they're receiving from it on novel topics.

[PartiallyTyped]

The topics that are not new to me and are of interest come up after its training-dataset-cutoff, thus it can produce bogus information.

I think ChatGPT and the likes should be thought of as cartographers who when probed can provide an outline of regions of the knowledge space and give hints as to what could be useful.

Given then a high level but also imprecise map, I can ask the GPS for clarity as to where I am going.

The problem is that I often don't know where that is and thus I don't know what to ask from the GPS, but I can describe it to the cartographer, and they can draw a map for me.

In this analogy, the GPS is search engines / books / papers.

[hammyhavoc]

No, it's objectively shit for a lot of things. The more technical and abstract something is in its concepts, the worse it becomes. It is just an LLM and that means it is inappropriate by its very nature for most things.

[visarga]

> I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say.

Yes, because people think that LLMs are almost AGI based on the social media reactions and can't imagine they still have unknown/unsolved problems. But if we take a look at the 14 years of self driving car development, it becomes clear how AI can be both amazing and not good enough at the same time.

[Paul-Craft]

> Yes, because people think that LLMs are almost AGI....

Surprise, surprise... this has happened before:

> Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear his opinion that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human being and any life form for that matter.[29] In the independent documentary film Plug & Pray (2010) Weizenbaum said that only people who misunderstood ELIZA called it a sensation.[30]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#Response_and_legacy

And, it's easy to see why. You can talk the damn thing, and it talks back! People love to anthropomorphize things, anyway, but if you can talk to it and it talks back, people think there's got to be something to it.

This time, though, is a little different. GPT-3 and GPT-4 actually do behave like they understand natural language to a great extent. That makes them directly analogous to Searle's Chinese room construct, and suggests that they could actually pass the Turing test (if suitably fine-tuned).

This is great, because, as you say, it's amazing. But I also think it's not good enough, because the fact that GPT-4 may be able to pass the Turing test really says more to me about the limitations of the Turing test than anything else. Likewise with the Chinese room analogy: we know what's in the box, and we know it shouldn't be trusted.

But, you're not going to get that kind of analysis from the general public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

[spacebanana7]

LLMs are different from self driving cars in that they can be useful even when they make wrong decisions occasionally. Copilots, document drafting (legal, copy, etc) and summarisation are useful services that people and enterprises are currently enjoying.

[cl42]

AVs have also struggled with regulatory muddle, which is partly my point.

Self-driving is very possible in many situations and if there was a "Manhattan Project" for self-driving to be up and running by 2025 I think we could do it... But there are so many vested interests that this won't happen.

... and then everyone is disappointed.

BTW, I'm not saying this is all bad... Everyone asking for a 6-month AI research moratorium gets it indirectly via societal inertia and regulatory muddle!

[somesortofthing]

The difference here is that steam engines were "less powerful than a horse" in an easily quantifiable, easily diagnosable way. They produced fewer newtons of force. You could tell this was the case because your mechanism just wouldn't move when you wanted it to. Most new technologies followed this pattern, they quantifiably underperformed alternatives until the field matured. But AI doesn't act like a dumb human who's missing information or is inept at the task presented to them. It doesn't refuse to answer if you give it a question that's too hard for it or requires info that it doesn't have in the training dataset, it confidently makes stuff up and then covers up for the fact that it made stuff up by burying it in marketing copy and extraneous info such that you need to be an expert in the topic you're using AI for to even tell that it failed. Better AI models do help with this, but they simultaneously improve the AI's obfuscation abilities to the point where fatal flaws in its output are going to be even harder to catch than they are now with human review. It doesn't have the same risk calculus as a human, it doesn't care whether the marketing copy you're writing describes your product as wonderful and perfect or if it's providing you completely bogus legal advice that'll land you in jail for a decade if you follow it.

And this is all before we even bring up the topic of prompt injection, a problem so intrinsic to the technology that OpenAI doesn't even take bug reports on it because bug reports "are for problems that can be fixed".

[daveguy]

One of the biggest problems in AI for the last 60 years is the grounding problem. The ability of a model to be rooted in objective reality. In other words, for one of these LLMs to understand when they are being accurate vs hallucinating. None of the current crop of LLMs has come close to solving this problem. On the contrary, they make the problem blatantly obvious. No LLMs will achieve AGI until this is solved sufficiently that the answers of an LLM can be depended on without complete independent secondary verification.

[mrguyorama]

A LANGUAGE model cannot solve this because truth and fiction is not a property of LANGUAGE

[majou]

In causal speech confidence in an answer is communicated; though maybe just as a pause, or even through tone.

Not the sort of data we'll have crop up in CommonCrawl.

[daveguy]

Congratulations. You figured out half the hype. The other half involves confusing a sigmoid curve with an exponential one.

[esjeon]

I think the analogy doesn't work here.

In my understanding, LLMs already hit a big wall. We can't increase the size of models mainly because it's too expensive, but also doing so may not be as effective as before. We've also run out of data. The free lunch is likely already over, for now. It's unlikely that we'll see huge improvements in the direction we've seen during recent years.

Instead, what I see is that the first letter 'L' is getting smaller. People are working on (relatively) smaller specialized models. But it means these models are unlikely outperform larger LLMs (in the direction mentioned above).

[SilasX]

Don’t forget the infamous remark from the Slashdot mod about the first iPod, “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.”

https://slashdot.org/story/21026

[pmoriarty]

they weren't wrong...

[SilasX]

He wasn't wrong that it has "no wireless" and less space than a Nomad (whatever that is). He was absolutely wrong that it was therefore "lame" i.e. unable to deliver significant value in spite of these limitations.

[wnevets]

A more modern example is the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day. If you look passed the novelty of having a lightsaber app on your phone it was terrible.

[3-cheese-sundae]

I had a Motorola Q at the time and the first iPhone was light years beyond it, even if the only metric used to compare was browsing the internet. Most sites were barely functional in Windows Mobile IE.

[throwaway472919]

But it had no apps, the analogy works, the iPhone did some things great (web browser:rewrite X in the style of y or whatever) and had some gotchas that seemed like a big deal at the time but were then resolved, or everyone realised it was so good they didn't matter (maybe no keyboard: hallucinations, we thought this was a problem but it's not, and no apps:no knowledge of current events, easy fix)

[Q6T46nT668w6i3m]

What? Safari on your phone was mind blowing and immediately useful. Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

[Nullabillity]

Browsers were already commonplace in phones for years at that point. Maybe things were more dire in the US?

[tempestn]

Browsers in other phones sucked. I'd owned high-end "smart" phones before the first iPhone and ultimately went back to a flip phone because they just weren't worth using. Usability of the first iPhone browser was a huge leap forward.

Ironically, that was largely because it let you more easily use sites built for desktop, due to the larger screen space and ease of pinch to zoom. Those older phones would have been somewhat more useful if mobile first/responsive sites had been a thing then, but it took the popularity of the iPhone for that to happen.

[sumtechguy]

At the time you pretty much had palm and wince and feature phones. Of the three wince was probably the better of the interfaces (but that was a mater of taste). Data was expensive to buy on most carriers. Which all the other carriers mimicked within a couple of months of iPhone coming out. The iPhone was decently better than the other two and the 'unlimited data plan' and the bling bling of 'apple'. Also the browser being worth anything. The built in ones for all the others were junk.

Then people started sideloading and basically showed Apple they needed a store which they quickly came up with. Getting an application on the other two platforms at the time was mind numbingly bad (activesync was to put it mildly awful to use). In some cases you needed to get the carrier involved (better have a few months to validate and a few hundred thousand dollars to pay for it).

Also that screen they used was way better than what any other phone out there had at the time. Most of the top end phones needed a stylus and itty bitty keyboard to be any sort of useful.

I would say it was not until the droidx came out that anyone had anything that approached how cool the iphone was.

[misterprime]

Mobile browsers were a painful experience before that. Mobile keyboards were a painful experience before that.

I think Blackberry was the only one that did both OK enough to take seriously. I know people loved the Sidekick, but I never used it and don't recall if people used a web browser on it, or just text messaging.

The first iPhone was more impressive than a Blackberry.

[Jtsummers]

Most feature phone browsers were very limited compared to what Safari supported (almost the full web experience at the time). You'd have to look at other "smartphone" class devices for something comparable, and those were not common (EDIT: among consumers) in the US at the time.

[earthling8118]

We must have been on a completely different web. It was several generations later before they even began to approach the "full web experience"

[iforgotpassword]

I... Think they were? I kinda remember having ICQ on it, but maybe that was already the iPhone 2. Or I'm hallucinating.

[jrmg]

There were only built-in apps on release. Third party apps and the App Store came in the iPhoneOS 2.0 update.

[wnevets]

> Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

So it did even less than I gave it credit for.

[mrguyorama]

You are completely ignoring the reality that Apple products are considered better than peer products even if they are objectively equal. The public doesn't care if Apple wasn't the first company to put a web browser on a phone. The public knows that they like their iPod, and the marketing for the iPhone made it compelling.

[wnevets]

> the marketing for the iPhone made it compelling.

That's part of my point. There was a tremendous amount of hype for something that was incredibly limited and objectively bad. However eventually it became very good and took over the world.

[wnevets]

> Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

So it was even worse than I remember.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure "bad" is fair. But the app ecosystem wasn't really developed, the network connectivity wasn't great, and there were probably a lot of other shortcomings especially in retrospect. I had a Treo at the time and didn't upgrade for a few years to the 3GS which, as I recall, was when the iPhone really took off.

The iPod had a somewhat similar trajectory. The first gen version was pretty much just another MP3 player and iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first.

[kgwgk]

> the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day

That's why it barely got over six million units sold.

[wnevets]

Milli Vanilli also sold over 10 million records. Maybe popularity doesn't equal quality?

[charcircuit]

No, because next word predictors are fundamentally limited in their capabilites and have interest problems. This isn't something you can just iterate on to fix. You need a different architecture.

[marban]

An iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator. Not so bad if you ask me.

[sclarisse]

What are you referring to here? The iPhone didn’t have apps for over a year, until the same time as the iPhone 3G launch.

[denimnerd42]

the worst was it was ATT only and they had a coverage hole on the block where I lived so I had to get rid of it for something supported by verizon. didn't go back to an iphone until 10 years later.

[onewheeltom]

My recollection was that AT&T was the only vendor that would provide free wifi with the iPhone (Apple precondition)

[hodgesrm]

> The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse.

Which steam engine do you mean and do you have a citation for this comment? The first industrial steam engines were based on the Newcomen design and were used to pump water out of mines. Their big drawback was efficiency, not power. They were only economical in coal mines, which had fuel immediately available at near zero cost.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

[Brendinooo]

> I think both of these views can be true at the same time: ChatGPT (or, LLMs really) are revolutionary and they won't revolutionize the world the way technologists/researchers say.

This is pretty much what I've seen. ChatGPT (that's 3.5, right? GPT3 was interesting but still pretty laughable) was a massive step forward, and incredibly exciting to witness and interact with. But it still does have limitations, especially if you try to separate hype (which comes from an ecosystem of people who have incentives to hype it) from reality.

[godelski]

> The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse.

This may not be the best example considering that steam engines were around since at least 20BCE[0] but the first successful application wasn't till almost 1700.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile