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Comment by csmpltn | Hacker News Reader

> "Developers are using GPT-3 to create realistic dialogue, summarize complex documents, answer customer services questions, and make search better than ever before"

This is OpenAI desperately admitting: "nobody needs this, we'll pay you to help us find a market and a vision".

What do we do with all of these fancy, expensive models? Nobody knows really.

We don't really have a clear use for any of it, beyond the most rudimentary tricks. We put all of our focus into building a fancy solution, hoping we'd figure the problem out later. We're finally starting to realize none of this has a practical use.

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I have to agree. Really reminds me of IBM Watson's tech for revenue share arrangement. If any of it works well, why not build the business?

> We're finally starting to realize none of this has a practical use.

Even a decent-quality chatbot could be applied all over the place. For example, video games, education, sex toys, auto-generated narratives for books/movies/games/comics/etc., sales/spam bots, tech support, enhanced searches, automated assistants, etc..

> "Even a decent-quality chatbot could be applied all over the place"

When shit hits the fan - you want a human being on the other side of the line to help you through whatever you need help with.

Call centers can be expensive - but the chat bots we see today are truly useless, if not harmful even. We call them "bots" - but a lot of them could've been implemented like the dialogue mechanics in an RPG game (a state machine of predefined questions, and predefined answers). There's nothing "smart" about it - it's the same tech we've had for the last 30 years, rebranded.

These things just don't work. GPT-3 isn't good enough - and honestly, it's not even needed.

I get the sense that you're focusing on when stuff like GPT-3 isn't useful. For example, yes, a customer with a complex issue to a call-center may need to speak to an expert that understands stuff beyond the level of a decent-quality chatbot.

But a lot of humans who work at call-centers are already chatbots. And not even decent-quality ones! They're basically reading from scripts, and when they go off-script, it's often unreliable guesswork. A decent-quality chatbot could be a pretty significant improvement in many positions currently held by humans.

Of course, you're right that GPT-3 isn't any sort of ultimate technological end-goal; that'd seem to go without saying. Still, it doesn't need to be some sort of uber-tech to have its uses. I mean, even a slightly smarter Google-like search box could be a helpful near-term technology.

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