Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I understand why people are somewhat frustrated by the "safety bumpers" on this. But I would say that I am actually really impressed by the quality of those safety controls. This is an AI that seems to know what it can and can not give a decent response to. I don't know if that's hard coded or trained in, but it's really impressive when you compare it to the hallucinations that typically show up in GPT3.

For example, ChatGPT refused to give me an opinion on new technologies (it says it doesn't have enough recent information) or political figures (it says it doesn't have enough personal experience). In contrast, it's happy to tell me what I should buy for a white-elephant at my office.

This is way, way closer to being useful than a model which just answers every question, regardless of whether it knows the answer.

what is it useful for

Well it demonstrates that ability. You could imagine a more refined version of this being a better version of Google's knowledge boxes (which also have the overconfidence issue). Similarly, knowing when you're not confident enough to give a good answer would be a key skill for a bot with superhuman research/summary abilities.

Imagine a bot that searches ancient texts to answer your research questions. You ask, "was Plato nice?"

If everyone wrote about how nice Plato was, you want it to say "Plato was nice."

If it doesn't know, you want it to say, "There is no evidence one way or the other."

It may be impossible for you to verify since you don't read ancient Greek, so you need a system which has shown a robust ability to know when it doesn't know something.

I used GPT-3 to help write a formulaic job negotiation email that I was stressing over. I would have spent an hour trying to get the language right; instead it took 30 seconds to write the prompt.

Primary school teacher, into to python, intro to anything (I even quizzed it for a while on Hindu philosophy, perfectly fine responses).

Though Codex is a better into to python once you know how to set up an IDE, this would get you going.

Wish I was ten years old and knew about this.

What was Kitty Hawk useful for?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com