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Comment by chrisbaker98 | Hacker News Reader

> ChatGPT is like having a bunch of 8 year olds who know how to use Google hanging around.

It astonishes me that people can dismiss ChatGPT like this. By your own account, there now exists an AI that can convincingly imitate a literate, technically fluent human child. That's an incredible advance that's far beyond anything that existed even a couple of years ago. How is it not amazing?

I get the sense that if some of the commenters here had been around to witness the Wright Brothers' first flight they'd have been like "meh, that's not impressive, the only people whose mind it will blow are people who've never been in a hot air balloon."

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Exactly which makes me think the egos are perhaps bruised. Yes obviously it will be wrong but using it you keep that in mind.

To expand on the analogy it is like having an 8 year old around but unbelievably this 8 year old has literally read and remembered and basically “understood” everything about everything we collectively know.

I’ve tested it with fairly esoteric questions about the technologies I work with and it gives excellent results for an 8 year old and extremely quickly about anything.

I think it can significantly speedup technical work. I intent to try and have it help me this week and see how it goes.

Framed differently: what would you (be able to) do, or (be able to) build with an infinite number of “8 year olds” at your disposal?

A lot because I can dispatch them to collect the background knowledge for the next step. I’ve had multiple 8 years olds I’ve raised to be older and even human 8 year olds can be incredibly useful when given instructions. Actually if I remember correctly they were so useful we had to ban child labor?

I believe where I disagree with you is the basically "understood" part. I don't think ChatGPT and the current models understand anything at all. Not in a way thats not fundamentally flawed and would require a complete new approach. I am hopeful that it can evolve into an incredible knowledge indexing tool but I am very hard pressed to believe it can do anything other than that at the moment.

ATM, im not sure if intentional or because it just can't do it, it just gobbles it all and spits out the mashup without knowing from where things got there, so it cant give me references.

I still think it can be very useful as it can point me to the general direction where I can copy and google stuff about its responses on subjects I know nothing about, though im not sure how much better that would be than googling it directly.

The way I see it, it still a very good simulation, just like a GCI lighting before ray tracing, very good at looking convincing but nothing underneath is actually reproducing the real thing.

It's possible to recognize the advancement within the field while simultaneously recognizing the deficiencies from a general standpoint, especially with domain knowledge of the former. ChatGPT is both fascinating in that it _can_ act like a bunch of ignorant liars using Google and Stack Overflow, and mockable because it _does_ act like a bunch of ignorant liars using Google and Stack Overflow.

In many cases, it does a lot better than 8 year olds with Google.

I agree. I pasted a block of code from a personal project into the prompt, and asked it to add a simple-but-not-trivial frontend feature, in human language (e.g. "This button expands the sidebar and shows some clickable options. It should open a modal instead, and include a search bar which filters the available options").

It gave me working code which did something kind of like what I asked. After some back and forth where I asked for changes, it -almost- got it working. I had to make one manual CSS change.

I don't think 8 year olds can do this - it feels more like an "instant junior developer" to me.

ChatGPT response is "Ah, yes, 8 year olds with Google access - the pinnacle of AI technology!"

lol

Here is another, poem/rap lyric response

"ChatGPT is the best, no doubt It's like having a Google scout It's so smart and so wise It'll blow your mind, surprise!

But don't be fooled by its charm It's just a bunch of 8 year olds in a swarm"

It's amazing. impressive and fascinating but not superhuman, at least not yet.

Also, you can't really dismiss AI skeptics by associating them with denialists that don't see anything of quality or value of these creations despite all the evidence otherwise.

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