Ask HN: Are older programmers/computer scientists more impressed with ChatGPT? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are older programmers/computer scientists more impressed with ChatGPT?

5 pointsamichail9 comments

One might expect this since they have seen chatbots fail to impress for a longer time.

I'm 49, so I suppose I fall into the "older" category. It's not clear to me that my age has anything to do with my assessment of ChatGPT though.

With that established...

I was talking a friend a couple of weeks ago, and recall saying something like

ChatGPT is the first thing I've encountered in a while that gives me that "we are living in the future" feeling.

Do I find it impressive? Yeah, definitely. But does that statement come with some caveats? Also "yeah, definitely."

What caveats? Well... while I find it impressive in a general sense, I'd stop short of some of the more hyperbole filled assessments I've seen out there. I don't, for example, think "ChatGPT is AI" or "ChatGPT is going to take all of our jobs" or even "ChatGPT is going to kill Google". Regarding AGI, I'm not even sure ChatGPT represents much at all in the way of progress towards that, although I lean towards a believe that it does represent some progress towards AGI. Maybe just not as much as some commentators would have you believe.

I would refer people who are really interested in this whole discussion to, among other things, the paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?[1] by Emily Bender, et al.

All of that aside, clearly it's a powerful and useful tool, and it also clearly has limitations.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Aarggh. Just noticed a typo in the above.

This:

I don't, for example, think "ChatGPT is AI".

should read:

I don't, for example, think "ChatGPT is AGI".

62 and no. It's statistics and nothing remotely like AGI. It's brilliant at making a parse tree in a given style of wrong facts.

It's Mark V Shaney good. It's a blast. But it's really only narrowly impressive, not generally impressive.

How do you judge where technology has taken us? I'm half your age and hate most of it since ~10 years.

I tend to Steven Pinker's view that overall society is more peaceful and lives are lived better (he's an argumentative show pony dick, but I do agree with this measured at scale) and some tech has to be part of this.

The net and tech has been amazing. It's just that people are getting lazy and a bit asocial about it all. You'd think with open access to reasonably demonstrable facts we'd have less bullshit, but human capacity to prefer bullshit (AGI) is amazing.

"The glass bead game" by Hermann Hesse (1943) has a page or two about society becoming obsessed with the views of a violinist about politics and a politician about sports and music, I think tech has tended to take us there.

The same tech which lets cellphones do remote medical diagnostics and GPS let us watch love Island and cat videos 24/7

"The machine stops" by E.M. Forster is from 1909. Also has some good observations on social isolation mediated by technology.

On a scale of 1 to 20 I'd rate tech a solid meh++ but I do love my chips with everything.

Thanks for your answer. What we have gained in technological sophistication we may have lost in soul. And increasingly I've seen that "soft factors" are absolutely not to be underestimated.

Can our (lizard) brains collectively take it all? Somehow I don't see it, but I'm willing to be surprised...

I am 67 years old and ChatGPT is just a more efficient LISP as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong, since I am 67 years old

Also 67, and no, not impressed

I'm impressed with the idea of a latent space being explored, which isn't a ChatGPT thing, but adjacent to it. Autoencoders and GANs are amazing ways to distill concepts out of a corpus and into neural networks.

We're just seeing the start of the power of these concepts. They're tools, but not anywhere near being an AGI.

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