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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

You sound like someone who has either never tried chatgpt, or someone who’s so scared of the consequences that it prefers to put its head in the sand.

«just a text generator on steroid » is meaningless unless you define what « on steroid» means. It might as well describe a novelist’s activity or a programmer.

The ability to understand enough of the relationship between words and their associated concepts in chatgpt is good enough to produce meaningful and sometimes correct answers to a huge number of questions. This is far beyond « random », and can easily be described as an « intelligent » capacity.

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has ChatGTP created anything new? something that's is just not rewriting text?

it hepled me write code using a C library , which otherwise is very poorly documented! Well if it quacks and it swims, it is a duck!

The tricky part is you can ask similar questions about the human brain. Are our thoughts, ideas, words, and actions really "new", or just deterministic transformations based on our genetics and sensory input? We don't know exactly how our brains do computation, but it's definitely possible that what looks and feels like creativity to us is really, under the hood, just as statistical and mechanistic as an LLM.

I agree with much of what you said except the use of the word "just".

Chaos theory just happens to be deterministic. And life is most assuredly chaotic. In fact it was equations related to populations of living things that lead to the discovery of chaos theory. (equations wrt the weather also helped) [1]

So I'd make your statement:

Our thoughts, ideas, words, and actions are really really irreducibly new. They are (deterministic-)chaotic transformations based on our genetics and sensory input.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Introduction

Why are you fixating on the "creating something new" argument? I can confidently say in 10yrs as a programmer, nothing I've worked on has "created something new" according to your argument.

Every web-app or scientific application I've written is merely "rewriting" and stitching together other techniques, libraries, and patterns. I haven't broken any new ground on data encoders/process handling/data analysis, but my work had value.

In this scenario, if ChatGPT provides enough value to reduce my workload and allow me to allocate my effort elsewhere, why is it not a valuable tool, regardless of whether it "creates anything new"?

This same argument can be made against the concept of an IDE. My IDE doesn't create anything new. I used to use Vim with a number of plugins, a terminal multiplexer, and an auto-completion engine.

Why would <insert IDE of choice> improve my workflow? It doesn't add anything new to my existing workflow. But after migrating to my current IDE, the convenience it brought me was significant, even if it didn't add anything new to my setup.

This seems more than just regurgitating stuff that's already out there.

could you make some that might be useful to aliens

Sure! Here are a few SaaS ideas that might be useful to extraterrestrial beings:

A intergalactic communication platform, allowing aliens from different planets to exchange messages and share information.

A virtual reality platform for exploring other planets and galaxies, providing a way for aliens to experience and study new environments from a safe distance.

A space weather forecasting software, providing up-to-date information on solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and other space weather events that could affect intergalactic travel and communication.

An artificial intelligence-powered resource management system, allowing aliens to optimize resource usage and minimize waste on their home planets.

A platform for remote monitoring and control of extraterrestrial mining operations, including real-time data analysis and reporting.

A language translation software that can translate between different extraterrestrial languages and dialects.

A virtual market place for intergalactic trade, facilitating commerce between different alien species.

These are just a few examples of SaaS ideas that could be of use to extraterrestrial beings. The key is to think about the unique needs and challenges that aliens might face in their everyday lives, and offer solutions that address those needs in innovative and effective ways.

Here's a video on cocktails that it came up with and the resultant taste tests by a master mixologist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=419no81su64

I'm pretty into cocktails and I've never heard of the ones it came up with. Admittedly, the world of cocktails is huge and every single cocktail is 'just a riff' on some other one at the end of the day. In short, these drinks are new.

Futhermore, to me it shows 'learned' innovation on the AI's part. Like, the AI got ~95% of the way there, just what a human would do when trying to create and refine drinks.

yes! It created a valentines poem for my wife, which brought her to tears (success). The poem is uniquely tailored to my wife (new) and something that I would not have been able to do myself.

Does this answer your question?

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