Hacker News Reader

Comment by gptgpp | Hacker News Reader

You all say it's solving these amazing complex tasks for you, but then don't provide any details.

Then "naysayers" like the linked article provide a whole document with images and appendixes showing it struggles with basic tasks...

So show us. For the love of god all of us would very much LIKE this technology to be good at things! Whatever techniques you're using to get these fantastical results, why don't you share them?

I can get it to provide snippets of code, CLI, toy functions that work. Beyond that, I am apparently an idiot compared to you AI-whisperers.

Also... Whatever happened to "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof?"

An AI that creates a complex system, condensed into an actionable plan, that has stumped an entire team for 8 months is a (pardon the language) bat-shit insane claim. Things like this used to require proof to be taken seriously.

View on HN

The explanation is easy.

An analytic prompt contains the facts necessary for the response. This means the LLM acts as a translator.

A synthetic prompt does not contain the facts necessary for the response. This means the LLM acts as a synthesizer.

A complete baseball box score being converted into an entertaining paragraph description of the game is an analytic prompt and it will reliably produce a factual outcome.

https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/chatgpt-and-the-analy...

There’s a bunch of active research in this area:

https://github.com/lucidrains/toolformer-pytorch

https://reasonwithpal.com/

Thank you so much!

Your technique of only posing analytical questions is indeed improving the results. It's not great, but I can actually get it to somewhat reliably summarize academic articles if I give it a citation now, which is pretty neat.

It doesn't summarize them well (I gave it a couple softballs, like summarizing McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", which almost every undergrad student in the humanities will have written about), but the stuff that it does make up is completely innocuous and not a big deal.

Very cool, thanks again.

It’s amazing how taking time to slow down and approach things in a measured manner can lead to positive results.

It’s not at all surprising that most of the popular conversation about these tools is akin to randomly bashing into walls while attempting to push the peg into whatever “moment we need to talk about”.

What is again surprising is that HN is primarily overrun with randomly bashing into walls.

I guess I’m normally in threads about C memory arenas, a topic that probably draws more detailed thinkers in the first place.

My take: Because GPT is just stochasticly stringing words after each other, it is remarkedly good at producing text on par with other text available on the internet. So it can produce plans, strategies, itineraries and so on. The more abstract the better. The 8 point plan is likely great.

It will much more likely fail on anything which involves precision/computation/logic. That's why it can come up with an generic strategy but fail to repeat unadjusted GAAP earnings.

There was an article not too long ago, that I'm struggling to find, that did a great job of explaining why language models are much much better suited to reverse-engineering code than they are at forward-engineering it.

I agree it's pretty good at generalities, doesn't shit the bed quite so much. Yet to suggest a plan that an entire team of professionals, who have been working for 8 months could not figure out?

It's certainly not that good, absent some amazing wizardry or some very silly professionals in a very squishy field. Yet I have no explanation for why someone would go on the internet and lie about something like that.

There were comments a while back (less so now) of people making other claims like it was solving complex functions for them and writing sophisticated software.

The entire thing baffles me. If I could get it to do that, I'd be showing you all of my marvelous works and bragging quite a bit as your newfound AI-whisperer. Hell, I'd get it to write a script for me to run that evangelized itself (edit: and me of course, as its chosen envoy to mankind) to the furthest corners of the internet!

"ChatGPT, think of a novel way to scam the elderly safely. Write it as an 8 points plan."

I mean no disparagement to the OP, but maybe the team is just really bad at planning. Or perhaps they’re stretched thin and are having a hard time seeing the bigger picture.

I’m not saying such a claim doesn’t need more info, but I’ve been on teams before that lacked anyone with a good project management skillset.

I can provide an example.

I have found ChatGPT to be a valuable tool for improving the clarity and readability of my writing, particularly in my blogs and emails. You can try this by asking questions such as "Can you improve the grammar of the following paragraphs?". You can also specify the desired tone.

It is impressive at simplifying complex technical language. Take the following sentences from a draft I wrote:

To mitigate these issues, it is recommended to simulate the effect of say n random permutations using n random hash functions (h1, h2, … hn) that map the row numbers (say 1 to k) to bucket numbers of the same range (1 to k) without a lot of collisions. This is possible if k is sufficiently large.

What ChatGPT suggested:

To address these issues, it's recommended to simulate the effect of n random permutations using n random hash functions (h1, h2, … hn). These hash functions should map the row numbers (from 1 to k) to bucket numbers within the same range (1 to k) with minimal collisions. This is achievable if the range k is large enough.

Try Grammarly. It's extremely good at this, and with an incredible UX.

Yes, I've been using Grammarly for several years now. I still use it in conjunction with ChatGPT. It's efficient in correcting spelling and basic grammar errors. However, more advanced features are only available to premium users. At present, their $12/m fee is a bit steep for me.

Interesting. I've wondered how useful that the AI stuff added to Microsoft Office would be. Does that mean that there is be a "make my grammar" button like in the example above?

Are you referring to Microsoft Editor (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-edit...)? It appears to be an interesting tool - includes tone, spelling, and grammar suggestions. I have yet to try it myself.

The more advanced features of chatgpt are $20/m as I’m sure you’re aware.

What do you get out of chatgpt in this realm? I feel very annoyed by its constant tropes and predictable style. Is that something you dont need to care about?

It replaces Grammarly (I also don't want that keylogger spyware running anywhere near my systems) entirely and provides additional features. Can Grammarly also write the Haikus necessary to make me chuckle?

Do you have evidence backing up the claims of “keylogger spyware”? Is it less of a keylogger or spyware than chatgpt in any way?

It obviously doesn’t write hilarious haikus. It doesn’t write anything and that’s the point. It suggests improvements on what you write.

It has to be a keylogger to do what it does.

https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-ca...

This reminds me of chain letters of old. "This guy ignored the letter, then his house burned down. But he found the letter back, sent it to 50 people, and lo and behold he won the lottery the very next day and was able to build a better house."

When prompted with a post dripping in snark, who aside from a masochist with nothing better to do is going to produce examples so they can be nitpicked to death? Posts like yours do not come off like wanting a discussion, they come off like angling for a fight.

Meanwhile, my sidebar of chat history is about five pages long and ever-growing. Quite a lot of my scripting in the past few weeks has been done with ChatGPT's help. So on one hand I have the angry skeptics who practically scream that is not doing the things I can see it doing, who appear to be incapable of discussing the topic without resorting to reductive disparagement, and on the other hand I can see the tasks it's accomplishing for me.

Guess what anyone in my position is going to do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com