Hacker News Reader

Comment by AJRF | Hacker News Reader

Google spent so long avoiding releasing something like this, then shareholders forced their hand when they saw Microsoft move and now I don’t think it’s wrong to say that these two launches have the potential to throw us into an AI winter again.

Short sightedness is so dangerous

View on HN

We're definitely inside a hype bubble with LLMs, but if the industry can keep up the pace that took us from AlexNet to AlphaZero to GPT3 within a decade I don't think a full AI winter is a major concern. We've just started extracting value out of transformers and diffusion models, that should keep the industry busy until the next breakthrough comes along.

I disagree. It's not perfect. People have to come to terms and understand its limitations and use it accordingly. People traying to "break" the βeta is people having some fun, it doesn't prove it's a failure.

You cannot expect that from people! People will be people. Anything that is open to abuse, it will be abused!

AI winter? Hardly. It practically will convince people that AI is achievable. I'm not even sure it doesn't qualify as sentient, at least for the few brief moments of the chat.

Within the first 48 hours of release the vast majority of stories are about the glaring failures of this approach of using LLMs for search. You think the average consumer is seeing nuanced stories about this?

If it was 99.999% incredibly useful, the vast majority of stories would still be about the glaring failures. You can't draw any conclusions at all from that.

Most lay people I know haven't really attached to those stories. Most people still don't even know that Bing has chat with it.

The crazy thing is that the conversations that these LLMs is having is largely like the conversations from AIs in movies. We literally just built science fiction and some folks in the tech press are complaining that they get some facts wrong. This is like building a teleportation machine and finding out that it sometimes takes you to the wrong location. Sure, that can suck, but still -- it's a teleportation machine.

Okay, need to point out the obvious - a teleportation machine which takes you to the wrong place is a major issue. You really wouldn’t want to materialize to the wrong place.

That's exactly my point. It's a really big issue and before it was used for things of consequence that needs to get resolved. But it's still a freaking teleportation machine!

I mean we now have chatbots that pretty much pass the Turing Test as Turing would have envisioned it -- and people are like, "Yeah... but sometimes it lies or has a bad attitude, so is it really all that impressive?"

Or that story where the teleportation machine actually has a chance of cloning you instead, so the clones have to be euthanized, except it might be you instead.

Most people still don't even know of Bing.

I've recently shown ChatGPT to people in tech-related or -adjacent industries and it's been their first exposure to it.

I don't think the media screaming about it will have any effect other than maybe convincing people to try it. At that point they'll decide for themselves if it's something they want to continue using.

"I used GPT and it worked fine" isn't a compelling headline or social media post. If you look at Newegg reviews for Hard Drives you'd draw the conclusion that HDD's have a 40% failure rate over 6 months. But that's because almost no one returns to write a review about a functioning hdd, yet almost everyone writes a review when one fails

> I'm not even sure it doesn't qualify as sentient, at least for the few brief moments of the chat

You need your head checked.

Give it a short story and ask it a question which is not 100% explicit in the text.

For example, give it Arthur C. Clarke's Food of the Gods and ask it was is Ambrosia in the story.

Is a language model, and it behaves like a language model. It doesn't think. It's doesn't understand.

Wow, how the goalposts have moved.

It's a magnificent achievement. But it simply does not do what it is hyped to do.

I haven't tried with Bing, but this kinda thing is super basic with ChatGPT at least: it can do what you're asking and far more.

meanwhile OpenAI are plucking Google Brain's best engineers and scientists. For the future of AI, this is disruption, not failure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com