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Comment by logisticpeach | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty hyperbolic. Great products that were much better than what they replaced or competed with, but "beyond wild dreams of millions of people"? You'd think they cured cancer in 2003 or something...

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I don't deny that it can be hyperbolic to many people. As for the comments about people's wild dreams, I truly mean it. I used to tap into building NLP applications for enterprise customers: NERs, relation extractions, multi-round dialogs, information retrieval, and etc. We built dedicated models for each tasks, we spent millions on labeled data and annotation teams in general, we worked with customers closely to address their specific issues. It was a painful process and customers are not happy, and I overlooked the significance of OpenAI's papers on GPT and Google's paper on emerging ability out of sheer ignorance and stupidity. Then, ChatGPT came along and could have pretty intelligent multi-round conversations, could handle multiple NLP tasks easily and have better performance than my models with my canonical tests, and could be helpful to me on a daily basis. It was shocking iphone moment or a personal Sputnik moment to me. For that, I extrapolated that it was "beyond wild dreams of millions of people".

I thought this was rather tame as far as Wolfram announcements go. Last time he claimed to have discovered the fundamental rules underpinning the entire universe.

This is GP replying to GGP here, not the OP.

Ha. Conway’s game of life really had an impact on boomers. Never knew why. (Wolfram, though, is a helluva guy… the book was damn interesting. I mock him in the same way that one might mock Einstein’s hair-do.)

Google Maps was pretty astonishing when it appeared.

I mean Google search were revolutionary while people had enough with Yahoo. Now the search result of Google had more ads that Yahoo had 20 years ago

On the other hand I used ChatGPT yesterday to explain something to me, it took about 2-3 minutes for the sentence to come back, I “Googled it” and found a better response in 2 seconds.

Meanwhile, for the use case I recently posted about, no amount of searching answers my inquiry, and ChatGPT can give me a good answer in seconds.

So yeah, moral of the story, depending on context YMMV?

Also call me old fashion but I still cross reference ChatGPTs response with other sources…if I care about accuracy and truth, which I basically always do.

You definitely should, hallucination can happen at any time. Luckily for my use case, which is explaining API changes for the purposes of porting a game mod, the compiler tells me if the AI was right or not.

Google maps has and had a tremendous effect to millions

There was MapQuest before Google Maps. Now GPS on the other hand, that was a game changer.

And that was the same thing as maps? Free? Global

Yes, it was free and global. The main things that Google Maps had over MapQuest were a nice AJAXy interface and (eventually) street view. But MapQuest was itself basically a generational improvement on AAA's "TripTiks."

Never used it.

And it was doing also routing too? Also in Germany?

I think that by this point, saying "cure cancer" is like saying "cured all disease", just because "cancer" are of many different kinds, some of which are pretty much cured.

nonetheless, I don't know enough about this because I am not an specialized oncologist. Which I only mention as a lead into a reflection of how in spite of all this information technology, I fear it's not getting any easier for the layman to learn more about types of cancer; the real shitty part is that it started getting MORE difficult in the least 8-10 years.. this time because of all this information technology.

funny how 'sales' people bear the brunt of educating 'laymen' (consumers/patients) about new developments

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