Pretty cool no doubt, but it seems that people are mostly discovering the power of Wolfram Alpha for the first time. It has been able to do stuff like this for over a decade now, just without a conversational chat interface.
This was such a fun game in the car with little kids who didn’t know any better that (1) it’s magic I couldn’t have imagined ten years before and (2) it was nerdy as hell.
Today it will, at best, give you the “Here’s what I found on the web” uselessness. So frustrating.
Siri f-ing sucks. I guess Apple didn’t want to pay anymore.
Everyone is pissing in their pants over this new natural language interface, but in a few years we're gonna collectively realize this is just search but worse.
This is a clearly different paradigm.
Some happy path examples are getting hyped, and the investors are falling in line, as in every classic tech bubble. But to think that we can go from processing and generating natural language to AGI if we do it harder is preposterous.
I'm not really sure how to respond to that assertion. I audibly giggled, so there's that.
GPT had been out for a while, but it only really exploded in use with ChatGPT.
Essentially, a conversational agent + tools = magic.
My hunch is if you read that, you could get "raw GPT-4" to defer to WolframAlpha via a similar mechanism (with a couple dozen lines of glue code).
If chatgpt gave errors or some other bad experience instead of smoothly fabricating fake answers, a lot of the magic would wear off.
For savvy users this doesn't matter. The utility is off the charts and you can mitigate the risk of being lied to. But let's not pretend this is cost free. There is a huge externality in the form of shadow scrambling reality for millions of people who don't realize it's happening.
People have crazy unrealistic expectations of what the raw model can do but undersell what it’s possible to build with a machine that grasps language better than basically every human.
https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/m...
https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
They can be taught!
And in this, as in many other things, he's pretty on the nose.
The amount of willingness to confidently bullshit you while virtue signaling offense when you call it out is almost laughable.
Maybe it does, but it isn't letting the user in on the confidence level of its statements (essentially lying to the user, as you say).
Even better would be some awareness of what original source it has a vague recollection of, so it could say “the answer is probably at [link].” Bonus points if it fetches the link itself.
Thus far, for programming uses, ChatGPT seems to act like a bizarre search engine. It has a truly amazing understanding of my query, it’s pretty good (but far from perfect) at finding the general direction of a right answer, and really bad at actually giving a fully correct answer. I get better actual output from DuckDuckGo if a manually filter for reference material.
Unfortunately ChatGPT’s hallucinations are plausible enough that identifying them takes real work. The worst is when something is syntactically correct and works just enough one might be convinced to move on to the next problem before realizing that ChatGPT pulled parts of the answer out of its excellent imagination.
Plus, the difficulty of integrals is not a real metric, but not having come across one that WA can't handle says something.