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Comment by invig | Hacker News Reader

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible and even if we never get beyond it the world is a much better place with it than without it. It makes total sense to bet on the team that made this being the best placed people in the world to advance it.

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I disagree strongly with this. GPT has:

- Precipitated a new class of computationally intense and expensive systems at a time when we desperately need to be focused on sustainability and reducing power demands/increasing efficiency.

- Devalued human labor without being high enough quality to truly replace it.

- Grossly violated an unspoken social contract of the internet by abusing the commons, leading to many people locking down their content.

- Flooded the internet with unverifiable noise that looks credible, making it harder to find high quality information and enabling scams and laziness.

At best this productivity tool is of neutral value to society. If you think it's a net good, I question your judgment.

- No, we just need better ways to generate electricity, which Sam Altman is also working on.

- If something is not replacing labor, it will not devalue it. In this case, GPT4 is replacing human labor, which is indeed devaluing those specific labors. But it is also unlocking new potential, which in the history of all technology has always been a net positive in the end.

- I wasn't aware of this unspoken social contract before OpenAI existed, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

- This is true, but this is also a trend that has been headed downward for a long time thanks to Google/SEO. The signal-to-noise ratio has indeed gone down due to GPT-powered blog spam, but honestly we needed to get our act together before GenAI anyway. This is actually lighting a fire under people's butts to find ways to avoid the AdSense/affiliate marketing fueled drivel.

Oh good, I'm glad Sam Altman, who doesn't even have a bachelor's degree, is on the case. I'm sure his efforts towards cold fusion will be appreciated.

> I wasn't aware of this unspoken social contract before OpenAI existed, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

It's shocking to me the number of programmers out there who simply did not realize everyone would be mad at them for leveraging everyone's work into a massive for profit system. Then they play stupid when people rightly called them out and spout some bullshit about outmoded forms of production as if productivity was an issue for the generation of culture.

Clearly he is not the one doing the physics himself; that is an uncharitable interpretation of the point (but I am sure you're aware of that). He is funding fusion research. It is reasonable to assume he is doing that in order for large-scale AI can be a thing without people worrying about the environmental impact.

Does OpenAI make a profit?

ChatGPT is offered by the for profit arm of the company. The relative success of that product with respect to it being profitable is irrelevant to it being for profit.

On the contrary, it is incredibly relevant whether or not the "for profit" system actually makes a profit. If ChatGPT does not make a profit, it is less "leveraging everyone's work into a massive for profit system" and more "leveraging everyone's work into a public good that is provided at or below cost, like a library".

I'm sure Microsoft invested billions in this company so it could become a library.

The intentions of some don't change the current reality for many.

It's easy to forget tangible win-win examples like this[1] or this[2]. Speaking from my personal experience, it's improved my life by reducing tedium associated with writing code. Small wins, but there's lots of them spread over many people. They are not abstract and it's harder to write grand narratives about them.

  > Precipitated a new class of computationally intense and expensive systems at a time when we desperately need to be focused on sustainability and reducing power demands/increasing efficiency.

Microsoft are building over 10GW of firmed renewables which will partly power their AI datacenters. It is not all greenwashing and cynicism. As far as emissions go, GPT should not be put in the same basket as truly wasteful sectors like beef or crypto mining. Everything takes energy, including productivity tools like GPT. The focus should be on sustainable growth and scaling firmed renewables, which is the only politically realistic way out of the climate crisis. Degrowth can't work, either on a political level, or on a company level given the competitive capitalist system that they exist in. I find this[3] is a good discussion on that topic.

  > Flooded the internet with unverifiable noise that looks credible

I agree with you on this. It's not all rosy, but let's not let social media off the hook. LLMs have not made long-form journalism worse, for example. The problem is the interaction of LLMs with incentives created by SEO algorithms and social media.

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10463535/ontario-family-doctor-ar...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478797/

[3] https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/is-green-growth-possib...

I don't buy the idea that there's nothing we can do about this with respect to whether we do it at all. I'm happy for Microsoft that they're building out green power infrastructure, but it would be better if that was put towards displacing fossil fuels rather than enabling extremely inefficient bullshit generators.

How exactly is the world so much better with GPT 4?

I'm not saying it's not cool tech or that the current level of LLMs don't have some impact, but "the world is so much better" is quite a stretch (unless you are a Nvidia shareholder)

Not to mention the adverse affect of job loss in industries such as customer service almost exclusively hurting people from poorer countries and lower socio economic levels.

Yeah, I mean I work inside a Fortune 10 company and after countless man hours across multiple teams we have exactly zero LLM applications in production and the pipeline heading to production is empty.

I guess it’s good at generating plausible blog spam and helping children with homework. I’ve used it to bootstrap my own writing. It’s not entirely useless but hardly world changing.

I think the biggest commercial use right now is Klarna uses it for basic lvl 1 support? I don’t know the details but it sounds like a good result from RAG over a fairly constrained corpus. So, again, nice but completely unaligned with the massive valuations in that space right now.

So the ends justify the means?

GPT-4 is peak LLM, nothing will likely be able to surpass it by these same methods for a long time. The only novel product OpenAI could release at this point is a fully uncensored and unrestrained GPT.

Introducing: GPT-ns4w

From what I can tell, all the GPT team did was scale up ideas already there invented elsewhere in previous large language models.

I am not sure that is a reason to bet on them making any breakthroughs needed for AGI.

OpenAI also pioneered reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to make LLMs output completions that are valuable/relevant.

I agree that OpenAI has provided no evidence they are anywhere close to AGI (and I don't think LLMs are sufficient) but also I think OpenAI should get a ton of credit for being the first party to make LLMs that actually useful.

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