The amount of business advice GPT-4 has given me is immeasurable.
I'd say I'm getting 10x more non technical business advice in multiple areas than I'm getting with the technical stuff.
Kind of like an AI CEO advising me on what to do next.
Probably in large part because you can't verify when its wrong since that isn't your area of expertise, so those advice looks better to you.
You should assume your org will be the same quality as a program written by a non-technical person using an LLM if you do it that way.
Only if OP is themself not somewhat business savvy
“ because you can't verify when its wrong since that isn't your area of expertise, so those advice looks better to you.”
Talking to people in other fields, e.g., history and literature, they say it’s the same for them.
LLMs are only useful if you know the topic you’re asking questions about. Otherwise, they generate so much nonsense that you cannot verify, that trusting it becomes a liability.
IME it hallucines rarely when asked practical programming questions but basically constantly when asked math questions beyond basic calculus.
As a business owner with both applied experience and formal education on both the tech and the business sides, I wouldn’t trust random LLM-generated advice on business. There are nuances and a certain humanity in good business that an LLM is unlikely to pick up. And the Internet is filled with horrible advice and useless insight on running a business that it can’t distinguish from good advice and valuable insight.
My advice to anyone seriously considering a business is that a course or reading a good survey text on business will pay off in ways that ChatGPT can’t (yet?) give you.
People are falling into the same trap of accepting authoritative sounding advice as true in an area they are not experts in.
Not true, and you're missing a key point for the topic at hand. LLMs are useful if you know the topic OR if you have measurable outcomes. If you want to increase sales, and you ask an LLM how to increase sales, you will know if its ideas work if they result in increased sales.
Think of it like AlphaGo - it learned to play Go by playing with an AI despite having no knowledge of Go strategy, because it could determine what was effective based on outcomes.
She reports that he is really nice, but some times he is insisting that he knows the working of some part of the system and is giving advice based on his understanding. Only thing is that he is wrong.
The software engineer needs to "de-hallucinate" him in order to get a proper answer.
I think we are at a time where we need not to categorically be critical about these things. Yes, preciseness is an issue. But there is a good chance that the LLM advice is on par with a random dude from a local accelerator.
This is not how modern training pipelines work. The models are trained on proprietary alignments that ensure factuality.
Regardless, that random dude from a local accelerator probably regurgitates those blog articles himself.
Just like reviews "ensure" correctness on Wikipedia - which is actually a good case. In my childhood teachers would make us avoid Wikipedia. Now they advice students to use it.
Most of the wrong thing it says is just invented by the model, not things it has seen, cleaning up the input doesn't add much there since it writes the same kind of bullshit as bullshitting humans do.
> The software engineer needs to "de-hallucinate" him in order to get a proper answer.
The question is not whether a model is sound and complete. The question how LLMs perform in comparison to the existing solutions.
Don't let perfect get in the way of good.
Let's take an example. I studied physics and can likely answer most questions on nuclear physics. However, as it is a while back, my answers will not sound as smooth, and I may have to correct myself a few times.
If you ask ChatGPT the same questions, it will come up with elegant, convincing answers. As a layman, you will likely prefer what ChatGPT comes up with, as it is answers are eloquent. Of course, until you build a nuclear reactor using ChatGPT knowledge. Once the fuel rods become critical and start making its way through the earth's crust, you may realise you should have relied on my stumbling answers instead.
At very least, ChatGPT doesn't intentionally try to mislead me to sell me something (yet).
I have a friend who has business experience and has been getting verifiably helpful marketing advice from LLMs.
Sales are up. That’s all that matters for any set of instructions: does it lead to the expected end result.
These “do LLMs always hallucinate” questions are in the category of “do humans have a soul”. This is fine and dandy but the conversation doesn’t always need to go there as there is practical utility to discuss as well.
Which is a kind of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Which, I just noticed, has “LLM” in the name.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
A few months ago, I tested its knowledge on precision machining, and not knowing much about the subject, I got what felt like really solid advice: I felt like it knew everything. Yet, when I reviewed what it told me with my dad, who used to work in the industry, he was not impressed: the answers were missing important bits of information or were sometimes plain wrong.
I do feel the current crop of AI is a game changer, but unless there is another breakthrough increasing its reasoning capabilities, I don't think human experts are at risk of losing their jobs anytime soon.
The current crop is disrupting occupations that deal purely with language: copywriters, translators...
Software engineers are probably very safe, but I believe that language specialists whose main skill is to deeply know a software stack will soon be hurting. I predict that software architecture and computer science skills mastery will become much more valuable than knowing a computer language syntax and associated API in depth. The AI will always be better than you at syntax now.
The place I see transformer-based models changing everything is human-computer interaction: voice and multimodality will soon become the main way humans interact with computers rather than mouse and keyboard, and this is huge.
However, I don't believe any GenAI model will be up to the task of running a company anytime soon, and I think that advice from a real CEO might prove immensely more useful than whatever GPT-4 is telling you.
GPT-4 is probably telling you the obvious—things you could have read on blog spam sites by googling your question. An experienced CEO would probably have unobvious and valuable insights that I don't believe you can get from ChatGPT at the moment.
Or like someone who never was a CEO, but has absorbed all kinds of articles, listicles, and books with business advice (most of them written by hustle hacks, non-CEO content creators, or failed small-time enterpreneurs) and serves advice based on that...
I’m curious if it was useful because of the AI’s skills, or perhaps it was the conversation itself that helped, like in rubber duck debugging[1] or journaling.
In any case, interested to hear more details.
It is also great at answering stupid questions. Sometimes I read a wikipedia article and don't understand enough to make sense of it. If I was in uni, I would have asked a prof: "Sorry, it is probably a very stupid question, but why X? and what is Y actually?" ChatGPT can give me ELI5 at pretty much anything and is faster than googling.
- How to compose a mix? What parts of the tracks should I play and what should I skip?
- It depends on lots of factors <type of party, music genre, the crowd, etc>. There is no one size fits all answer.
- Ok, suppose I am playing an early morning set of melodic techno at a houseparty for friends. What would you suggest?
- Then your friends will probably be tired by the morning so it makes sense to insert more breakdowns, melodic techno is usually structured this way, hence blah blah blah.
Or you can ask for examples. I often struggle with distinguishing closely related EDM subgenres:
- Can you explain the difference between psybass and psybreaks?
- <a vague description>
- I still don't get it. Can you give me 5 iconic tracks in both?
- Sure thing, here is the list: <..>
Besides, there are open research problems in CS as well where there is no single solution. Then I learn the vocabulary and google recent papers on this subject.
I think fundamentally we have a lot more information available than a single person can ever handle. I find ChatGPT incredibly useful at navigating and summarizing this sea of information.
"What's the difference between amortization and depreciation?" types of things. You could Google them, but you have to waste time skimming through a couple blogspam articles, but LLMs can explain the concept in an easy to digest way much faster.
Generating plan names.
Customer interview recruitment strategies.
Brainstorming a customer interview plan.
Mock customer interviews.
Analytics. This is more technical but it's created SQL queries to understand all kinds of metrics. Also helping to understand the results.
I'm aware of the hallucination problem so I'll usually check other sources for anything important.
As a solo founder, i've got to be the ceo, marketer, product manager, customer service rep, tech support person and a bunch of other things i've not previously done. GPT-4 is great at guiding me on these things. In a typical 2 person CEO/CTO founded early stage startup, the CEO might be doing these non technical things until the business gets enough funding to hire their first employees.
This is extremely rude and downright uncomfortable to read on a forum where people are supposed to be curious.
Who tf do you think you are?
Why do you think it is anti-curiosity to use LLMs?
The original commenter did not say they used it for producing content, so and auto complete is not really precise, is it?
You could say that it is an advanced, stochastic knowledge-retrieval system. Does the workings of such merit your curiosity? Does the workings of compression algorithms merit your curiosity?
Or are you merely and ignorant person already left behind due to your own inability to be curious?
> Does the workings of such merit your curiosity?
Not really, if the workings of such are well-understood (like in case of LLMs).
> Or are you merely and ignorant person already left behind
You think you are mounting a personal attack that would make me feel humiliated, but you need to check who would be ignorant after what I outlined in the beginning of my comment.
This reads like "bla bla bla" without any support. Let's try to dissect what you are saying
1. You are saying that LLMs are "unthinking tools" what is that? It does appear to be a made up word. What does it mean?
2. You set up a dichotomy between using this "unthinking tool" and running a business. Can you please point me to the passage where the commenter is saying that they are only doing one or the other, and not both?
3. You say that you become non the wiser by using this "unthinking tool". Would you extend that to all similar activities? Such as reading a book, reason blog articles, receiving lectures etc?
> but you need to check who would be ignorant after what I outlined in the beginning of my comment.
After you establishing false dichotomies and using non-existing words? You demonstrate neither being able to reason or use knowledge. The hallucinations from an LLM is strictly more useful that the hallucinations from you - At least they can be corrected.
"Don't need to study and trial/error to learn about business, I can get business advice in a box".
It's Stack Overflow copy-pasting MkII.
Have you tried making and LLM draft a study plan for you? Kickstarting learning of a new area?
Have you tried making an LLM correct your "homework" for your studies? When you try to learn a new language?
Curiosity is about not being categorical - "It's Stack Overflow copy-pasting MkII." is extremely categorical and thus, anti-curiosity.
This reads like a comment from a person who makes the discussion about the other person.
>Curiosity is about not being categorical - "It's Stack Overflow copy-pasting MkII." is extremely categorical and thus, anti-curiosity.
You could say the exact same thing about someone criticizing regular Stack Overflow copy-pasting as lacking curiocity and hacking spirit. "Oh, that critique is so extremely categorical".
Sorry, "that's categorical" is not the trump card you think it is.
Yes, I find that commentary extremely inappropriate. And yes, I am defending my stance in the sub-threads.
But tell me: you say that my critique of a reductionist categorical view on the use of LLMs (it is merely stack overflow...) is catagorical itself? Can you please elaborate on that.
I didn't write it so don't care about the "root for this".
I quoted what I was commenting upon: "Why do you think it is anti-curiosity to use LLMs?".
>Yes, I find that commentary extremely inappropriate.
Feel free to do so. Has nothing to do with my comments and it's not a responce to my arguments. It's sidelining them and trying to appeal to outrage and emotion by getting back to what a different person said.
Your sentiment is that this is stack overflow c/p style business development. I understand this as: You receive instructions from a third party entity and carry them out verbatim. An because that to use a LLM that is anti-curiosity.
Let's delve into that, shall we?
1. Following instructions verbatim is as old as instructions. You could apply the same sentiment to mentorship, books, and well, Q/A systems. Just to inspire some reflection: Do you think good chefs ever use recipes or is that only bad chefs? It is quite well established that following instructions is key to learning.
2. You say that it is equivalent to follow instructions from an LLM to following instructions from SO - I think this misses a key feature of LLMs: The ability to index them. You can tell them they are care about business development in a narrow sense, to what it is index all future responses. This is realtime interactive and does probe behavior like changing what you index your instructions for, which indeed is the core of curiosity.
Based on this I hold on to my previous statement as a response yo your comment:
> Curiosity is about not being categorical - "It's Stack Overflow copy-pasting MkII." is extremely categorical and thus, anti-curiosity.
I do find that your line of thought is narrow and dismissed the elements to be curious about regarding LLMs.
Oh, please
Treating a comment here as endorsing or refuting the entire thread leading up to it is not going to help a nuanced discussion.
What does a true Scotsman, sorry, hacker have to do? Go to a remote place and rediscover the entire human knowledge for 20 years?
You could use the same proverb to dismiss the effects of Gutenbergs printing press.
And also, now when you respond again: can you elaborate on why you feel it is necessary to urge people to boycott a startup, because they use a technique that you currently are not familiar with? I see that you have earned your PhD and I would not expect this kind of behavior from a person who has credentials like you.
And yet you are still extremely dismissive and rude around people investigating methods where foundational work is roughly 40 years old.
Humbleness and perspective can nobody blame on you, though - maybe an llm could help you on that?