Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrsw | Hacker News Reader

I can call a coworker right now and have a real time conversation with them without feeling like I’m talking to a frustrating machine. Most of them, anyway. But I guess that’s “moving the goalposts”.

View on HN

I can call coworker right now and have conversation so frustrating that I wish I was talking to machine instead.

Haha, sounds like a median human being alright!

Just say “box plot” and 99.9999% of the working force gets watery eyes.

bro, same

> I can call a coworker right now and have a real time conversation with them without feeling like I’m talking to a frustrating machine.

These machines were designed with the express purpose of being condescendingly sycophant to the point they hallucinate just to state "you are absolutely right".

No wonder some people even find these chatbots to be wife material.

In gemini I have the following personal context:

- Do not stroke my ego

- I never want to be complimented

And it disagrees with me a lot, granted this is in the webchat which I don't use for programming but for general usage seems to work, it isn't sycophantic

I don't have those system prompts, but gemini pushes back on its own quite a bit. It'll tell me when I wrong, or when there are better options to consider. They won't be exhaustive, but good enough for 95% of my queries, so it's also my go-to web chat.

Huh? Can you link to where condescending sycophancy and hallucination were intentional design choices?

I feel like my odds are better with the AI than with random humans.

Random humans don't have a significant cross section of human knowledge available in real-time, although many like to pretend they do, especially in internet comments :P Being able to compete with the capabilities of a median human would be an absolutely world changing achievement.

What do you mean? Virtually all humans have access to the internet. That's literally "a significant cross section of human knowledge available in real-time".

Oh, the median human can't process that in realtime, you say? Looks like they can't compete with the capabilities of the frontier AI then.

Yep - I like to phrase it as "AI is better at most tasks than most people". AI will still be beat at experts at specific tasks, but in general I find it to be better than me at the areas where I have no expertise. It's the ultimate generalist.

I dunno, have you tried the voice chat in paid ChatGPT?

Have you? It’s a dumb model that gets a lot wrong. Codex voice is IMO only good for when I cannot dictate into the good models. The delay introduced by letting it work with a good model kills it for me.

I think they're claiming it's achieved by text models, not voice models, fwiw.

Reminds me of Turing test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Reply on news.ycombinator.com