Comment by rsynnott
2 years ago
> ChatGPT and similar models are revolutionary
For _what purpose_, tho? It's a good party trick, but its tendency to be confidently wrong makes using it for anything important a bit fraught.
2 years ago
> ChatGPT and similar models are revolutionary
For _what purpose_, tho? It's a good party trick, but its tendency to be confidently wrong makes using it for anything important a bit fraught.
If you're the type of person that struggles to ramp up production of a knowledge product, but has great success in improving a knowledge product through an iterative review process, then these generative pre-trained transformers are fantastic tools in your toolbox.
That's about the only purpose I've found so far, but it seems a big one?
It seems to me that the tendency to be confidently wrong is entirely baked into intelligence of all kinds. In terms of actual philosophical rationality, human reasoning is also much closer to cargo cults than to cogito ergo sum, and I think we're better for it.
I cannot but think that this approach of "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is a much stronger path forward towards AGI than what we had before.
If you work at a computer, it will increase your productivity. Revolutionary is not the word I'd use, but finding use cases isn't hard.
I can buy that it's a better/worse search engine (better in that it's easier to formulate a query and you get the response right there without having to parse the results; worse in that there's a decent chance the response is nonsense, and it's very confident when it's being wrong about things).
I can't really imagine asking it a question about anything I cared about and not verifying via a second source, though, given its accuracy issues. This makes it feel a lot less useful.
How will it do that?
One of major problems of modern computer-based work is that there are too many people already in those roles, doing work that isn't needed. Case in point: the culling of tens of thousands of software engineers, people who would consider themselves to be doing 'bullshit jobs'.
But will it? After accounting for the time needed to fix all the bugs it introduces?
Humans introduce bugs too. ChatGPT is still new, so it probably makes more mistakes than a human at the moment, but it's only a matter of time until someone creates the first language model that will measurably outperform humans in this regard (and several other important regards).
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