Comment by fnordpiglet
2 years ago
I think people are miss that while chatgpt isn’t the destination it’s an incredible way station in the way that shows meaningful progress. It’s deficiencies can be built around with other techniques, much like our mind isn’t a single model but an ensemble of various models and processes in a feedback and control loop. By not seeing that, people erroneously discount both its amazing utility within its limits and the astounding breakthrough it is in evolving a roadmap to the destination. These last two years have proven to me beyond a doubt that we are very close to the AI people are disappointed chatgpt isn’t, while before that I had entirely written of AI as a pursuit.
> These last two years have proven to me beyond a doubt that we are very close to the AI people are disappointed chatgpt isn’t, while before that I had entirely written of AI as a pursuit.
The problem with this is we don't know exactly where on the sigmoid growth curve we are. Every developer is aware of the phrase "the last 10% of task takes 90% of the effort" - we're at a point that is promising, but who knows how far away we really are in terms of years and effort. Are we going to run into a chat uncanny valley?
I honestly don't think people (at least, the sorts of people on HN) are generally missing this point at all. I think a lot of people are calling out the absurd claims that are being made about it, though, as they should be.
What’s hard for tech people to understand is that for people who aren’t geeks, they might be seeing a lot of downsides to the use of the technology without the inherit nerd fetish and excitement of having digital brains shared by many HN readers and geeks in general.
I find it funny that on hacker news I frequently see dismissive, anti-human comments all the time like, “oh brains are nothing special or magic, they’re just atoms”, “we’re just meat bags etc”, but then fail to understand why regular people might be unimpressed by something which acts somewhat like a synthetic brain.
It is what it is I guess…if people aren’t immediately impressed with the results. If it’s not really what the majority of people want. Who cares?
I find it funny that the anti-human comments are paired with how amazing the future is going to be when we don't have to work anymore.