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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

I've find two groups of people on this subject, first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science. The latter camp is more numerous and did not do those things.

The latter group are far more hyped about ChatGPT et al, despite explanation by the first group.

Don't get me wrong, ChatGPT is very exciting, just not in the way it is frequently portrait to be, in particular, development on this model will not lead to General Intelligence, which is not a data training/stat problem altogether. With how the ML field is shaping up to be today, it doesn't even look to be a Machine Learning problem.

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> first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science

I think it's just a few people getting salty because they understand "how it works" but don't understand "why is getting popular". So they start to shout from their ivory tower without realising the tectonic shift under way.

Sort of, you know how to build a stupid mobile video/photo app, but fail to make it popular like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc. The tech used is certainly not transformative on the surface, but the implications of mass adoption and impact at a societal level are huge.

I for one I'm excited about its usefulness and how this is going to speed up the AI race. The genie is out of the bottle.

I'm also very excited about how useful it is, after years of mostly academic papers and poor industrial attempt to utilize it, there's finally something that truly showed the power of the LLM model to the masses. It's the iPhone 4 of language models.

But iPhone 4 isn't fusion energy. It's incredibly useful and a tectonic shift in the cellphone industry, but it's not producing energy. The analogy might sound completely insane, but that's how different machine learning of today and general intelligence is.

This will replace humans in certain jobs - just like McDonald's touch order machines and 100000 other times when a machine of either digital or mechanical contraption replaces humans in history. This is not however the beginning of singularity where the AI gets a mind of its own and start a symbiotic or adversarial relationship with human civilization, this isn't even a step in that direction, this is closer to the internet or wikipedia than that.

Well explained. The analogy is on point

Excellent point about "why its getting popular".

It's getting popular because a bunch Vulture VC's see a huge oppotunitiy to pump and dump.

They're gonna make billions! Who gives a shit if it'll really solve any problems, or make real revenue. It's immediate primary value is in it's ability to create stock value inflation.

Because shareholder value is really the meaning of life, right?

“development on this model will not lead to General Intelligence, which is not a data training/stat problem altogether”

Why is everyone so damn sure about this? Not to pick on you—I’ve read so many self-backpatting comments that feel the need to reassuringly say something like: “we all know this isn’t AGI and couldn’t possibly be and won’t lead to it.”

I don’t think this is so clear cut.

It is because of alan turing. The turing test has arbitrarily put the bar at “must successfully emulate a human being to be labeled general intelligence”.

I don’t find the turing test useful at all as a benchmark. We don’t need something to successfully emulate a human to do useful intelligent work. ChatGPT can already do that work in many domains and many languages, if working as an assistant to a human. I honestly don’t know why we shouldn’t call that general intelligence.

The argument “but it doesn’t understand” is not useful either, and it is the one I read most from people who deeply understand how it works. Many (most?) people don’t really understand what they do for a living either, they’re just going through the motions and need supervision to prevent then going off the rails. Just like ChatGPT. And still someone finds their “intelligence” useful enough to pay them for it.

I can see why not believing Turing Test is a useful benchmark means that you can't deduce ChatGPT is sentient from it being able to pass one. But how do you deduce it is not AGI without some other reasonable benchmark? Moreover, how can you deduce GPT-4 can't spontaneously become one even in principle without having that benchmark? Those two are the questions to the skeptics really.

Right. I don’t see why human-level AI is the criteria for AGI. I think we can have weak AGI, potentially long before we have strong AGI. We need clear benchmarks, otherwise it turns into theology.

Because at the end of the day its still a bunch of linear algebra optimized to predict the next “word” that would fit into a sentence. This is very evident because you can convince it of anything because it desperately needs the conversation to make sense.

And why would mathematics not be a road to intelligence?

Because general intelligence don't arise from statistical analysis of extremely large amount of data.

Think human child, or even adults. They don't know near the amount of data that ChatGPT has been trained on, yet react far better when they are put in a situation that they have never seen before.

I think there's a further split between "academic experience" and "real world experience".

I'm mostly a developer to be honest, but my job title is technically "data scientist". From my experience most stuff I see is not a math problem, it's a data problem.

You want to optimize $thing? Well, you'll need a pipeline to fetch the necessary data and have them ready on demand, and that's actually harder than modeling.

This isn't a dunk on math or research; I'm a math fan (?) if anything, I just find a large part of the discussion around ML to be very far removed from the reality on the ground.

Indeed, I consider ChatGPT to be extremely impressive on an engineering perspective. The data science team I've observed have a difficult time to bridge science and engineering, it's hard to find someone proficient in both, despite all being very smart people.

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