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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

AI winter isn't an issue anymore and won't be - the breakthrough in public perception already happened for its first time at this scale.

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Why is that a perception question rather than a delivery question? We still don’t really know how/if the current crop of AI is going to deliver.

Even if there are a lot of great applications for these things (I think there are), it’s not clear they’re going to be truly transformative?

>> truly transformative

For me, it is already pretty transformative. I use ChatGPT at least as much as the regular internet - probably more.

Out of curiosity: to do what?

Not just as a hobby/toy?

most of programmers use ChatGPT as the "librarian" to replace finding docs/stackoverflow manually.

So like the Star Trek Computer?

> "Computer, locate Commander Riker's repo"

> "Commander Riker's repo is not currently on the ship"

Today it told me how to write a powershell command to make a git commit that includes the current timestamp in the commit message.

For example. I could have figured it out elseways, but would have taken >20x the time.

I don’t see how this type of usage (which is real/valuable) adds up to “as much or more” than the actual internet.

"The actual internet" allowed people to get information 20x times faster than before (e.g. vs physically going to a library, or writing a letter to an expert). If we now have a technology that lets us get answers 20x times faster than what we had before it, then yes - I see this technology as a huge advancement over the "old" internet.

Here are a couple of recent examples:

1) I wanted to make a github action to auto build, run tests and publish a package. I don't do a lot of this type of work so quite unfamiliar with it. ChatGPT gave me a very good start with some example yaml which I was able to tweak and get started with. When something wasn't working with my tweaked yaml file, I asked it what the problem was and it was able to pin-point the issue right away. I don't use it at work for anything but it is very useful for side projects and things like that.

2) I had some example json text from a service for which I wanted to create some serialization classes. This is easy to do but it is tedious work. ChatGPT was able to write most of this for me. There are likely tools, websites, services that can create this, but the experience in ChatGPT is pretty great - copy and paste in some json text and ask it to create the code. If it isn't quite right, give it some additionally instructions. When 80% OK, manually tweak it.

3) I use it to get ideas for things or to provide answers about things. For example, one of the commenters in this thread discussed the "AI scaling hypothesis". Google would have had a good answer for this but if you happen to have any questions(after the initial response is provided) this is a completely new search. ChatGPT, though not always correct, feels a lot more calming to use. Google seems very "noisy" to me now. Google is still very necessary but it feels like only 20% of queries need to go there at this point.

I see. I’m skeptical all of this (and similar use cases) could add up to “as much or more” than the regular internet. The average internet usage is something like 6-7 hours per day. I don’t see how even extremely heavy usage of GPT gets anywhere close to that, unless much of that time is “playing” (which is itself extremely cool!)

The comparison I draw is to google search, not general internet usage like Netflix and YouTube. I think it makes sense to use ChatGPT more often than search for most of my use cases. Fully agree that it does not replace the entire internet.

Okay yes that I find much more believable. Information retrieval is pretty awesome, though I’d suggest a lot of that is due to the inferiority of the search engine business model than superiority of LLM technology. Especially if hallucinations and fake citations are solvable, this will be a killer app for sure.

Obviously generative usecases are awesome (though IMO will be practically fewer and further between than people seem to think), and summarization usecases are awesome.

Today I used chatGPT to workshop title ideas for a research paper I’m finalizing. (It wasn’t able to produce good backronym titles, sadly, but it was a pretty good source of feedback/ideas)

Some graduate students I collaborate use it to help them revise and polish their writing (English is not their first language)

Look outside of dev work, which needs a huge amount of context in a specialized language domain, and instead look at things that are human to human communication in order to find areas ChatGPT where already an indispensable tool.

Eg https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/tech/chatgpt-real-estate/inde...

Right but most internet usage is read, not write, which is why I was specifically curious about the claim that they use GPT as much or more than the internet.

Also these types of use cases I think will not actually last very long. They’ll be adversarial’d out of value and then probably out of existence after that.

In a world where every listing is written by a bot, a reader’s first objective is to distill the human-written parts out of the unreliable narration and filler words of the bot.

See my channel on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbvAaQYtgYM

It is strange to me that OpenAI has Whisper speech-to-text but no text-to-speech. "Hey Chat", seems like an obvious offering from OpenAI.

OpenAI have built Jukebox - I'm pretty sure they can create a very good text-to-speech model whenever they decide it's worth the effort.

Quite a lot lately:

1) Short scripts in languages im unfamiliar with

2) Generating short, specific, well defined functions

3) Curing the tyranny of the blank page effect re emails, explanations, etc

4) Rephrasing that long email last thing on a friday when English just wont click

I don’t see how any of these add up to using it “as much or more” than the internet.

"Great applications" but not transformative is enough to avert a winter, I'd say.

I am curious if AI is successful if an AI backlash is coming. Perhaps one of the existing political parties or a new political party taking up the mantle of regulating or outright banning of AI. Or even just attacks on AI researchers and institutions.

I mean… the fear/goal of AI success, depending on who you ask, is social and economic upheaval.

I suspect there will be a lot of resistance as it “succeeds.”

Could make "AI revolution" take on an entirely different meaning

it's already happening. Stable diffusion forums regularly get brigaded, and there are lawsuits in the works against stability ai and midjourney. Those lawsuits are nominally about copyright, but one gets the sense that it's really about putting the breaks on developing the tech.

I kind of get it, too. If I made my money making art this would scare me. What I wonder is what's gonna happen when it's [ artists, accountants, copywriters, bloggers, designers, programmers, etc, etc, etc].

I see problems coming.

The resistance if futile. The amount of effort currently going into making generative models like Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT is insane. It's the fastest changing subfield in ML. These models are getting better and better every month, with no sign of plateauing in the near future. I expect decent music and video generation models appearing within the next 2 years. There's no way to stop the progress.

Public interest wanes quickly if the technology doesn’t continue to be magic

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Its not the first time. Chess was the first time.

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