Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think the argument is that "it's just autocomplete" by itself, but rather the implications of such. The current product is absolutely useful for all sorts of little things, but I think we're all looking to the future - whether consciously or not. The idea is not that ChatGPT, in its current state, will change the world - but the exciting possibility that ChatGPT shows we're on the verge of artificial general intelligence. OpenAI themselves are happy to play into this with regularly repeated claims of AGI coming within 10 years.

So the question is, is it coming? And I think this is where "it's just autocomplete" comes into play. Can you get from a really sophisticated autocomplete system to AGI? Look to the past of humanity. Our intelligence drove the epitome of human knowledge being 'bash stone, poke with pointy part' to putting a man on the moon. Now imagine we were able to seed a ChatGPT style program with all of the expressed knowledge of humanity from that former time. Where would it lead us? Your answer here is going to be driven largely be whether or not what you think what we're seeing today is "just autocomplete."

From where I’m sitting, ChatGPT in its current nascent state is absolutely changing the world. It’s not only showing what’s possible but also making a powerful and highly disruptive tech available to the masses to hack and extend.

Of course, we won’t stop here, but as one of the seeds from which AGI will spring, I truly believe it will be seen as a historical innovation in the same league as early search engines, crypto (yes, unironically), or even the internet itself.

> From where I’m sitting, ChatGPT in its current nascent state is absolutely changing the world.

From what I've seen, ChatGPT is changing the world... it's absolute goldmine for the spammers, the content mills, the bullshitter industries. We've already seen at least one magazine cease unsolicited submissions because ChatGPT overwhelmed their editors. We've had a contributor on an open-source project get incredibly belligerent when told not to use ChatGPT to respond to bugs (because its advice wasn't helpful).

We’ve also had thousands of people use chatgpt to tune their writing to be more polite, and to fix other issues they struggle with.

Pointing to two very real anecdotes as evidence of systemic uselessness of a technology is not super convincing. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of saying cars will never amount to anything because Ms. Agnes Thompson was run over by one in Cleveland, or that the internet is pointless because someone sent a hoax UUCP message.

All this means is it is a powerful tool for many uses. Determining if it's a 'good' tool depends on what end of it you're on.

Let's imagine that ChatGPT stayed frozen in its current state of functionality, but was otherwise completely available for use. What would you see being realistically different in the average person's life ten years from now?

That’s a moot question because it will continue to evolve, and while its successor will inevitably dwarf its capabilities, it will be remembered as an early influence and historically significant innovation.

If it was frozen in current state, however, it would still be a springboard for innovation because businesses will find new ways to integrate it with their products and compose its functionality with other code and itself. It’s impossible to imagine the kinds of influence these products will have because progress will be following the exponential part of an S curve for some time to come.

Finally, even if in this artificially constrained world of our imagination we don’t allow for third party products that use it as a platform, it will completely upend the way business is done, on a 10 year timescale, just as search engines have before it.

1. Lots more communication because it lowers the barrier to composing simple, effective messages. “Write a polite complaint letter to my gym asking them to play music other than Prince” changes the ROI on casual notes.

2. Much, much easier for non-native speakers to ensure writing is grammatically and tonally correct.

3. Huge reduction in make-work exercises where the idea is to just soak up an hour of someone’s time to validate they have some understanding of a topic.

I use it to make all business correspondence more politically correct.

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