Yeah, this is a dumb slippery slope. If you want to depend on Youtube for saving lives, pay for premium.
2,584 karma · joined June 2, 2012
There were legitimate objections to the rubber stamp, and that should have been discussed, but instead we labelled any medical or scientific skepticism with "conspiracy theory" and got the populace to shun those people.
This sort of behaviour corrupts society, it is a building block of fascism and we are seeing the fall out of that now.
Saying something is true when it's not and then gaslighting everyone isn't how to run a healthy society. People lost friends over this, countries have came out broken and more divided than before. Politicians have free reign to say whatever the hell they want now, the president has been set. People follow blindly or be shunned.
Journalism is dead. Not one major news org questioned any of the COVID policy for fear of being isolated and painted as right wing. This is not a healthy society by any means. It's corporate government up and down, fascism is calling out descent as fascism and we sleep through all of it as if it's never happened exactly like this before.
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
Science these days has become more political than fact based. Any questioning is stopped at the source and from scientist, medical doctor, or pundits get socially shunned.
We truly are living in Orwellian times. Journalists more or less don't bother asking big questions, too afraid to challenge the hot pick that comes down from politicians who are so openly bought by lobbyists it's quite frankly scary.
All we get in the news is political finger pointing, it's all treated like entertainment. The best I can come up with as an analogy is pro wrestling. Which isn't actual wrestling, doesn't even look like real wrestling, it's all theatre but the crowds all behave as if it's real, even though they know it's not.
America has lead here, and it seems so attractive to other leaders that the rest of the world is following suit.
Edit: Downvotes without a counter essentially harden my opinion of social shunning over evidence based science. We just can't have these discussions in the open without "you are a conspiracy theorist" and such.
That's like saying junior developers will never take your job because they just don't know enough context or have enough experience.
Why do you think there is any reason for progress to stop? When has progress ever stopped? Even just looking at the simplistic Github Copilot from ~3 years ago I could see the writing on the wall for jnr devs. When these models have your entire codebase consumed it's quite apparent that the gestalt has changed in a way I think you are underestimating.
Complex product/systems is exactly where you'll need an AI code writer. It knows all of everything in your massive codebase. It will be able to suggest efficiencies you couldn't possibly be aware of unless you'd read every line of code yourself.
Remember when AlphaGo made that one move that showed it was far, far superior than a human at improvising and seeing ahead leagues of moves? It shocked the whole community, even the DeepMind engineers were shocked. That's going to be you one day. There is absolutely no reason I can see for this not to happen bar some sort of as yet undiscovered logical limit.
1) Scaling 2) Efficiency 4) Quality 5) Security
Some of these may be super-duper hard problems, but hard problems worth solving = massive opportunity.
If IBM could put space age technology into corporate offices in the 50s, we can put dystopian era technology into offices in the 2020s. At first it will be stupidly expensive, and only the big players will be able to take advantage of the cost to benefit ratio, but in time it will more than likely be on your phone.
What I find remarkable is how many HN folks seem to fall into this category, or at least come out of the woodwork to discount GPT in particular. This being a technology community it's quite surprising.
That was actually me. And it already can write Jiras, scaffold code, and help write docs. Doesn't need any significant reasoning, just a well trained model and contextual data.
However, I didn't say it was going to 100% replace anyone. The horizon looks like GPT will become a significant assistant tool for numerous tasks. I think it will need humans to review and approve output and direct it for the foreseeable future.
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> Employee: Hey CorpGod; where is that document that had some information about our new project management processes? You know, the one I had open like 2 weeks ago
> CorpGod: Oh, you mean the one your boss asked you to read by Friday? It's here [link]
> Employee: No, that's not it. It's the one that we copied and made edits to after that, I can't find it.
> CorpGod: That got deleted after Employee2 made a copy and published it. It's here on the Wiki [link]
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GPT already does stuff like that with data from the Internet.
I'd have thought that people on HN would have far more vision than this. For every single "well it can't do that yet" observation there are dozens of use cases people are finding TODAY. It's already widely useful and this is year one.
This is demonstrably not true. It's saying quite a bit, yes it's rather PR-speak like, but that's how it's been trained.
> And as anyone who's ever had to train anyone can tell you, looking over someone else's work constantly doesn't exactly help you get anything done
WTF? I think the way you are thinking about this seems fundamentally bogged down by cynicism. Proof reading an article written for you is far, far speedier than writing it yourself. That's why newspaper editors a) edit, b) get someone to write for them to edit. I can review a PR far more quickly than writing the code.
> I'm perfectly capable of making mistakes on my own, thanks
But now I don't need to pay you to make mistakes, GPT will make them instead and whoever was checking on your mistakes is still useful.
> Give me a GPT I can train myself to eventual competency and maybe it'll pay dividends, but that doesn't realistically exist today.
And GPT didn't exist in the wild last year. You have just admitted this is WIP, and I see no reason not to expect progress will continue. Maybe one day we'll all have personally trained AI models that live through our whole lives with us. They'll be able to give personal life advice, around to bounce ideas off of, help you remember everything. I mean it's trivial to find revolutionary use cases for this tech. The only question is "is it possible or is there a hard wall in front of us?" I am yet to be convinced there is anything standing in the way and billions of dollars is backing that up right now.
Honestly GPT here has more insight than you do, I think that's miraculous.
"Yeah, I hear what you're saying about the limitations of language models like GPT-3, especially when it comes to more creative tasks like writing. But it's still pretty impressive what these models can do! I mean, think about all the time they can save us by handling repetitive tasks, like customer service or even generating news articles. And who knows, maybe someday they'll be even better at the creative stuff too.
I know it's frustrating when you have to review everything the model outputs, but that's not just a problem with language models. People make mistakes too, y'know? So let's use these models as tools to help us, instead of trying to replace us completely.
All in all, while they may not be perfect yet, language models have a ton of potential to make our lives easier and more efficient. And that's pretty cool, if you ask me!"
These corporate AI instances will take huge configuration, and like when IBM started adding infrastructure to large corps it was a huge effort. But the reward and advantage it provided was worth the millions of dollars and years of work. Eventually it all permeated down to consumers.
How long this will take it up for debate, but I don't think we can easily dismiss that it's inevitable.
I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.
- Robert Metcalfe, in InfoWorld, 1995
Most things that succeed don’t require retraining 250 million people.
- Brian Carpenter, in the Associated Press, 1995
Tim Berners-Lee forgot to make an expiry date compulsory . . . any information can just be left and forgotten. It could stay on the network until it is five years out of date.
- Brian Carpenter, in the Associated Press, 1995
Seems like this is an interesting engineering or product problem worth solving. History is littered with big problems that were solved. Go look at flight, within 50 years we went from "it's not possible", to it's too fragile, to jets, to international airports and mass transit never before possible.
If you work in tech I think you've slept through your life.
It's cynical because you are viewing everything through one personal perspective that is loosely grounded in reality, and choosing to not see the rest of the world, which only serves to validate your cynical mindset.
BitCoin had no real use-cases beyond betting and pump and dump and niche trading that the general public could not get in on. ChatGPT is being used creatively today by millions. It does your homework.
How is this classed as a bubble or hype. How can you possibly see it as a waste of effort or equivalent to talking to a parrot??
MS Teams gets the GPT treatment. It watches all your chats, email, calendars, code, wiki, meetings, spreadsheets, documents. Where is Slack now?
If you want to know absolutely anything from engineering domain knowledge to product strategy through to aiding you in sales, Slack has no answer. Ask Teams to splat you a database table, refine an SQL statement, brief you on a meeting, remind me of who a particular customer is and what sort of sales pitch would appeal to them.
I mean, not seeing the potential in GPT is really being intentionally blind to world changing technology. Just the fact that it can scan your whole codebase, find potential security holes, suggest performance blind-spots and indeed write code, or at least suggest code, this alone is such a big change it's hard to get your head around the opportunity. All of that in a chat window or IDE. It's revolutionary.
1) IRC bots could not write novel text, just pre-planned responses. They cannot respond to everyday conversational language.
2) IRC bots do not have anywhere near as much information on hand.
3) IRC bots cannot hold context over multiple conversational exchanges.
4) IRC bots cannot even approximate fooling a human into thinking it was another human on the other end.
5) IRC bots absolutely can not improvise code from the context of your code base, let alone take plain language instruction.
Regardless of the above, this is the very beginning of the tech. I imagine if you were alive in the 80s you'd ask why the internet is any better than your local dial up BBS.
A week or so ahead of all this a US general was saber rattling[1] about war with China, it just seems convenient that in close succession we have this balloon crisis.
I just don't buy any of it. I've been lied to by governments so many times it's hard not to see anything as a big propaganda campaign now.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/02/us-general-gut...
The iPhone and iPad gave us Star Trek like touch screens. ChatGPT has given us god like HAL interfaces.
Seems to me they slapped HFR on it just to make you think you are getting something different to the 2012 version and get you in seats.