> As though no progress will ever be made from this current moment in time.
The issue is that the folks promoting chatGPT are for the most part incredibly dishonest. E.g. this entire blog post is about the AI having written a sales email, with zero written about how well it actually converted. The author is claiming that the AI can do a superhuman amount of work in 30 minutes, but we don't actually know if it did any work at all.
How can we even know whether OpenAI is making progress if we don't know how good it is in its current state? Back when Go AI was far less good than even the average club player, we at least knew what rank the AI was playing at. Whereas right now the ChatGPT equivalent is basically that it's putting stones on the board in a way that looks somewhat like a real game, but you're not allowed to know what level it's playing at.
I don't understand this perspective, the only way it makes sense is if you haven't bothered to really try to use the tool to get something done. There are literally a hundred million+ people out there using it to get shit done. I didn't sign up until the GPT-4 release because I had tried 3.5 and thought it was ok but limited, I had more luck using the API and custom prompts with GPT-3 but GPT-4 converted me. I've been using it daily and for increasingly more stuff. It's so good that I'm actively trying to break the habit of using search engines to look up docs, error messages, and SO answers. Mandatory disclaimer: it doesn't always produce perfect output that works on the first try but you know what? the old search result method doesn't work on the first try either especially if I have to read bad or limited documentation, parse a somewhat related SO answer into the solution I need or search through miles of issues about the error message where everyone is just complaining and no one has found a solution. The big difference is that GPT is a hundred times faster, provides better explanations and even when it's wrong it gives me enough information to figure out the problem on my own.
Sorry but it's just frustrating seeing "how can we know it's better?" when it's right f-ing there in front of you. Maybe you don't want to spend $20USD to try it out, fine whatever, wait until it's free to use but don't make lazy negative remarks from a place of ignorance.
Exactly. It’s similar to someone saying Google can do a superhuman amount of work.
“All I had to do is search for a sample product launch email and POOF it appeared! Just had to fill in the company name.”
It’s the same thing with the minor code snippets being “written” by Chat GPT. Any real programmer knows that Google could give you pretty much the same thing. And they also know how complicated their actual job is that goes well beyond the simple prompts people are using that everyone has been googling for over a decade now.
It’s all hyperbole. This technology is just an evolutionary improvement on Google.
That's one application. You don't find it at least a little jaw dropping that the same program that is "an evolutionary improvement on Google" for programming tasks can also translate text, write (bad but improving) poetry, give reasonable relationship advice, creatively answer questions of the form "what do <x> and <y> have in common" for even radically different x and y, and correctly solve analogy puzzles? All in fluent English?
English? I've been prompting GPT-4 in Spanish all along, and it responds in impeccable Spanish. I can ask it to change the writing style of an essay to famous Latin American writers and it does it admirably. Translating back and forth between English and Spanish respecting meaning and context, even subtleties, no problem. Better than DeepL.
If y'all have been focusing on GPT-4 coding abilities, I ask you to try it with literature-based prompts. GPT-4 is an exceptional writer, summarizer, and style corrector.
The issue is that the folks promoting chatGPT are for the most part incredibly dishonest. E.g. this entire blog post is about the AI having written a sales email, with zero written about how well it actually converted. The author is claiming that the AI can do a superhuman amount of work in 30 minutes, but we don't actually know if it did any work at all.
How can we even know whether OpenAI is making progress if we don't know how good it is in its current state? Back when Go AI was far less good than even the average club player, we at least knew what rank the AI was playing at. Whereas right now the ChatGPT equivalent is basically that it's putting stones on the board in a way that looks somewhat like a real game, but you're not allowed to know what level it's playing at.