Is it teaching people anything? I suspect it's just enabling the "author" to spend even less time actively thinking about whatever task they're performing.
I’ve learned from gpt. Did it teach me? In the same way books teach me things, yes, it did. I could have learned the same things on my own with much more reading, but you don’t always know what to read when working on a problem. Gpt has read everything, and can tell you answers to questions you don’t even know to ask. Like “how do the complete works of two authors (I’ve never read) relate?” Sure it gives a nonsensical answer quite often, but that doesn’t really matter. I can verify what I need to verify on my own, just as I would any other unreliable source of information (like CNN, aljazeera, etc…)
This is pretty hyperbolic. Great products that were much better than what they replaced or competed with, but "beyond wild dreams of millions of people"? You'd think they cured cancer in 2003 or something...
I don't deny that it can be hyperbolic to many people. As for the comments about people's wild dreams, I truly mean it. I used to tap into building NLP applications for enterprise customers: NERs, relation extractions, multi-round dialogs, information retrieval, and etc. We built dedicated models for each tasks, we spent millions on labeled data and annotation teams in general, we worked with customers closely to address their specific issues. It was a painful process and customers are not happy, and I overlooked the significance of OpenAI's papers on GPT and Google's paper on emerging ability out of sheer ignorance and stupidity. Then, ChatGPT came along and could have pretty intelligent multi-round conversations, could handle multiple NLP tasks easily and have better performance than my models with my canonical tests, and could be helpful to me on a daily basis. It was shocking iphone moment or a personal Sputnik moment to me. For that, I extrapolated that it was "beyond wild dreams of millions of people".
I thought this was rather tame as far as Wolfram announcements go. Last time he claimed to have discovered the fundamental rules underpinning the entire universe.
Ha. Conway’s game of life really had an impact on boomers. Never knew why. (Wolfram, though, is a helluva guy… the book was damn interesting. I mock him in the same way that one might mock Einstein’s hair-do.)
On the other hand I used ChatGPT yesterday to explain something to me, it took about 2-3 minutes for the sentence to come back, I “Googled it” and found a better response in 2 seconds.
So yeah, moral of the story, depending on context YMMV?
Also call me old fashion but I still cross reference ChatGPTs response with other sources…if I care about accuracy and truth, which I basically always do.
You definitely should, hallucination can happen at any time. Luckily for my use case, which is explaining API changes for the purposes of porting a game mod, the compiler tells me if the AI was right or not.
Yes, it was free and global. The main things that Google Maps had over MapQuest were a nice AJAXy interface and (eventually) street view. But MapQuest was itself basically a generational improvement on AAA's "TripTiks."
I think that by this point, saying "cure cancer" is like saying "cured all disease", just because "cancer" are of many different kinds, some of which are pretty much cured.
nonetheless, I don't know enough about this because I am not an specialized oncologist. Which I only mention as a lead into a reflection of how in spite of all this information technology, I fear it's not getting any easier for the layman to learn more about types of cancer; the real shitty part is that it started getting MORE difficult in the least 8-10 years.. this time because of all this information technology.
funny how 'sales' people bear the brunt of educating 'laymen' (consumers/patients) about new developments
"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."
This was basically Memnoch The Devil's [0] argument against the legitimacy of Jesus Christ's sacrifice - it didn't count, because he did it with full knowledge of his own immortality. Through crucifixion he suffered and died, but he never faced the existential dread that plagues humankind, and therefore giving up his own life was an inauthentic act.
I'd add to this by asking: how much more PMF can you get when you have a two week horizon of new customers before you literally run out of compute resource in a major cloud provider data centre?
Sounds like customers are coming in thick and fast.
If this is the dynamic and the company can't spare a few weeks to solve it, something has gone seriously wrong in a very interesting way.
Disclaimer: UK centric thoughts (because that's where I live)
Some projections are signalling deflation on the horizon.
Given the brutal cost of living crisis, I suspect the government and BoE have grossly underestimated how hard things are getting (and how much harder they'll eventually get) for a giant slice of the population.
I'm an absolute lay person here, but surely maintaining (relatively) higher interest rates whilst cutting government investment and raising the tax burden to post war highs during the worst cost of living crisis in a generation is an economic wrecking ball.
If my naive take is anywhere close to sensible, I'd bet on a screeching u-turn and rates lowering again to try and rescue the situation.
Side question: what are "normal" levels for interest rates? I hear people use this term all the time (usually while advocating for hawkish rises in some direct or implied way). Surely the interest rate mechanism is inherently dynamic and therefor entirely context specific, rendering the notion of a "normal" level useless.
Lower interest rates will create more inflation. The UK economy is overly “financialized”. It needs more workers, low cost energy, productivity improvements, and an overall improvement in its ability to supply goods and services.
I occasionally struggle with issues around optimism/pessimism.
Working in a start-up I'm surrounded by others who are overwhelmingly optimistic (which is such a powerful bulwark against the brutal struggle, especially in the early days).
I try my best to be as positive as I can, but on reflection I'm probably a slight optimist, or neutral in my overall outlook.
I can't help feeling like some other team members see me as constantly dragging things down when I point out issues etc. I guess I can sometimes feel like a total pessimist when contrasted against individuals who are overwhelmingly optimistic, despite not in-fact having a tendency toward pessimism.
Maybe I'm a barrier to progress :)
It's a strange relativism that I only encounter in my work environment. In everyday life, I definitely don't feel pessimistic.
I wonder if, relatively speaking, the extreme blind optimist can make the more rational, reserved optimist seem negative by comparison. Gaining a good overall perspective is key I guess, although never easy.
Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all
Not sure how others here feel, but I have to say that when I've found myself in situations where there isn't much work to be done I find it utterly soul destroying.
Always feel guilty doing anything else in down-time when I'm billing a client and so sometimes end up sitting in a weird stand by mode, feeling like I'm somehow being lazy.
It's not lazy. If I go for a walk I'm actively thinking about projects. I have solved many problem by just clearing my mind and taking breaks.
Building software should not be paid by the hour. It's a weird thing.
If I can build a piece of software in 10 hours, and another dev needs 40 hours....it seems kind of odd to pay the slower less resourceful dev MORE for a slower delivery?
So I consider taking a walk to clear your mind part of work for sure. I also consider reading HN or other engineering news/continued education sites to be part of work. And taking a coffee break to chat with co-workers about whatever (back when we worked in an office), including big-picture stuff and non-work related stuff, sure, that too.
That's all part of work when you do this kind of work. You can not just write code 8 hours a day, indeed, it's impossible, and if an employer tries to make you work that kind of sweat-shop environment (sometimes it seems like that's the actual goal of some Scrum implementations), it won't actually get them your best or even most productive work.
But there are people on HN who say that they literally spend the majority of their day the majority of days just doing things that are not work at all. I dunno, watching TV, running errands, riding their bike, mindlessly social media'ing, playing video games. Like they only spend a few hours a week on anything related to work at all.
I agree with GP that for me that's utterly soul-destroying, I end up feeling useless and unmoored. (The other day on the radio I heard someone reference a study that busy-ness to life satisfaction graphed as an upside down U, if you have too little free/leisure time you are unhappy, but people with too much are unhappy too, there's a sweet spot in the middle. Perhaps that's what we're talking about here).
But maybe different people are different.
Or maybe in new remote world, if you spend that time on projects you find rewarding (writing poetry, I dunno) instead of just goofing off, then it's not really "leisure" anymore, and you won't have that problem. If also you don't have any ethical problems with it (maybe your employer is awful and deserves to be drained of money), or just worry about getting caught.
Yep. Same here, at my level of experience can deliver work in high-quality at a fraction of time required for a junior. Instead of burn-out, use the extra time to enjoy other things and keep learning/improving.
Hate to say it but when i see stuff like this it only reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain.
Can't help feeling that this accidentally harms creative types and risks swamping us with visual junk.
The technical achievment is astounding but no-one would seriously claim that crafting an image via a short prompt is creative except in the most cursory way.
I'm probably missing some life changing use-case, but apeing art in random styles can't be it.
People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software. The next generation will normalize these tools and find incredible ways to be creative within their new cutting edge medium.
The post-art world is here! Just think about how history books will remember this period! The styles that will be borne of necessity, of the need to break down art and find what makes it tick.
"People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software."
Also about desktop publishing.
Remember all the printers (ie. people working in the printing industry operating printing machines) that were put out of a job when you could just buy a (electronic) printer for your home computer and just print whatever you wanted yourself?
People were wringing their hands about that too back then... now we take it for granted that we can instantly print whatever we want whenever we want, without having to pay an expensive professional to do it for us (something most people couldn't afford).
Has it resulted in more junk being printed? Absolutely. But it also let people print all sorts of fantastic not to mention useful things that would almost never have seen the light of day without cheap and easy access to home printers.
The xerox copier was similarly revolutionary... as was the printing press itself, which put a lot of scribes out of business.
Photoshop put a lot of airbrush artists out of business, and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?
As with photography, printers, copiers and photoshop, artists who embrace this technology will be able to use it to enhance their creativity and speed up their creative process.
There'll be a lot more competition, a lot more junk but also a lot more fantastic art that we can't even dream of yet.
> [...] and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?
When I was finishing high school in the early 2000s, we still had teachers who made worksheets that way.
I remember one history teacher in particular. She used a photocopier to get sections from books, cut-and-paste them together, and then use the photocopier again to make the final sheets to distribute to the students.
I was very surprised at the time, but also admired the ingenuity. The process is much more physical than using a PC.
Yep, I see this as a start, and very curious to see the ways in which it’ll get used with a human in the loop, and also the ways human artists will be pushed to creat art that’s out of distribution for these models.
Even then, few artist got famous on technical skill alone, surely less than those who got famous primarily for their message irregardless of their skill. And this is before getting into the endless pit of defining what art is.
Besides having an ai doing the legwork is no much different than Veronese giving large swath of paintings to his novices while focusing on the two/three major parts.
I think we agree then - if new technologies allow an artist to more rapidly explore, iterate, and refine a particular message, then those artists should still have something to create beyond what is possible with these images.
> As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving.”
Ha, dissing engraving at the same time as photography.
Though I wonder if the 'write' meant engraving of a design someone else already produced, or any engraving work at all.
Both reactions always happen. With basically anything new, people will select some points via happenstance or bias, draw one of a few basic trend lines [1], and give a hot take. Because they generally think only about first-order effects and don't imagine other things that could happen, the hot takes are often of the utopia/dystopia variety.
These hot takes generally tell you more about the opiner (or the audience they're playing to) than the reality to come. It turns out it's hard to model en entire universe using 3 pounds of meat.
True, but then we've essentialy had limitless image generation capabilities since we've had the tools to make marks. I guess this is faster, and in other ways it offers promising new opportinities for people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.
Others are interpreting my original comment as "this is not art", but I'm not really trying to make that argument. Art is entirely subjective and i don't presume to define what is or isn't art.
I guess my point is more specifically "what itch does this scratch"?
It's really cool, and that may well be the answer tbh.
people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.
That’s 99% of the people. I mean even to learn prompt engineering will probably be too much for majority of those 99% people, but it’s a huge step forward in user friendliness, compared to, say, photoshop.
”what itch does this scratch"?
How many people post pictures on social media? Many of those pictures are not personal, they show something pretty, cool, or interesting in some way. All of those people can potentially use image generators to achieve the same effect.
> only reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain.
I hate arguments like this. Even ignoring how dismisive it is of the achievement at hand, why would you assume ingenuity is transferable like that? Someone who makes a breakthrough in physics is by no means likely to have made an equivalently ground breaking advance in biology if they had decided to study that field instead.
I think this phrase actually means "I don't want to seem like a Luddite, but now that AI is disrupting something that I personally care about, I'm no longer enthusiastic about progress"
Aside from the fact that I explicitly praised the achievment, my point actually relies on said appreciation.
I guess my musing was hypothetical but I was careless in communicating that. I get that we can't centrally plan innovation or human effort - and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where this was the case.
I am a filmmaker and most films are essentially crafted this way. Beyond hiring and securing resources, directors essentially create by communicating ideas in short prompts because there isn’t enough time to do anything more.
I could absolutely see an AI model doing the job of an entire film crew. I have issues with this, but only with respect to the longer term aggregate affects on culture in the broad sense. I cannot honestly believe that much would be lost from the perspective of one project or another.
I'm of the opposite opinion. AI assisted art is simply the natural next chapter for "art" as a whole. It will finally kickstart the public discourse about what being an artist means in the perspective of artistic vision vs execution.
Most artists spend their lives not refining their brush stroke, but rather their eyes. The way I see it, the impact of curation and artistic direction will matter more and more in the future.
i find myself mentally unable to comprehend people who believe that the drawing part of drawing is monotony.
discovering that this mindset not only exists but is widespread has been equally as disturbing as any ai advancement.
I would look at it as more of "allowing normal people access to unbefore-dreamed-of levels of draftsmanship" vs some comment on capital-A Art. It allows non-artists to express themselves visually.
I'm biased: I've been working on an image generation app. But the beta users I've had so far will generate fifty or a hundred images in a day. That isn't a use case traditional artists support.
> reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain
It will; I think the reason we're seeing diffusion models applied to image generation first, is that it's a task that meshes well with the models. But also in general I think people will still be guided by the principle "use the right tool for the job" - this is just another tool. I doubt that the set of paths toward realization for any given needed creative imagery collapses to just "use a model"
I don't know why everyone assumes that ML researchers have some big map of the future where they can make decisions like "yeah, let's choose this branch over here, where AI gets good at generating art first, rather than that other one where it cures cancer a decade earlier." The breakthroughs come where they come, and no one knows where some model architecture will have an application in the future.
