The usual critics will quickly point out that LLMs like GPT-4o still have a lot of failure modes and suffer from issues that remain unresolved. They will point out that we're reaping diminishing returns from Transformers. They will question the absence of a "GPT-5" model. And so on -- blah, blah, blah, stochastic parrots, blah, blah, blah.
Ignore the critics. Watch the demos. Play with it.
This stuff feels magical. Magical. It makes the movie "Her" look like it's no longer in the realm of science fiction but in the realm of incremental product development. HAL's unemotional monotone in Kubrick's movie, "Space Odyssey," feels... oddly primitive by comparison. I'm impressed at how well this works.
Well-deserved congratulations to everyone at OpenAI!
Because its capacities are focused on exactly the right place to feel magical. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t real utility, but language (written, and even moreso spoken) has an enormous emotional resonance for humans, so this is laser-targeted in an area where every advance is going to “feel magical” whether or not it moves the needle much on practical utility; it’s not unlike the effect of TV news making you feel informed, even though time spent watching it negatively correlates with understanding of current events.
Kind of this. That was one of the themes of the movie Westworld where the AI in the robots seemed magical until it was creepy.
I worry about the 'cheery intern' response becoming something of a punch line.
"Hey siri, launch the nuclear missiles to end the world."
"That's a GREAT idea, I'll get right on that! Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Kind of punch lines.
Will be interesting to see where that goes once you've got a good handle on capturing the part of speech that isn't "words" so much as it is inflection and delivery. I am interested in a speech model that can differentiate between "I would hate to have something happen to this store." as a compliment coming from a customer and as a threat coming from an extortionist.
This is basically just the ship computer from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
"Guys, I am just pleased as punch to inform you that there are two thermo-nuclear missiles headed this way... if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and take evasive action."
ChatGPT is now powered by Genuine People Personality™ and OpenAI is turning into the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (who according to the HHGTTG were "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came")
I did wonder if there's a less verbose mode. I hope that's not a paywalled feature. Honestly it's possible that they use the friendliness to help buy the LLM time before it has to substantively respond to the user.
Yeah people around me here in Central Europe are very sick of that already. Everybody is complaining about it and the first thing they say to the bot is to cut it out, stop apologizing, stop explaining and get to the point as concisely as possible. Me too.
Or perhaps the news media has been increasingly effective at convincing us the world is terrible. Perceptions have become measurably detached from reality:
Or perhaps the reality on the ground for the working and middle class masses is not the same reality experienced by the elites, and the upper middle class with $150K+ salaries, or measured by stock market growth, and such...
As John Stewart says in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY - "How about I hold the fort on making peanut butter sandwiches, because that is something I can do. How about we let AI solve this world climate problem".
Yet to see a true "killer" feature of AI, that isn't doing a job badly which humans can already do badly.
>the point of all of this is: this is alpha 0.45 made to get the money needed to build AGI whatever that is
Maybe they publicly made it available at alpha 0.7 and now it's more like 0.9 RC instead, with not much room to go except through marginal improvements for an ever increasing training budget making them less and less worthy?
And that's before 90% of the internet becomes LLM ouput, poisoning any further corpus for training and getting into LSD-grade hallucinations mode...
It’s not an either-or: the stuff feels magical because it both represents dramatic revelation of capability and because it is heavily optimized to make humans engage in magical thinking.
These things are amazing compared to old-school NLP: the step-change in capability is real.
But we should also keep our wits about us, they are well-Des robed by current or conjectural mathematics, they fail at things dolphins can do, it’s not some AI god and it’s not self-improving.
Let’s have balance on both the magic of the experience and getting past the tech demo stage: every magic trick has a pledge, but I think we’re still working on the prestige.
Yes, the announcement explicitly states that much of the effort for this release was focused on things that make it feel magical (response times, multiple domains, etc.), not on moving the needle on quantifiable practical performance. For future releases, the clever folks at OpenAI are surely focused on improving performance on challenging tasks that practical utility -- while maintaining the "magical feeling."
> explicitly states that much of the effort for this release was focused on things that make it feel magical (response times, multiple domains, etc.), not on moving the needle on quantifiable practical performance.
Hmm, did you mean implicitly? I've yet to see where they say anything to the likes of not "moving the needle on quantifiable practical performance."
Pretty interesting how it turns out that --- contrary to science fiction movies --- talking naturally and modelling language is much easier and was achieved much sooner than solving complex problems or whatever it is that robots in science fiction movies do.
I didn't use it as a textual interface, but as a relational/nondirectional system, trying to ask it to inverse recursive relationships (first/follow sets for BNF grammars). The fact that it could manage to give partially correct answers on such an abstract problem was "coldly" surprising.
You really think OpenAI has researchers figuring out how to drive emergent capabilities based on what markets well?
Edit: Apparently not based on your clarification, instead the researchers don't know any better than to march into a local maxima because they're only human and seek to replicate themselves. I assumed too much good faith.
I don’t think the intent matters, the effect of its capacities being centered where they are is that they trigger certain human biases.
(Arguably, it is the other way around: they aren’t focused on appealing to those biases, but driven by them, in the that the perception of language modeling as a road to real general reasoning is a manifestation of the same bias which makes language capacity be perceived as magical.)
Intent matters when you're being as dismissive as you were.
Not to mention your comment doesn't track at all with the most basic findings they've shared: that adding new modalities increases performance across the board.
They shared that with GPT-4 vs GPT-4V, and the fact this is a faster model than GPT-4V while rivaling it's performance seems like further confirmation of the fact.
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It seems like you're assigning emotional biases of your own to pretty straightforward science.
> Intent matters when you're being as dismissive as you were.
The GP comment we're all replying to outlines a non-exhaustive list of very good reasons to be highly dismissive of LLM. (No I'm not calling it AI, it is not fucking AI)
It is utterly laughable and infuriating that you're assigning legitimate skepticism about this technology as a an emotional bias. Fucking ridiculous. We're now almost a full year into the full bore open hype cycle of LLM. Where's all the LLM products? Where's the market penetration? Business can't use it because it has a nasty tendency to make shit up when it's talking. Various companies and individuals are being sued because generative art is stealing from artists. Code generators are hitting walls of usability so steep, you're better off just writing the damn code yourself.
We keep hearing this "it will do!" "it's coming!" "just think of what it can do soon!" on and on and on, and it just keeps... not doing any of it. It keeps hallucinating untrue facts, it keeps getting basics of it's tasks wrong, for fucks sake AI Dungeon can't even remember if I'm in Hyrule or Night City. Progress seems fewer and farther between, with most advances being just getting the compute cost down, because NO business currently using LLM extensively could be profitable without generous donation of compute from large corporations like Microsoft.
I didn't see any good reasons to be dismissive of LLMs, I saw a weak attempt at implying we're at a local maxima because scientists don't know better than to chase after what seems magical or special to them due to their bias as humans.
It's not an especially insightful or sound argument imo, and neither are random complaints about capabilities of systems millions of people use daily despite your own claims.
And for the record:
> because NO business currently using LLM extensively could be profitable without generous donation of compute from large corporations like Microsoft
OpenAI isn't the only provider of LLMs. Plenty of businesses are using providers that provide their services profitably, and I'm not convinced that OpenAI themselves are subsidising these capabilities as strongly as they once did.
All that spilled ink don’t change the fact that I use it every day and it makes everything faster and easier and more enjoyable. I’m absolutely chuffed to put my phone on a stand so GPT4o can see the page I’m writing on and chat with me about my notes or the book I’m reading and the occasional doodle. One of the first things I’ll try out is to see if it can give feedback and tips on sketching, since it can generate images with a lot better control of the subject it might even be able to demonstrate various techniques I could employ!
As it turns out, people will gleefully welcome Big Brother with open arms as long as it speaks with a vaguely nice tone and compliments the stuff it can see.
A year is an eternity in tech and you bloody well know it. A year into an $80 billion dollar valued company's prime hype cycle, and we have... chatbots, but fancier? This is completely detached from sanity.
I mean when you’re making a point about how your views should not be taken as emotional bias, it pays to not be overly emotional.
The fact that you don’t see utility doesn’t mean it is not helpful to others.
A recent example, I used Grok to write me an outline of a paper regarding military and civilian emergency response as part of a refresher class.
To test it out we fed it scenario questions and saw how it compared to our classmates responses. All people with decades of emergency management experience.
The results were shocking. It was able to successfully navigate a large scale emergency management problem and get it (mostly) right.
I could see a not so distant future where we become QA checkers for our AI overlords.
>they aren’t focused on appealing to those biases, but driven by them, in the that the perception of language modeling...
So yes in effect that is their point, except they find the scientists are actually compelled by what markets well, rather than intentionally going after what markets well... which is frankly even less flattering. Like researchers who enabled this just didn't know better than to be seduced by some underlying human bias into a local maxima.
I think that's still just an explanation of biases that go into development direction. I don't view that as a criticism but an observation. We use LLMs in our products, and I use them daily and I'm not sure how that's that negative.
We all have biases in how we determine intelligence, capability, and accuracy. Our biases color our trust and ability to retain information. There's a wealth of research around it. We're all susceptible to these biases. Being a researcher doesn't exclude you from the experience of being human.
Our biases influence how we measure things, which in turn influences how things behave. I don't see why you're so upset by that pretty obvious observation.
The full comment is right there, we don't need to seance what the rest of it was or remix it.
> Arguably, it is the other way around: they aren’t focused on appealing to those biases, but driven by them, in the that the perception of language modeling as a road to real general reasoning is a manifestation of the same bias which makes language capacity be perceived as magical
There's no charitable reading of this that doesn't give the researcher's way too little credit given the results of the direction they've chosen.
This has nothing to do with biases and emotion, I'm not sure why some people need it to be: modalities have progressed in order of how easy they are to wrangle data on: text => image => audio => video.
We've seen that training on more tokens improves performance, we've seen that training on new modalities improves performance on the prior modalities.
It's so needlessly dismissive to act like you have this mystical insight into a grave error these people are making, and they're just seeking to replicate human language out of folly, when you're ignoring table stakes for their underlying works to start with.
Note that there is only one thing about the research that I have said is arguably influenced by the bias in question, “the perception of language modeling as a road to real general reasoning”. Not the order of progression through modalities. Not the perception that language, image, audio, or video are useful domains.
3 years ago, if you told me you could facetime with a robot, and they could describe the environment and have a "normal" conversation with me, i would be in disbelief, and assume that tech was a decade or two in the future. Even the stuff that was happening a 2 years ago felt unrealistic.
astrology is giving vague predictions like "you will be happy today". GPT-4o is describing to you actual events in real time.
People said pretty much exactly the same thing about 3d printing.
"Rather than ship a product, companies can ship blueprints and everyone can just print stuff at their own home! Everything will be 3d printed! It's so magical!"
Just because a tech is magical today, doesn't mean that it will be meaningful tomorrow. Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy.
GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful.
That's mostly the thinking here. A lot of the "killer" AI tech has really boiled down to "Look, this can replace your customer support chat bot!". Everyone is rushing to try and figure out what we can use LLMs (Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world) and so far it's been niche locations to make shareholders happy.
> Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy.
how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes?
> Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world
how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself?
I'm sure 10 years from now, assuming LLMs don't prove me wrong, I'll make a similar comment about LLMs and a new hype that I just made about 3d printing, and I'll get EXACTLY this reply. "Oh yeah, well here's a niche application of LLMs that you didn't account for!".
> how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes?
See where I said "in consumer products". I'm certainly not claiming that 3d printing is never used and is not useful. However, what I am saying is that it was hyped WAY beyond industrial applications.
In fact, here I am, 11 years ago, saying basically exactly what I'm saying about LLMs that I said about 3d printing. [1]. Along with people basically responding to me the exact same way you just did.
> how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself?
Did I say it wasn't behind the scenes? ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say. I know, I spent a LONG time trying to integrate ML into our company and found it simply wasn't as good as hard and fast programmed rules in almost all situations.
sorry, maybe i'm not completely understanding what you mean by "in consumer products".
reading your argument on reddit, it seems to me that you don't consider 3d printing a success because there's not one in every home...which is true.
but it feels uncreative? like, sure, just because it hasn't been mass adopted by consumers, doesn't mean there wasn't value generation done on an industrial level.
you're probably using consumer products right now that have benefitted from 3d printing in some way.
> ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say
what hype train are you referring to? i know a lot of different predictions in machine learning, so i'm curious about what you mean specifically.
> but it feels uncreative? like, sure, just because it hasn't been mass adopted by consumers, doesn't mean there wasn't value generation done on an industrial level. you're probably using consumer products right now that have benefitted from 3d printing in some way.
I'd suggest reading both the article and the surrounding reddit comments if you want context for my argument there. The explicit argument there was that everyone would own a 3d printer. Not that they would be used in commercial applications or to produce consumer goods. No, instead that everyone would have a 3d printer on hand to make most of their goods (rather than having their goods shipped to them). That's the hype.
I did not say there weren't other areas where 3d printing could be successful nor that it wouldn't have applications. Rather, that the hype around it was unfounded and overblown.
This is much the same way I see LLMs. The current hype around them is that every job will end up being replaced. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, programmers, engineers, architects, everything. All replaced by LLMs and AI. However, that seems really unrealistic when the current state of LLMs is you always need a human doublechecking what it produces, and it's known to give out incorrect responses. Further, LLMs have limited capabilities to interact with applications let alone the physical world. Perhaps they will but also perhaps they won't. The imagination of what they could do is just wildly out of step with what they currently do.
> what hype train are you referring to? i know a lot of different predictions in machine learning, so i'm curious about what you mean specifically.
I didn't really see a lot of predictions around ML. Instead, it was more just a bunch of articles talking about the importance of it and seemingly ever CEO deciding they need more ML in their products. Lots of stuff ended up being marketed specifically because it had ML capabilities (much like this last CES had almost every product with "AI" capabilities).
Funnily, the ML didn't (as far as I could see) have a whole lot of predictions other than more of an ephemeral notion that it would save manpower.
I bring it up in this case because like LLMs, there's just a bunch of buzz around 2 letters with not a whole lot of actual examples of those 2 letters being put to practical use.
hm, maybe we're misinterpreting each other's main point.
My reply was to some person who said that AI was akin to astrology, i.e. absolutely fake bullshit, which is bonkers to me.
Your reply was that AI, like 3d printing, is likely not going to be mass adopted by the average consumer, despite the hype, which i think is a reasonable prediction, and doesn't necessarily mean it won't have some valuable applications.
Yeah, if you see it that way then I think we agree.
croes's point, I believe, about the astrology was that we know today that LLMs will produce bad results and that they can't be trusted. Yet the hype is sort of at a "Well, if we just give it more time maybe that problem goes away". Similar to how in astrology "if you just think about it right, the prediction was actually accurate".
That's where I see the parallels with 3d printing. There was a sort of "We can print anything with enough time!" even though by and large the only printable things were plastic toys.
> GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful.
sure, but my experience is that if you are able to optimize better on some previous limitation, it legitimately does open up a whole different world of usefulness.
for example, real-time processing makes me feel like universal translators are now all the more viable
The huge difference between this and your analogy is that 3d printing failed to take off because it never reached mass adoption, and stayed in the "fiddly and expensive" stage. GPT models have already seen adoption in nearly every product your average consumer uses, in some cases heedless of whether it even makes sense in that context. Windows has it built in. Nearly everyone I know (under the age of 40) has used at least one product downstream of OpenAI, and more often than not a handful of them.
That said, yeah it's mostly niche locations like customer support chatbots, because the killer app is "app-to-user interface that's undisguisable from normal human interaction". But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app (like a POS). "Magical" is exactly the requirement to replace people like that.
> But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app
That's the sleight of hand LLM advocates are playing right now.
"Imagine how many people are just putting data into computers! We could replace them all!"
Yet LLMs aren't "just putting data into a computer" They aren't even really user/app interfaces. They are a magic box you can give directives to and get (generally correct, but not always) answers from.
Go ahead, ask your LLM "Create an excel document with the last 30 days of the high temperatures for blank". What happens? Did it create that excel document? Why not?
LLMs don't bridge the user/app gap. They bridge the user/knowledge gap, sometimes sort of.
"Adoption" of tech companies pushing it on you is very different from "adoption" in terms of the average person using it in a meaningful way and liking it.
Remember when Chegg's stock price tanked? That's because GPT is extremely valuable as a homework helper. It can make mistakes, but that's very infrequent on well-understood topics like English, math and science through the high school level (and certainly if you hire a tutor, you'd pay a whole lot more for something that can also make mistakes).
Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?
If you follow much of the education world, it's inundated with teachers frantically trying to deal with the volume and slop their students produce with AI tools. I'm sure it can be useful in an educational context, but "replacing a poor-quality cheating tool with a more efficient poor-quality cheating tool" isn't exactly what I'd call "meaningful."
The most interesting uses of AI tools in a classroom I've seen is teachers showing students AI-generated work and asking students to critique it and fact check it, at which point the students see it for what it is.
> Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?
No? Solving homework was never meaningful. Being meaningful was never the point of homework. The point was for you to solve it yourself. To Learn with your human brain, such that your human brain could use those teaching to make new meaningful knowledge.
John having 5 apples after Judy stole 3 is not interesting.
Ok, but what will the net effects be? Technology can be extremely impressive on a technical level, but harmful in practical terms.
So far the biggest usecase for LLMs is mass propaganda and scams. The fact that we might also get AI girlfriends out of the tech understandly doesn't seem that appealing to a lot of folks.
this is a different thesis than "AI is basically bullshit astrology", so i'm not disagreeing with you.
Understanding atomic energy gave us both emission-free energy and the atomic, and you are correct that we can't necessarily where the path of AI will take us.
There are 8 billion humans you could potentially facetime with. I agree, a large percentage are highly annoying, but there are still plenty of gems out there, and the quest to find one is likely to be among the most satisfying journeys of your life.
But technology has secondary effects that you can't just dismiss. Sure, it is fascinating that a computer embedded into a mechanical robot can uphold one end of an engaging conversation. But you can't ignore the fact that simply opens the door towards eventual isolation, where people withdraw from society more and more and human-to-human contact gets more and more rare. We're already well on the way, with phone apps and online commerce and streaming entertainment all reducing human interactions, perhaps it doesn't bother you, but it scares the hell out of me.
I'm increasing exhausted by the people who will immediately jumps to gnostic assertions that <LLM> isn't <intelligent|reasoning|really thinking|> because <thing that applies to human cognition>
>GPT-4o is also describing things that never happened.
>People started to ask [entity] questions and take the answers as facts because the believe it's intelligent.
Replace that with any political influencer (Ben Shapiro, AOC, etc) and you will see the exact same argument.
People remember things that didn't happen and confidently present things they just made up as facts on a daily basis. This is because they've learned that confidently stating incorrect information is more effective than staying silent when you don't know the answer. LLMs have just learned how to act like a human.
At this point the real stochastic parrots are the people who bring up the Chinese room because it appears the most in their training data of how to respond to this situation.
Maybe you just haven't been around enough to seen the meta-analysis? I've been through four major tech hype cycles in 30+ years. This looks and smells like all the others.
I'm 40ish, I'm in the tech industry, I'm online, I'm often an early adopter.
What hype cycle does this smell like? Because it feels different to me, but maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough. If your answer is "the blockchain" or Metaverse then I know we're experiencing these things quite differently.
Where platforms and applications are rewritten to take advantage of it and it improves the baseline of capabilities that they offer. But the end user benefits are far more limited than predicted.
And where the power and control is concentrated in the hands of a few mega corporations.
This is such a strange take - do you not remember 2020 when everyone started working from home? And today, when huge numbers of people continue to work from home? Most of that would be literally impossible without the cloud - it has been a necessary component in reshaping work and all the downstream effects related to values of office real estate, etc.
No way. Small to medium sized businesses don't need physical servers anymore. Which is most businesses. It's been a huge boon to most people. No more running your exchange servers on site. Most things that used to be on-prem software have moved to the cloud and integrate with mobile devices. You don't need some nerd sitting around all day in case you need to fix your on-prem industry specific app.
I have no idea how you can possibly shrug off the cloud as not that beneficial.
> the end user benefits are far more limited than predicted
How have you judged the end user benefits of the cloud? I don't agree personally - the cloud has enabled most modern tech startups and all of those have been super beneficial to me.
i feel like a common consumer fallacy is that, because you don't interact with a technology in your day-to-day life, it leads you to conclude that the technology is useless.
I guarantee you that the cloud has benefitted you in some way, even though you aren't aware of the benefits of the cloud.
which hype cycles are you referring to? and, after the dust settled, do you conclusively believe nothing of value was generated from these hype cycles?
Yeah, I remember all that dot com hysteria like it was yesterday.
Page after page of Wired breathlessly predicting the future. We'd shop online, date online, the world's information at our fingertips. It was going to change everything!
Silly now, of course, but people truly believed it.
Astrology is a thing with no substance whatsoever. It's just random, made-up stories. There is no possibility that it will ever develop into something that has substance.
AI has a great deal of substance. It can draft documents. It can identify foods in a picture and give me a recipe that uses them. It can create songs, images and video.
AI, of course, has a lot of flaws. It does some thing poorly, it does other things with bias, and it's not suitable for a huge number of use cases. To imply that something that has a great deal of substance but flaws alongside is the same as something that has no substance whatsoever nor ever will is just not a reasonable thing to do.
If you want to talk facts, then those critics are similarly on weak grounds and critiquing feelings more than facts. There has been no actual sign of scaling ceasing to work, in medium after medium, and most of their criticisms are issues with how LLM tools are embedded in architectures which are still incredibly early/primitive and still refining how to use transformers effectively. We haven't even begun using error correction techniques from analog engineering disciplines properly to boost the signal of LLMs in practical settings. There is so much work to do with just the existing tools.
"AI is massive hype and shoved into everything" has more grounding as a negative feeling of people being overwhelmed with technology than any basis in fact. The faults and weaknesses are buoyed by people trying to acknowledge your feelings than any real criticism of a technology that is changing faster than the faults and weakness arguments can be made. Study machine learning and come back with an informed criticism.
yea, we don't want or need this kind of "magic" - because it's hardly magic to begin with, and it's more socially and environmentally destructive than anything else.
Speak for yourself, my workflow and live has been significantly improved with these things. Having easier access to information that I sorta know but want to verify/clarify rather than going into forums/SO is extremely handy.
Not having to write boilerplate code itself also is very handy.
So yes, I absolutely do want this "magic." "I don't like it so no one should use it" is a pretty narrow POV.
You should be worried because this stuff needs to make sense financially. Otherwise we'll be stuck with it in an enshittification cycle, kind of like Reddit or image hosting websites.
Problem is that by that time there would be open source models (the ones that already exist are getting good) that I can run locally. I honestly don't need _THAT_ much.
Fair enough, if we get there. The problem for this stuff, where do we get the data to get good quality results? I imagine everything decent will be super licensed within 5-10 years, when everyone wakes up.
people like you are the problem. the people who join a website cause it to be shitty, then leave and start the process at a new website. Reddit didnt become shit because of Reddit it became shit because of people going on there commenting as if they themselves are an LLM repeating enshittification over and over and trying to say the big buzzword first so they get to the top denying any real conversation.
I've been on Reddit for more than a decade and I didn't make them create crappy mobile apps, crappy new web apps as well a policy of selling the data to anyone with a pulse.
Do you even know what "enshittification" means? It has nothing to do with the users. It's driven by corporate greed.
Reddit should be a public service managed by a non profit.
Edit: Also LOL at the 6 month old account making that comment against me :-)
I would say a machine that thinks it feels emotions is less likely to throw you out of a spaceship. Human empathy already feels lacking compared to what something as basic as llama-3 can do.
> I would say a machine that thinks it feels emotions is less likely to throw you out of a spaceship.
Have you seen the final scene of the movie Ex Machina? Without spoilers, I'll just say that acting like has emotions is much more different than actually having them. This is in fact what socio- and psychopaths are like, with stereotypical results.
Can you prove that you feel empathy? That you're not a cold unfeeling psychopath that is merely pretending extremely well to have emotions? Even if it did, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the outside, so in strictly practical terms I don't think it matters.
If I could logically prove that I feel empathy, I would be much more famous.
I get your nuanced point, that “thinking” one feels empathy is enough to be bound by the norms of behavior that empathy would dictate, but I don’t see why that would make AI “empathy” superior to human “empathy”.
The immediate future I see is a chatbot that is superficially extremely empathetic, but programmed never to go against the owner’s interest. Where before, when interacting with a human, empathy could cause them to make an exception and act sacrificially in a crisis case, this chatbot would never be able to make such an exception because the empathy it displays is transparent.
> Ignore the critics. Watch the demos. Play with it
With so many smoke and mirrors demos out there, I am not super excited at those videos. I would play with it, but it seems like it is not available in a free tier (I stopped paying OpenAI a while ago after realizing that open models are more than enough for me)
HAL's voice acting I would say is actually superb and super subtly very much not unemotional. Part of what makes so unnerving. They perfect nailed creepy uncanny valley
Did you use any of the GPT voice features before? I’m curious whether this reaction is to the modality or the model.
Don’t get me wrong, excited about this update, but I’m struggling to see what is so magical about it. Then again, I’ve been using GPT voice every day for months, so if you’re just blown away from talking to a computer then I get it
The voice modality plays a huge role in how impressive it seems.
When GPT-2/3/3.5/4 came out, it was fairly easy to see the progression from reading model outputs that it was just getting better and better at text. Which was pretty amazing but in a very intellectual way, since reading is typically a very "intellectual" "front-brain" type of activity.
But this voice stuff really does make it much more emotional. I don't know about you, but the first time I used GPT's voice mode I notice that I felt something -- very un-intellectually, very un-cerebral -- like, the feeling that there is a spirit embodying the computer. Of course with LLM's there always is a spirit embodying the computer (or, there never is, depending on your philosophical beliefs).
The Suno demos that popped up recently should have clued us all in that this kind of emotional range was possible with these models. This announcement is not so much a step function in model capabilities, but it is a step function in HCI. People are just not used to their interactions with a computer be emotional like this. I'm excited and concerned in equal parts that many people won't be truly prepared for what is coming. It's on the horizon, having an AI companion, that really truly makes you feel things.
Us nerds who habitually read text have had that since roughly GPT-3, but now the door has been blown open.
Honestly, as someone who has been using this functionality almost daily for months now, the times that break immersion the most by far is when it does human-like things, such as clearing its throat, pandering, or attaching emotions to its responses.
Very excited about faster response times, auto interrupt, cheaper api, and voice api — but the “emotional range” is actually disappointing to me. hopefully it doesn’t impact the default experience too much, or the memory features get good enough that I can stop it from trying to pretend to be a human
Flat out impossible? If you mean “without clicking anything”, sure, but you could interrupt with your thumb, exit chat to send images and go back (maybe video too, I’ve never had any need), and honestly the 2-3 second response time never once bothered me.
I’m very excited about all these updates and it’s really cool tech, but all I’m seeing is quality of life improvements and some cool engineering.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Not everything has to be magic or revolutionary to be a cool update
Did you even watch the video ?
It's just baffling how I have to spell this out.
Skip to 11:50 or watch the very first demo with the breathing. None of that is possible with TTS and STT. You can't ask old voice mode to slow down or modulate tone or anything like that because it's just working with text.
Yes I watched the demo. True those things were not possible, so if that’s what’s blowing you away then fair enough I guess. For me that doesn’t impact at all anything have ever used voice for or probably will ever use voice for.
I’ve voice chatted with ChatGPT for hundreds of hours and never once thought “can you modulate your tone please?”, so those improvements are a far cry from magic or revolutionary imho. Again, that’s not to say they aren’t cool tech, forward advancements, or impressive —- but magic or revolutionary are pretty high bars.
Few people are going to say "modulate your tone" in a vacuum sure but that doesn't mean that ability along with being able to manipulate all other aspects of speech isn't an incredible advance that is going to be very useful.
Language learning, audiobook narration that is far more involved, you could probably generate an audio drama, actual voice acting, even just not needing to get all my words in before it prompts the model with the transcribed text, conversation that doesn't feel like someone is reading a script.
And no, thumbing the pause button, sending an image and going back does not even begin to compare in usability.
Great leaps in usability are a revolution in itself. GPT-3 existed for years so why did ChatGPT explode when it did? You think it was intelligence? No. It was the usability of the chat interface.
How so? You don’t have to press the mic button after every sentence. You press the headphone button and speak like you normally would and it speaks back once you stop talking.
Yeah the product itself is only incrementally better (lower latency responses + can look at a camera feed, both great improvements but nothing mindblowing or "magical"), but I think the big difference is that this thing is available for free users now.
I find it interesting the psychology behind this. If the voice in 2001 had proper inflection, it wouldn't have been perceived as a computer.
(also, I remember when voice synthesizers got more sophisticated and Stephen Hawking decided to keep his original first-gen voice because he identified more with it)
I think we'll be going the other way soon. Perfect voices, with the perfect emotional inflection will be perceived as computers.
However I think at some point they may be anthropomorphized and given more credit than they deserve. This will probably be cleverly planned and a/b tested. And then that perfect voice, for you, will get you to give in.
1. Demos are meant for feel magical and except in Apple's case they are often exaggerated versions of their real product.
2. Even then this is a wonderful step for tech in general and not just OpenAI. Makes me very excited.
3. Most economic value and growth driven by AI will not come from consumer apps but rather the enterprise use. I am interested in seeing how AI can automatically buy stuff for me, automate my home, reduce my energy used, automatically apply and get credit cards based on my purchases, find new jobs for me, negotiate with a car dealer on my behalf, detect when I am going to fall sick, better diabetes case and eventual cure etc. etc.
Her wasn’t a dystopia as far as I could tell. Not even a cautionary tale. The scifi ending seems unlikely but everything else is remarkably prescient. I think the picnic scene is very likely to come true in the near future. Things might even improve substantially if we all interact with personalities that are consistently positive and biased towards conflict resolution and non judgemental interactions.
Seemed like a cautionary tale to me where the humans fall in love with disembodied AIs instead of seeking out human interaction. I think the end of the movie drove that home pretty clearly.
Some people in the movie did but not all. It happened enough that it wasn’t considered strange but the central focus wasn’t all of society going down hill because everyone was involved with an AI. If you recall, the human relationships that the characters who fell in love with AIs had were not very good situations. The main character’s arc started off at a low point and then improved while his romance with the AI developed, only reaching a lower point when he felt betrayed and when the AI left him but that might as well be any ordinary relationship. At the end he finds a kindred soul and it’s implied they have some kind of future together whether romantic or not.
Well that's exactly why I'm not looking forward to whatever is coming. The average joe thinking dating a server is not a dystopia frighten me much more than the delusional tech ceo who thinks his ai will revolutionise the world
> Things might even improve substantially if we all interact with personalities that are consistently positive and biased towards conflict resolution and non judgemental interactions.
Some kind of turbo bubble in which you don't even have to actually interact with anyone or anything ? Every "personalities" will be nice to you as long as you send $200 to openai every week, yep that's absolutely a dystopia for me
It really feels like the end goal is living in a pod and being uploaded in an alternative reality, everything we build to "enhance" our lives take us further from the basic building blocks that make life "life".
There’s a lot of hyperbole here but I’ll try to respond. If LLMs can reach a level where they’re effectively indistinguishable from talking to a person then I don’t see anything wrong with someone dating one. People already involve themselves in all kinds of romantic relationships with nonhuman things: anime characters, dolls, celebrities they’ve never met, pillows and substitute relationships with other things like work, art, social media, pets, etc. Adding AI to the list doesn’t make things worse. I think there’s a strong argument that AI relationships would be much healthier than many of the others if they can emulate human interaction to within a very close degree.
The scene which I referenced is one in which a group of three humans and one AI spend time together at a picnic and their interactions are decidedly normal. How many lonely people avoid socializing because they are alone and don’t want to feel like a third wheel? If dating or even just being friends with an AI that can accompany you to such events is accepted and not derided by people who happily have a human companion then I think having a supportive partner could help many people reengage with wider social circles and maybe they will eventually choose to and be able to find other people that they can form relationships with.
OpenAI charges $20 a month which is an extremely reasonable price for a multipurpose tool considering you can’t buy a single meal at a restaurant for the same amount and is far better than the “free” ad supported services that everyone has become addicted to. We’ve been rallying for 20 odd years for payment based services instead of ads but whenever one comes along people shout it down. Funny isn’t it?
The movie Her had an answer for our current fascination for screens as well. It showed a world where computers were almost entirely voice driven with screens playing a secondary role as evidenced by their cell phones looking more like pocket books that close and hide the screen. If you’re worried about pods, well they’re already here and you’re probably holding one in your hands right now. Screens chain us down and mediate our interactions with the world in a way that voice doesn’t. You can walk and talk effortlessly but not so much walking and tapping or typing. If the AI can see and understand what you see (another scene in the movie where he goes on a date with his “phone” in his pocket) and understands enough to not need procedural instructions then it can truly act as an assistant capable of performing assigned tasks and filling in the details while you are free to go about your day. I believe this could end the paradigm of being chained to a desk for office work 8 hours a day and could also transform leisure time as well.
There is a massive philosophical and ethical problem and the answer amount to "people already fuck anime pillows so it's ok". Once again, some people terrify me. You could argue that the tech itself is neutral but all the arguments I read in favor of it are either creepy or completely unrealistic.
Tech absolutely wrecked social relations and people assume more of it will automagically fix the issues, it's perplexing
> Funny isn’t it?
What's funny is when your wife of 6 years get bought by a private entity which will fire half the company and jack the prices up from $20 to $200
> I believe this could end the paradigm of being chained to a desk for office work 8 hours a day and could also transform leisure time as well.
That's what politicians told us in the 80s about computers, the 2 day work week, the end of poverty, &c. nothing changed, if anything things are a it worse than they were. New technologies without a dramatic change of political and social policies will never bring anything new to the table
Imagine what an unfettered model would be like. 'Ex Machina' would no longer be a software-engineering problem, but just another exercise in mechanical and electrical engineering.
The future is indeed here... and it is, indeed, not equitably distributed.
Or from Zones of Thought series, Applied Theology, the study of communication with and creation of superhuman intelligences that might as well be gods.
> The simplest example is “list all of the presidents in reverse chronological order of their ages when inaugurated”.
This question is probably not the simplest form of the query you intend to receive an answer for.
If you want a descending list of presidents based on their age at inauguration, I know what you want.
If you want a reverse chronological list of presidents, I know what you want.
When you combine/concatenate the two as you have above, I have no idea what you want, nor do I have any way of checking my work if I assume what you want. I know enough about word problems and how people ask questions to know that you probably have a fairly good idea what you want and likely don’t know how ambitious this question is as asked, and I think you and I both are approaching the question with reasonably good faith, so I think you’d understand or at least accommodate my request for clarification and refinement of the question so that it’s less ambiguous.
Can you think of a better way to ask the question?
Now that you’ve refined the question, do LLMs give you the answers you expect more frequently than before?
Do you think LLMs would be able to ask you for clarification in these terms? That capability to ask for clarification is probably going to be as important as other improvements to the LLM, for questions like these that have many possibly correct answers or different interpretations.
> I think it “understood” the question because it “knew” how to write the Python code to get the right answer.
That’s what makes me suspicious of LLMs, they might just be coincidentally or accidentally answering in a way that you agree with.
Don’t mean to nitpick or be pedantic. I just think the question was really poorly worded and might have a lot of room for confirmation bias in the results.
> List of US Presidents with their ages at inauguration
That’s what the python script had at the top. I guess I don’t know why you didn’t ask that in the first place.
Edit: you’re not the same person who originally posted the comment I responded to, and I think I came off a bit too harshly here in text, but don’t mean any offense.
It was a good idea to ask to see the code. It was much more to the point and clear what question the LLM perceived you asking of it.
The second example about buckets was interesting. I guess LLMs help with coding if you know enough of of the problem and what a reasonable answer looks like, but you don’t know what you don’t know. LLMs are useful because you can just ask why things may not work or don’t work in any given context or generally speaking or in a completely open ended way that is often hard to explain or articulate for non-experts, making troubleshooting difficult as you might not even know how to search for solutions.
You might appreciate this link if you’re not familiar with it:
I was demonstrating how bad that LLMs are at simple math.
If I just asked a list of ages in order, there was probably some training data for it to recite. By asking for it to reverse it, it was forcing the LLM to do math.
I also knew the answer was simple with Python.
On another note, with ChatGPT 4, you can ask it to verify its answers on the internet and to provide sources
You’re also scarface_74? Not that there’s anything wrong with sockpuppets on HN in the absence of vote manipulation or ban evasion that I know of, I just don’t know why you’d use one in this manner, hence my confusion. Karma management?
I saw a blue icon of some kind on the link you shared but didn’t click it.
No worries, that was somewhat ambiguous to me also, and confusing. I thought you might be a different person who had edited their comment after receiving downvotes. I mean, it’s reasonable to assume in most cases that different usernames are different people. Sorry to make you repeat yourself!
Maybe email hn@ycombinator.com to ask about your rate limits as I have encountered similar issues myself in the past and have found dang to be very helpful and informative in every way, even when the cause is valid and/or something I did wrong. #1 admin/mod on the internet imo
> It makes the movie "Her" look like it's no longer in the realm of science fiction but in the realm of incremental product development.
The last part of the movie "Her" is still in the realm of science fiction, if not outright fantasy. Reminds me of the later seasons of SG1 with all the talk of ascension and Ancients. Or Clarke's 3001 book intro, where the monolith creators figured out how to encode themselves into spacetime. There's nothing incremental about that.
You'll have a great time once you discover literature. Especially early modern novels, texts the authors sometimes spent decades refining, under the combined influences of classical arts and thinking, Enlightenment philosophy and science.
If chatbots feel magical, what those people did will feel divinely inspired.
That's what openai managed to catch. The large enough sense of wonder. You could feel it as people spread the news but not as the usual fad.. there was a soft silence to it, people focused deeply poking at it because it was a new interface.
Blah blah blah indeed, the hype train continues unabated. The problem is, those are all perfectly valid criticisms and LLMS can never live up to the ridiculous levels of hype.
Watching HAL happening in real life comes across as creepy, not magical. Double creepy with all the people praising this ‘magicality’.
I’m not a sceptic and apply AI on a daily basis, but whole “we can finally replace people” vibe is extremely off-putting. I had very similar feelings during pandemic, when majority of people was so seemingly happy to drop any real human interaction in favor of remote comms via chats/audio calls, it still creeps me out how ready we are as a society to drop anything remotely human in favor of technocratic advancement and “productivity”.
On one hand, I agree - we shouldn't diminish the very real capabilities of these models with tech skepticism. On the other hand, I disagree - I believe this approach is unlikely to lead to human-level AGI.
Like so many things, the truth probably lies somewhere between the skeptical naysayers and the breathless fanboys.
On the other hand, I disagree - I believe this approach is unlikely to lead to human-level AGI.
You might not be fooled by a conversation with an agent like the one in the promo video, but you'd probably agree that somewhere around 80% of people could be. At what percentage would you say that it's good enough to be "human-level?"
When people talk about human-level AGI, they are not referring to an AI that could pass as a human to most people - that is, they're not simply referring to a program that can pass the Turing test.
They are referring to an AI that can use reasoning, deduction, logic, and abstraction like the smartest humans can, to discover, prove, and create novel things in every realm that humans can: math, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, art, sociology, etc.
Most peoples interactions are transactional. When I call into a company and talk to an agent, and that agent solves the problem I have regardless of if the agent is a person or an AI, where did the fooling occur? The ability to problem solve based on context is intelligence.
> You might not be fooled by a conversation with an agent like the one in the promo video, but you'd probably agree that somewhere around 80% of people could be.
I think people will quickly learn with enough exposure, and then that percentage will go down.
Nah– These models will improve faster than people can catch up. People or AI models can barely catch AI-created text. It's quickly becoming impossible to distinguish.
The one you catch is the tip of the iceberg.
Same will happen to speech. Might take a few years, but it'll be indistinguishable in a max a few years. Due to compute increase + model improvement, both improving exponentially.
Well spoken and well mannered speakers will be called bots. The comment threads under posts will be hurtling insults back and forth on who's actually real. Half the comments will actually be bots doing it. Welcome to the dead internet.
Right! This is absolutely apocalyptic! If more than half the people I argue with on internet forums are just bots that don't feel the sting and fail to sleep at night because of it, what even is the meaning of anything?
We need to stop these hateful ai companies before they ruin society as a whole!
Seriously though... the internet is dead already, and it's not coming back to what it was. We ruined it, not ai.
I'm not so sure, I think this is what's called "emergent behavior" — we've found very interesting side effects of bringing together technologies. This might ultimately teach us more about intelligence than more reductionist approaches like scanning and mapping the brain.
Comments have become insufferable. Either it is now positive to the point of bordering on cringe-worthiness (your comment) or negative. Nuanced discussion is dead.
I mean, humans also have tons of failures modes, but we've learned to live them over time.
The average human have tons of quirks, talk over each other all the time, generally can't solve complex problems in a casual conversion setting, and are not always cheery and ready to please like Scarlet's character in Her.
I think our expectations of AI is way too high from our exposure to science fiction.
the interruptiopn part is just flow control at the edge. control-s, control-c stuff, right? not AI?
The sound of a female voice to an audience 85% composed of males between the ages of 14 and 55 is "magical", not this thing that recreates it.
so yeah, its flow control and compression of highly curated, subtle soft porn. Subtle, hyper targeted, subconscious porn honed by the most colossal digitally mediated focus group ever constructed to manipulate our (straight male) emotions.
why isn't the voice actually the voice of the pissed off high school janitor telling you to man-up and stop hyperventilating? instead its a woman stroking your ego and telling you to relax and take deep breaths. what dataset did they train that voice on anyway?
It's not that complicated, generally more woman-like voices test as more pleasant to men and women alike. This concept has been backed up by stereotypes for centuries.
Most voice assistants have male options, and an increasing number (including ChatGPT) have gender neutral voices.
> why isn't the voice actually the voice of the pissed off high school janitor telling you to man-up and stop hyperventilating
sounds like a great way to create a product people will outright hate
I may or may not entirely agree with this sentiment (but I definitely don't disagree with all of it!) but I will say this: I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for this. Have a "corrective upvote" on me.
Ignore the critics. Watch the demos. Play with it.
This stuff feels magical. Magical. It makes the movie "Her" look like it's no longer in the realm of science fiction but in the realm of incremental product development. HAL's unemotional monotone in Kubrick's movie, "Space Odyssey," feels... oddly primitive by comparison. I'm impressed at how well this works.
Well-deserved congratulations to everyone at OpenAI!