I’m convinced people who can’t tell when a chat bot is hallucinating are also bad at telling whether something else they’re reading is true or not. What online are you reading that you’re not fact checking anyway? If you’re writing a report you don’t pull the first fact you find and call it good, you need to find a couple citations for it. If you’re writing code, you don’t just write the program and assume it’s correct, you test it. It’s just a tool and I think most people are coping because they’re bad at using it
Yeah. GPT models are in a good place for coding tbh, I use it every day to support my usual practice, it definitely speeds things up. It’s particularly good for things like identifying niche python packages & providing example use cases so I don’t have to learn shit loads of syntax that I’ll never use again.
It’s usually good for ecosystems with good and loads of docs. Whenever docs are scarce the results become shitty. To me it’s mostly a more targeted search engine without the crap (for now)
Because in a lot of applications you can bypass hallucinations.
- getting sources for something
- as a jump off point for a topic
- to get a second opinion
- to help argue for r against your position on a topic
- get information in a specific format
In all these applications you can bypass hallucinations because either it’s task is non-factual, or it’s verifiable while promoting, or because you will be able to verify in any of the superseding tasks.
Just because it makes shit up sometimes doesn’t mean it’s useless. Like an idiot friend, you can still ask it for opinions or something and it will definitely start you off somewhere helpful.
All LLMs are text completion engines, no matter what fancy bells they tack on.
If your task is some kind of text completion or repetition of text provided in the prompt context LLMs perform wonderfully.
For everything else you are wading through territory you could probably do easier using other methods.
Also just searching the web in general.
Google is useless for searching the web today.
so, basically, even a broken clock is right twice a day?
I only use it for complex searches with results I can usually parse myself like ‘‘list 30 typical household items without descriptions or explainations with no repeating items’’ kind of thing.
great value for all that energy it expends, indeed!
it’s because everyone stopped using it, right?
at least months ago?
Remember when you had to have extremely niche knowledge of “banks” in a microcontroller to be able to use PWM on 2 pins with different frequencies?
Yes, I remember what a pile of shit it was to try and find out why xyz is not working while x and y and z work on their own. GPT usually gets me there after some tries. Not to mention how much faster most of the code is there, from A to Z, with only little to tweak to get it where I want (since I do not want to be hyper specific and/or it gets those details wrong anyway, as would a human without massive context).
Because most people are too lazy to bother with making sure the results are accurate when they sound plausible. They want to believe the hype, and lack critical thinking.
This sound awfully familiar, like almost exactly what people were saying about Wikipedia 20 years ago…
Pretty weak analogy. Wikipedia was technologically trivial and did a really good job of avoiding vested interests. Also the hype is orders of magnitude different, noone ever claimed Wikipedia was going to lead to superhuman intelligences or to replacement of swathes of human creative/service workers.
Actually since you mention it, my hot take is that Wikipedia might have been a more significant step forward in AI than openAI/latest generation LLMs. The creation of that corpus is hugely valuable in training and benchmarking models of natural language. Also it actually disrupted an industry (conventional encyclopedias) in a way that I’m struggling to think of anything that LLMs has replaced in the same way thus far.
Gippity is pretty good at getting me 90% of the way there.
It usually sets me up with at least all the terms and etc I now know to google, whereas before I wouldnt even know what I am looking for in the first place.
Also not gonna lie, search engines are even worse than gippity for accuracy often.
And Ive had to fight with so many cases of garbage documentation lately that gippity genuinely does the job better, because it has all the random comments from issues and solutions in its data.
Usually once I have my sort of key terms I need to dig into, I can use youtube/google and get more specific information though, and thats the last 10%
What are you talking about? I don’t verify anything that ChatGPT gives me.
You have to understand it well enough to know what stuff you can rely on. On the other hand nowadays there are often sources there, so it’s easy to check.
Big businesses know, they even ask people like me to add extra measures in place. I like to call it the concorde effect. Youre trying to make a plane that can shove air out of the way faster than it wants to move, and this takes an enormous amount of energy that isn’t worth the time save, or the cost. Even if you have higher airspeed when it works, if your plane doesn’t make it to destination it isn’t “faster”.
We hear a lot about the downsides of AI, except that doesn’t fit the big corpo narrative and people don’t care enough really. If youre just a consumer who has no idea how this really works, the investments companiess make into shoving it everywhere makes it seem like it’s not a problem and it looks like there’s only AI hype and no party poopers.
