Europeans need to just stall for may be 1 or 2 years. The current admin is honestly going to collapse when the rather ill president won't be able to govern anymore, which given recent reporting, is rather soon.
>My fear for improving AI has nothing to do with malicious AI or humans being optimized away, it's something that might be possible today, and if not, then probably tomorrow or whenever everyone gets to use GPT4: using these programs to generate highly effective propaganda, and propaganda distribution strategies, to convince people that the accumulation of power is good, or at least, to tell people whatever it is they need to be told to optimize for those in power to stay and accumulate more power.
So, this is potentially a crackpot theory, but hear me out. I've noticed that a lot of the hype runners, posts claiming their businesses are optimizing this with chatgpt, or they've replaced most of their coding with chatgpt outputs have been generally accounts here that were created in 2021 or later. While before the last couple of months, you should generally assume good faith on HN and elsewhere, the fact is mass astroturfing now is very much possible on HN and elsewhere with chatGPT, and why wouldn't OpenAI want to hype their product and get as many users on board? They certainly could and would not be noticeable. You don't need nefarious political goals if you're just trying to sell something. You just need to create enough hype and illusion to grow your product. SV companies have done it before, and now it's automated, to a degree.
One explanation (beyond basic confirmation bias) is that a lot of people joined the crypto wave and knew the orange site was the place where tech people hung out, and a lot of those types ditched crypto and are riding the AI wave, but I really cannot be sure anymore.
I kind of feel you, everything seems really hyped, more than it should be. I mean I still don't even have any idea what ChatGPTs actual use case is besides look super impressive. It seems like it can do a bunch of stuff, sometimes really well, other times spectacularly bad. It's not an a true AGI, but it's kind of marketed like one.
I think we're all completely baffled by it? I mean the thing can talk right? So we're all fired?
I tried GPT4 yesterday to write a relatively small python ML/data analysis CLI tool. It makes the development much faster, sure, very impressive, yes - but it makes dumb mistakes as well (such as writing True where it should be False etc). The tricky bits I had to write myself. The code it generates is suboptimal - the quality really feels like a representation of an average github profile.
It is really nice to let it write down all the boilerplate, I was more productive than ever, but,at least in this iteration, I doubt it will take our jobs away. So yeah, the hype is somewhat overrated.
Boilerplate is a pretty good approximation of the noise in the signal to noise sense. It reminds me of a demo where eclipse would write some tens of lines of java and then fold them away so you don't have to look at them.
If the effect of this tech is largely to generate language cruft that didn't strictly need to exist in the first place it'll do wonders for people's tolerance of said cruft.
Moderately interesting from a language design perspective.
As per usual everyone else keeps coming up with the ideas that when I hear, I think, "damn, seems obvious, wish I had thought of that." Sometimes it's because it's a good idea, sometimes because it's an idea that will probably get funding, which makes it a good idea :P
Examples:
1. Ingesting a shitload of unread emails after you come back from vacation, then telling you briefly what important things you missed
2. The same idea but for slack
3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API
4. Generating "individual" lesson plans based on student needs (I've heard 5 different pitches around this, majority for language learning)
5. student tutor chatbot
There's some other ideas that were too stupid (or more probably, too innovative for dumb old me to comprehend) to remember.
At the very least it has people thinking and being imaginative, which I think is pretty cool. I like getting into political debates with the thing.
To be honest, at least for 1 and 2, they seem like issues that shouldn't be happening, you're working at a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email (I guess? I don't have this problem), so rather than maybe have that addressed, which is what we did where I work, we'll just continue bad habits because of the bot?
3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API
Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.
Using it for teaching and lesson planning? Really ? I mean I know it might be considered mostly right but I'm not sure if I'd be using it unless I had a very good grasp on the subject matter, is this a good thing for students to be using ?
Not trying to tell you it's not worth using, but it seems funny to have a model trained and running that's cost billions of dollars to be used for a lot of random tasks. It is literally a really expensive Clippy?
Absolutely not without a teacher there anyway, which basically defeats the purpose.
For older students, I think it's a relatively nice alternative to Wikipedia. I asked it some complicated questions about some obscure bits of political theory and it put me onto some authors that were I not already such a freak, I probably wouldn't have known.
> Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.
This wasn't really a product, just someone at a hardware startup I was doing some work for improving their workflow. It's not really a good long term solution I think, each supplier has a relatively standard format, so eventually you just tweak your API intake to handle the various formats. I actually never looked at the intake code, maybe it just grabs by keywords, who knows, point is, overkill to bring in chat GPT. Probably quite tedious to manage the emails, it sounded like a one off experiment to avoid the boredom of tweaking email greppers. Chat GPT was 100% accurate in transforming the data though, over probably a set of less than 100 emails.
> It is literally a really expensive Clippy?
I mean we probably won't hear about the really good ideas until those ideas hit funding rounds, right? I'm always careful to be arrogant about this kind of things because I don't want a famous dropbox comment attributed to my name, lol.
> a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email
That describes most large companies.
While I agree it’s an obvious use case, the first startup to reliably extract the signal from the noise of daily communication at big organizations will make huge piles of money.
And whoever can do the same for Europeans while pretending to comply with GDPR, and probably a bunch of other related smaller markets. China without accidentally mentioning 1989 or cartoon bears. And so on.
I'll go ahead and say the quiet part loud. There is a changing definition of what is a child in the US. People generally under 24 are considered children, and I can recount a few people facing critique over dating people in their early twenties (<25) from dating men (mostly men) who are older. I've read an article that questions whether 16 year olds can be sexually active at all, that is, with teens their own age (other 16 yr olds), not with older people so nothing like pedophilia or an age difference at all. Another example is a thread I read on reddit questioning whether it was okay for a 17 year old musician making music with sexually explicit lyrics, presumably concerning sexual relations with others their own age.
A lot of the Epstein drama seems to be driven by two pieces, political connections to Trump and Clinton (so it touches "both" sides if you will) and the reaction of this changing definition of childhood to the exploitation of these teens at the hand of Epstein and the perspectives of people either older or from countries with different ideas of the propriety of the sexuality of teenagers. The changing range of who is a child is why what rms said so digusting, because it is considered in kind with say, rape of a toddler or a preteen in the popular mind as the social definitions are shifting.
The problem of course is this is very US centric, and there are of course people just living in different cultures and attitudes elsewhere. I have friends abroad were actually confused about the Epstein drama when they first read about it because to them, it was salacious but not as creepy as Americans think it is.
That's quite strange because I was under the impression that the US has a problem with teen pregnancies and the age at which sexual encounters first take place is going down.
I assume that's the whole point of the law in many US states and countries - it recognizes the biological reality that teens will have sex.
I've also seen that some EU countries allow teens to sext with each-other (boyfriend/girlfriend exception) without having them fall afoul of the otherwise clear laws against child pornography. This is unlike the US and also seems sensible.
The teen birth rate has been dropping, and things usually attributed to youthful indiscretion like drugs and alcohol just aren't as popular anymore. The entire Hollywood set of tropes popular in 00's teen movies aren't really true anymore.
My point is that social mores in the US are moving faster than current laws. I'm also not really sure whether teenage sexuality is a hard biological reality as, well, social pressures have an ability to change minds. Years ago, 13 year olds were expected to take up work on the farm. Today, 13 year olds are children most definitely. Perhaps there are limits to how much social conditions can condition individuals but at the very least, the whole changing definitions of childhood (or what was called "adolescence" for teens being pushed into the early 20's) is happening and whether it's conditioning or not.
The way these types of networks function results in the generation of wholly unique, never before seen images. I guarantee you will never find a single copyrighted work of art that is generated by a model like this.
Arguably it's a derived work in the same way that a person developing a taste for art after looking at thousands of images and then going and painting their own original creation is.
This seems like a very common sentiment regarding anime especially among white people in America. I think the reason for that is partly stylistic choices of anime but if we are really honest, Japanese people if not many Asian peoples appear as children to white people. This of course seems mostly visual/aesthetically based, a similar but opposite disposition towards black people exists in America[0]. Japanese animators draw characters that emulate characteristics they find familiar, which makes sense, and thus they appear "childish" to Americans.
I could bring up old racial stereotypes regarding Asian people to further bolster this point but I think most people are aware of this.
That start-class wiki article explains a lot of Korean dramas right there.
Joking aside, today I learned what a "culture-bound syndrome" is. That right there is quite substantial evidence that culture is a very real thing, and just because it might be socially constructed doesn't make it any less real (in fact, it might make it more real because it is so widely experienced).
If there's no clear and abiding biological cause (like in general paresis or something), nearly all psychological disease is culture-bound.
America in 1950 had orders of magnitudes less diagnosed depression than America in 2018, although people had some things that we would label depression today - and that Americans of 2050 will doubtless label something interesting and different.
One theory was nascent in the 70's, but the Freudian bullshit was the age of an old man by then, and the demon possession idiocy was millenia old. We still have remarkably bad effectiveness on the drugs and therapies, so there will come new theories and they will, hopefully, be better in turn.
