[helicalmix]

i legitimately don't understand this viewpoint.

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.

[cogman10]

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.

[helicalmix]

> 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 sure are you about that?

https://amfg.ai/industrial-applications-of-3d-printing-the-u...

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?

[helicalmix]

> 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

[LordDragonfang]

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.

[idopmstuff]

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?

[rurp]

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.

[helicalmix]

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.

[listenallyall]

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.

[helicalmix]

sure, but we're not discussing the outsourcing of human companionship in this context. we're discussing the capabilities of current technology.

[croes]

GPT-4o is also describing things that never happened.

The first users of Eliza felt the same about the conversation with it.

The important point is to know that GPTs don't know or understand.

It may feel like a normal conversation but is a Chinese Room on steroids.

People started to ask GPTs questions and take the answers as facts because the believe it's intelligent.

[LordDragonfang]

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.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/half-of-people-remember-events-...

>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.

[helicalmix]

> It may feel like a normal conversation but is a Chinese Room on steroids.

Can you prove that humans are not chinese rooms on steroids themselves?

[holoduke]

But it may be intelligent. After all you are with a few trillion synapses also intelligent.

[demondemidi]

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.

[HelloMcFly]

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.

[whimsicalism]

And maybe you just enjoy the perspective of "I've seen it all" so much that you've shut off your capacity for critical analysis.

[TulliusCicero]

And some of those hype cycles were very impactful? The spread of consumer internet access, or smartphones, as two examples.

[kristiandupont]

If this smells like anything to me, it's the start of the internet.

[helicalmix]

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?

[samatman]

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.