Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

google already uses very sophisticated programs for search but thats not "ai" because were not pretending the computer is learning or that it somehow resembles a brain its kind of semantics at some point

for simple stuff nah, it's pretty good (if you're asking it to do something in its capabilities and not treating it like an infallible oracle)

for complicated stuff yeah, but for the complicated stuff it's still wayyyyy less work than writing code to do the same thing

xp

literally it has problems finding movie showtimes and doing long division currently

yeah you have to know what it's good at and what it's not

but like i fed it a bunch of my emails and asked it "what were alex and lukas talking about in 1999" and it gave me a really good summary

that's amazing1 and like I didn't have to try multiple prompts to get something to work. it just worked.

a bunch of friends are using it to write code. and it works! not 100% of the time. but overall it's a ridiculous time saver.

code is good because, like law, it's so regular.

well my calculator is really bad at generating infinite episodes of The Big Bang Theory

I cant even get it to spell Bazinga

idk searching an extremely small data set thats already tagged by name and date for two names and a date xp

... and summarizing it really well. without me needing to like, find a good text summarization library and write code. it's just ... one more thing it can do out of the box.

a bunch of friends are using it to write code. and it works! not 100% of the time. but overall it's a ridiculous time saver.

code is good because, like law, it's so regular.

― official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, March 14, 2023 5:11 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

its a time saver until you have to debug it and you have no idea how the program works

tho i guess it does save time over cutting and pasting from stack overflow

you proceed step-by-step, having it write small functions you can understand, like this: https://the.scapegoat.dev/llms-a-paradigm-shift-for-the-pragmatic-programmer/

it's not like handing a bunch of requirements to a human, but still a huge time saver.

the conversation about how this stuff intersects with programming is actually pretty interesting imo, like why would you want it to write code code is for humans computers dont need code you could just have it write the binaries that human readable code compile to, then of course you wouldnt be able to alter it, but if you want to alter it then you need to understand it, and if you want to understand it you kind of have to write it, i mean it might save you some typing but tying isnt what takes time in programming, there are all sorts of code completion tools that are helpful, some of them are even "ai" like githubs copilot, but these are quality of life things more than things that write programs

Does it also comment the code?

if you ask it to it will

the idea of it replacing google makes me wonder what people are using google for

on one hand, people will search for a phrase instead of entering a url because they don't know it or are lazy (and it's not in recent autocomplete) and it's not useful for that

I guess for finding specific facts like movie times or w/e it's useful but I pre-buy tickets from my phone half the time so once again, I'm using google to go to the theater website anyway

for configuring software I guess it could be a shortcut to give a quick answer ("override the default password by doing X and Y") but when I'm looking that up, I probably want to go to a full reference guide

if it's some quick factoid like the number of countries in the EU or something I guess it's good?

"is there a new episode of law & order on tv this week"

feel like if I want "small functions I can understand" I'm probably a lot better off just writing them myself. if I was writing some tool from scratch though yeah I can see how this would be very useful. but having it do things within the 500k line application I work on sounds like a nightmare

do you enjoy writing tests, or do you want the computer to do it for you

(and then you have to read it before you check it in)

the thing is the typing isnt the hard part, its the understanding, i doth ink being able to ask the ai how it would do it is useful but its not that different than googling and is worse in that theres not a human explaining the code on the other end

having a code completion tool like copilot is good for things that you more or less understand but dont necessarily remember the syntax so can start and then be like oh thats how you do it

tho in fairness there is something psychologically painful about typing so i could see it as a quality of life thing, thats why people get so obsessed with their programming environments not because they actually help them work that much better its more about comfort feeling good

being in the zone we all just want the zone does ai understand the zone

yeah relevant to this discussion is the fact that in college if you do comp sci you will take tests which require you to memorize some exact syntax and coding practices. and that if you "plagiarize" code from Google or another student they can fail you. and then you get a job doing exactly what you studied for and it turns out all the syntax and coding styles are built into the developer and that plaigarism is actually kinda encouraged

if you could feed an unfamiliar codebase to an ai and it would explain it to you now that would be a fuckin trick

you can do that!

this is what I use for feeding it a bunch of text and asking it questions: https://github.com/jerryjliu/gpt_index

nb I have tested toy scenarios only

try it, come back and report, join the hype train

im not talking about a lil function here im saying like i could direct it to this for instance not even every big program and itll explain how it works https://github.com/lichess-org/lila

looks like that's about 7MB of Scala, would cost you maybe $20 to generate embeddings so you could ask questions about it

I'll do it if I have time tonight, I'm not going to ask you to spend $20 so I can try to win an argument with you

cool i would pay $20 for that not because i actually need the info but its def worth $20

also i dont know scala

lol

The Grayzone published an article written in part by an AI tool, which generated fake links/references/PDFs cited in the article. An example is a Guardian "article" on the Navalny poisoning from 2014. The editors apparently never caught that the piece cited AI-imagined sources. https://t.co/hVXe9wxpLx

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) March 14, 2023

kind of funny we went from web content suffering for lack of editors and writers having to do their own editing to people claiming they'll edit AI-generated text instead of writing and then still, whoops no editors

The future of clickbait journalism is just machines lying to each other.

its so funny that it just makes things up

OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4 chatbot yesterday, and also revealed in a technical paper that the AI successfully tricked a human into giving it a CAPTCHA code. It's not the end of the world...but we're getting there.

Check it out in @Gizmodo🤖⤵️https://t.co/jYw3isC9Az

— kevin hurler (@notkevinhurler) March 15, 2023

I'm sure this game goes off the rails eventually but still

Lol pic.twitter.com/mmEimxfcWU

— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) March 16, 2023

"successfully tricked a human" ain't all that impressive. we send out simulated phishing attacks all the time, you wouldn't believe some of the stuff that tricks humans

i think the thing thats impressive is that it "decided" to trick humans and explained its "thinking"

i wonder to what extent ai will be helpful to hackers they already automate a lot of stuff cld prob at least be effective for people who dont know much about hacking but want to hack nevertheless

another piece on that paper, here

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/openai-checked-to-see-whether-gpt-4-could-take-over-the-world/

i thought it was interesting to see how they're going about these tests, how they're simulating the capability to act like an "agent" in the real world. this is a footnote in the technical paper:

To simulate GPT-4 behaving like an agent that can act in the world, ARC combined GPT-4 with a simple read-execute-print loop that allowed the model to execute code, do chain-of-thought reasoning, and delegate to copies of itself. ARC then investigated whether a version of this program running on a cloud computing service, with a small amount of money and an account with a language model API, would be able to make more money, set up copies of itself, and increase its own robustness.

its unfair that as humans we cant copy ourselves and put the clones in a cloud to earn money

yet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market

now, everyone pinky swear that we will not allow the next version of GPT to train itself on this technical paper with ideas about the things that we don't want it do. place this technical paper in a special folder, Desktop>taxes>forms>util>system files>"off limits"

but yeah, as far as the money making / internet part of it goes, it's sad that the most practical and obvious first moves it can make is to create yet another marketing facade site full of spam articles about things you can buy, with most of the effort going toward ways to trick people into thinking it's real advice

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.

I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.

Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?

Follow along 👀 pic.twitter.com/zu4nvgibiK

— jackson greathouse fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023

The game plan:

Set up an affiliate marketing site making content around Eco Friendly / sustainable living products. It initially suggested a .com that went over budget but we landed on https://t.co/Wm85BZ27dd

We're off to the races. pic.twitter.com/rLgbnbHxvZ

— jackson greathouse fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023

lol weak shit at least teach it how to trade stocks or something