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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34907 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Yes LLMs are very cool.

Gpt 3.5 and 4 have astounding capabilities. However, I have a job and thus only have time to play with the publically accessible versions. In these the capabilities are lobotomised or this is nothing-burger.

Asking openais model questions that don't get blocked is a hassle to make it unusable for all but an extremely narrow range of tasks, while bings bot, allegedly gpt4, cannot answer basic questions or map concepts together if the material doesn't already exist on the web.

What is being presented to the public is worrying in the same way an industrial lathe spinning at 500rpm catching someones hair is, not in the way that an intelligent agent is worrying. What exactly does everyone else seem to see in them that I don't?

How come 3/4 of my questions to these AIs break them?

There is perceptual gap here.

I have tried GPT4 and it renders this comment invalid, it is able to fluently answer my queries and provide massive added value to a suite of activities.

Can you post any transcripts of conversations you had with it? Or at least just the questions / types of questions it had trouble with?

For myself, I suddenly discovered their utility yesterday. They are much more effective at restructuring existing text than at answering questions (de novo text generation), and very very good at generating convincing (if not fully accurate) boilerplate. So the best application is summary or restyling ('please rewite this email to a superior a bit more formally', 'please restructure this bulleted list as a polite email'). Of course, everything submitted goes to OpenAI, so this opens up business secrets concerns, but everything typed into Office Home already gets sent to Microsoft by default via "diagnostic data."

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