Still dont understand why anyone would "pay" for this. The default model will probably be better in pretty much all cases. I guess if someone randomly has some sort of esoteric knowledge? Seems very limited.
Not sure how much you've used custom GPTs. They are currently flawed and buggy but I think they hold promise. They combine 3 things:
1. A custom initial prompt (yeah - you can paste this in every time and keep a personal database of special purpose prompts - but it rather kills the convenience and utility)
2. A JSON description of one or more APIs that can be used (not just for retrieveal of information - but potentially to take actions. This aspect is under-explored IMHO)
3. Uploaded documents which (I presume) are encoded into a vector database. This part is currently the most flaky. I was hoping this was a way to get round context-window limits. It has worked very badly so far and I'm not sure I understand why.
If these things start working effectively in combination then there's potentially a "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts" going on here. Each of these things is fairly useful on it's own but if you combine them and have them on tap - and someone else has put the hours in to making them useful and well-tuned - then it is potentially transformative.
Yes - GPT on it's own is pretty good at a lot of things, but you spend a long time working around it's flaws and blind-spots.
Custom GPTs don't cure all the warts but they are still potentially a force-multiplier.
EDIT - I'm also currently underwhelmed how well the other "special powers" work together. Image generation can't be fed into Image Understandin. Python is hamstrung in various ways. And GPT has no real understanding of how to prompt Dall-E. In fact it's worse at prompting than I am.
3. working seamlessly would be a major thing. 1. and 2.? I used both, together, for months, via TypingMind.com (alternative frontend UI, bring-your-own-API-key).
This is not to advertise the service - even though it does deserve it, at the very least for having a perpetual license instead of subscription bullshit - just to say that a) OpenAI is lagging way behind the obvious in everything surrounding the models themselves, and b) the combination of 1. and 2. is convenient, but not ground-breaking. At least, not unless you hook a powerful enough "actuator" via 2. This, I agree, seems underexplored.
(Or underreported? It's an obvious lever to go after, a lot of people have said they're going after it, it's reasonable to expect some spectacular results from this, and yet... nothing. Crickets. Is everyone just staying silent and trying to build a bullshit startup to monetize whatever cool thing they made?)
I guess. I assume the OpenAI vision, in the short term, is for there to be a beefy LLM on top that can call the correct sub LLMs that have more bespoke knowledge about random things, and sort of orchestrate an answer based on that.
Not sure why OpenAI feels the need to pay people for this though, I guess to incentivize use?
It is an emotional response to the fear of being "left behind".
And for some folks, there are pseudo-religious elements. There's been a long line of thought (search Extropians) obsessed with a sort of godhead-merger, or becoming godlike, and related immortality dreams. And just from a symbology perspective, there are a lot of religious overtones. The similarities between Vinge's singularity and biblical rapture are hard to miss, for instance. And just listen to some of the "AI" cheerleaders right now...
In my opinion calling something similar to religious thinking is not an actual argument against it at all, as many smart people in the past who developed important concepts have been religious. See plant genetics, the "big bang" theory, and outcome matrices. It's kind of the other way around of the "Jesus said this (in some out of context statement) therefor you should take in all the refugees, no I don't believe in any of that stuff" meme. If you're asking an atheist "since this sounds like something a (intelligent) Christian said in the past you should disagree with it" you should check if the original argument made sense with the assumed priors (i.e. "God exists") before throwing it away in general for any assumed priors. On the other hand, merging with AIs is not a good idea and sounds like a very good idea to bring yourself and the species to ruin, especially if ASI are involved, even if not doing the merging themselves.
Any merger attempt is unlikely to go well, but there have been many intelligent Christian and non-Christian Russian cosmists (or just cosmists, the "C" in TESCREAL) so I don't think "sounds religious" is a good argument for or against. I do agree that merger is cope, and it's probably reasonable to write off all "AI controls the world, de facto or otherwise" upsides, but criticisms should be against the actual thing, not its aesthetics.
A really cheap and efficient way to get around and multiply.
We are cheap, disposable tools for machines.
If machines figure out how to farm humans, they're set...it's way more practical than mining resources, refining them, producing materials and using the materials to build a mechanism to travel around in.
If a "super intelligent AI" is something in the vicinity of an LLM, which does nothing but respond to prompts, then humans provides a necessary element. Without a prompt, it'll just sit there doing nothing forever.
Maybe thats what makes it AGI. Currently there is no AGI. There are many, many, many things people can do that AI cant. At an abstract level it makes sense that adding a little human to AI could be what makes AGI.
These boys will not be your rank and file employees. They will operate exactly as they have done in OpenAI. Only difference will be that they no longer have this weird "non-profit, but actually some profit" thing going on.
But, to take a stab at that, yes, I personally think there can be some very specific viewpoints that, if compared to how things are today, some aspects of life were quantifiably better than they are today.
If we're holistic about it? Then all the human, technological and societal progress probably overshadows those teeny-tiny aspects of human life that were better before oil. It all depends on your own viewpoint and what you personally think is valuable in life.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style and also please not fulminate in HN comments? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
When he got started, yeah. I don't know how he became a YC partner without investing a lot more than he would've netted from the Loopt exit.
At this point I don't think anyone can question his track record, based on OpenAI's success at both R&D and fundraising. They are apparently trying to get him back onboard, if that means anything...
