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I'm going to shamelessly steal @Scimitar's post from the Friday Fun thread because I think we need to talk about LLMs in a CW context:
A few months ago OpenAI dropped their API price, from $0.06/1000 tokens for their best model, to $0.02/1000 tokens. This week, the company released their ChatGPT API which uses their "gpt-3.5-turbo" model, apparently the best one yet, for the price of $0.002/1000 tokens. Yes, an order of magnitude cheaper. I don't quite understand the pricing, and OpenAI themselves say: "Because
gpt-3.5-turboperforms at a similar capability totext-davinci-003but at 10% the price per token, we recommendgpt-3.5-turbofor most use cases." In less than a year, the OpenAI models have not only improved, but become 30 times cheaper. What does this mean?https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11fn0td/the_implications_of_chatgpts_api_cost/
...or about $0.13 per hour. Yes technically it overlooks the fact that OpenAI charge for both input and output tokens, but this is still cheap and the line is trending downwards.
Full time minimum wage is ~$20k/year. GPT-3.5-turbo is 100x cheaper and vastly outperforms the average minimum wage worker at certain tasks. I dunno, this just feels crazy. And no, I wont apologize for AI posting. It is simply the most interesting thing happening right now.
I strongly agree with @Scimitar, this is the most interesting thing happening right now. If you haven't been following AI/LLM progress the last month, it has been blazingly fast. I've spent a lot of time in AI doomer circles so I have had a layer of cynicism around people talking about the Singularity, but I'll be damned if I'm not started to feel a bit uncomfortable that they may have been right.
The CW implications seem endless - low skill jobs will be automated, but which tribe first? Will HR admins who spend all day writing two emails be the first to go? Fast food cashiers who are already on their way out through self ordering consoles?
Which jobs will be the last to go? The last-mile problem seems pretty bad for legal and medical professionals (i.e. if an LLM makes up an answer it could be very bad) but theoretically we could use them to generate copy or ideas then go through a final check by a professional.
Outside of employment, what will this do to human relations? I've already seen some (admittedly highly autistic) people online saying that talking to ChatGPT is more satisfying than talking to humans. Will the NEET apocalypse turn into overdrive? Will the next generation even interact with other humans, or will people become individualized entirely and surround themselves with digital avatars?
Perhaps I'm being a bit too optimistic on the acceleration, but I can't help but feel that we are truly on the cusp of a massive realignment of technology and society. What are your thoughts on AI?
I predict absolutely nothing will happen to medical professionals because of AI. We've already had "AIs" (aka expert systems) that perform as well or better as trained medical professionals in diagnosis for decades, yet they're used approximately nowhere.
They don’t perform as well. Someone has to actually examine the patient, observe his state and put the findings into the expert system. The expert system cannot do that. What it can do, on the other hand, is relatively trivial for the doctor who does the examination.
Is this the GP everyone usually goes to first you mean, or hospitals? Because sure, you can have a minimum wage triage clerk taking pulse, heart rate, breathing and blood samples, and recording the data.
But then you need someone to interpret the findings. Is that muscle pain due to what? There's a lot of things it can be, and that's where the decade of training comes in. For a hospital, having the intake clerks do the grunt work while they then park you for six hours in the waiting room until the blood work comes through and The Consultant has had the chance to look at everything for five minutes before he decides to send you home is very doable. If you want to replace The Consultant with the AI, first I don't think it will do much to cut down on the six hours waiting time (organic chemical reactions go along at their own pace, plus however many tests are ranged up to be done) and second, that's fine right up until there's a mix-up in the blood work or the right test wasn't done and it turns out to be the sign of something more serious. That already happens in hospitals.
I'm not saying AI in medicine is a bad idea, I'm saying that we're likely to see it used first the way the insurance company triage phone lines are now used, and all it takes is one unfortunate death to set back the adoption of the technology. I could see it being adopted in hospitals, but for the local practitioner where people go first, you do need the level of training and expertise that can recognise "this is a muscle strain" from "this is something more serious, you need to go to the hospital right now".
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