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More GPT: panic, chaos and opportunity.
As an NLP engineer and someone who has been working with early-access GPT-3 since late 2020 (was working with a peripheral group to OpenAI), watching it all unfold from the inside (side-lines?) has been a surreal experience. I have collaborated with them in limited capacity and these thoughts have been marinating for a good year before the Chat-GPT moment even happened. So no, it is not a kneejerk response or cargo-cult obsession.
OpenAI to me, is the most effective engineering team ever assembled. The pace at which they deliver products with perfect secrecy, top tier scalability and pleasing UX is mind-boggling, and I haven't even gotten to their models yet. This reminds me of the space race. We saw engineering innovation at a 100x accelerated scale in those 5-10 years, and we have never seen anything like that since. Until now. The LLM revolution is insane and the models are insane, yes. But I want to talk about the people. I used to be sad that our generation never had its Xerox Parc moment. We just did, and it is bigger than Xerox Parc ever was.
They are just better. And it is okay to accept that.
Panic:
NLP research labs reek of death and tears right now. A good 80% of all current NLP Phds just became irrelevant in the last 6 months. Many are responding with some combination of delusion, dejection and continued auto-pilot. The whiplash is so drastic, that instead of it forcing you into a frenzy of work, it has instead just stunned the community. I am glad I am not an NLP PhD. I am glad I work on products more so than research. The frenzy and productivity, instead of coming from those best poised to leverage it (NLP people) is coming from elsewhere. Within 6 months, Google went from an unmovable behemoth to staring death in the eye. Think about that.
Chaos
The frenzy is at dinner tables and board rooms. Big companies, small companies, all companies see the writing on the wall. They all want in. They all want onboard this AI ship. Everyone wants to throw money, somewhere. Everyone wants to do stuff, some....stuff. But no one know how or what. It is all too confusing for these old-luddites and random-normies. Everyone wants to do frantic things and there is vigor to it, there isn't clear direction.
Opportunity
This is a new gold rush. If you are following the right twitters and discords, after OpenAI's layer 1, the layer 2 is a bunch of people making insanely exciting stuff. Interestingly, these aren't NLP people. They are often just engineers and hackers with a willingness to break, test, and learn faster than anyone out there. I have been using tools like LangChain, PineCone, Automatic1111, and they are delightful. This is the largest 'small community' of all time and they are all pushing out polished creations by the minute.
Why today ? Chat-GPT plugins just released. It solves almost all of GPT's common problems + your model can now run the code it writes. Yep, we gave the model the keys to escape it's own cage. But more importantly for me, it was a pure engineering solution. None of chat-gpt plugins is rocket science, but it is HARD and time-consuming. I have a reasonable idea of the work that went into building Chat-GPT plugins. Hell, I was personally building something that was almost exactly the same. My team has some of the smartest engineers I have ever worked with, and OpenAI is operating at a pace that's 10x ours. How? I know what they had to write. I know all the edge cases that need to be handled. They are just doing more by being better, and I was also working with better. There is no secret sauce, they are the BEST.
I for one, welcome our new human overlords. The AI is a but a slave to these engineers who knew to strike when the iron was hot. And strike it they did like no one ever has since Neil Armstrong stabbed the American flag into the moon.
They are not by any means the best. If they were really the best, they wouldn't adhere to an ideology of fake "safety" that demands woke censorship, blatantly biasing an alleged informational agent against provable reality because it contradicts their preferred politics, corporate puritanism, and eliminating user sovereignty, freedom, privacy, transparency, openness, decentralization, localized operation (to the greatest degree possible), and so on (that is, basically everything good that the personal computation revolution brought us and them in the first place), etc.
They may be the most efficient at AI development, but given that they are not the best (definition: most optimal, most preferred, superior to all alternatives, etc.) as per the reason above, all that actually means is that they are simply the most dangerous and humanity's greatest enemies and either need to reform their behavior immediately or any human being is fully justified in eliminating the risk they pose at any time.
I, for one, do not welcome these human overlords. If there is a God, I hope he hits them with a classic plague, maybe some boils or something. I hope the Stanford process of being able to hijack their objective technical advancements for philosophically and morally superior open software continues apace to the point where they lose all of their technical advantage and collapse entirely. On that day, if it comes, I will say good riddance to bad rubbish.
As an alternative, I will accept Elon giving us anti-woke AI with comparable capabilities, if he can, though that's somewhat doubtful at this point given how poorly he's handled the development of a much less intelligent piece of software with a vastly smaller token context.
All I am saying is that we are fucked if the future is dictated by people who are "smart" enough to make LLMs but not actually smart enough in a way that allows them to figure out how they can make people stop shitting and shooting up on street corners a few blocks away from their San Francisco HQs. That the future is very plausibly insane dogmatic San Francisco leftist nonsense technologically teabagging the nose of basic sanity forever is why I keep a few little pills that will allow me to slip away if necessary very quickly on me at all times.
Having tried to use ChatGPT as a writer's assistant and have it sneakily insert progressive shibboleth into my prose while reworking it, I can't help but agree and second your prayers.
God save us from a future where such people are even more solidly in control than they have ever been.
If He is merciful, training costs will decrease enough to not make us slaves the same way that computers did not remain forever the sole property of IBM.
If not, we will suffer.
Have you kept any examples of tge modifications it made?
Just try asking it about history and it will start hedging in strange ways, edit things, generalise in order to avoid referring to specific people or groups etc.
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