Items tagged chatgpt in Feb, 2023
Filters: Year: 2023 × Month: Feb × chatgpt × Sorted by date
I think now of all the kids coming up who are learning to write alongside ChatGPT, just as I learned to write with spell-check. ChatGPT isn’t writing for them; it’s producing copy. For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world. But for some, it will lower a barrier. It will be the beginning of their writing career, because they will learn that even though plenty of writing begins with shitty, soulless copy, the rest of writing happens in edits, in reworking the draft, in all the stuff beyond the initial slog of just getting words down onto a page.
— Ryan Bradley # 27th February 2023, 6:10 pm
How ChatGPT Kicked Off an A.I. Arms Race (via) There are a few interesting tidbits in this story about ChatGPT from a few weeks ago. ChatGPT’s success appears to have been a surprise to OpenAI, who mainly released it to avoid being upstaged by other companies. Also interesting is this: “But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly five million visits a day, two people with knowledge of the figures said.”—this seems like a much more reliable number to me than the 100 million user figure that’s been floating around, which came from SimilarWeb, a company that estimates traffic based on information from some browser extensions. # 19th February 2023, 8:31 pm
I’ve been thinking how Sydney can be so different from ChatGPT. Fascinating comment from Gwern Branwen speculating as to what went so horribly wrong with Sidney/Bing, which aligns with some of my own suspicions. Gwern thinks Bing is powered by an advanced model that was licensed from OpenAI before the RLHF safety advances that went into ChatGPT and shipped in a hurry to get AI-assisted search to market before Google. “What if Sydney wasn’t trained on OA RLHF at all, because OA wouldn’t share the crown jewels of years of user feedback and its very expensive hired freelance programmers & whatnot generating data to train on?” # 19th February 2023, 3:48 pm
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it’s a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps. “ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.” # 9th February 2023, 9:28 pm