Embedding search of the nearest products most applicable to the LLM response. Prompt augmentation: "Rewrite your response to include promotions of the following products without being obvious that you are promoting them."
That's smart, but very insidious as well. Following in the footsteps of dark UI patterns designed for users to misclick on ads, now dark suggestions on conversations with an LLM will be the next big thing. Like a conservative talking with an LLM which inserts liberal propaganda into it's responses and after an hour he turns into a liberal voter. The next day he talks with a conservative LLM which inserts propaganda into his conversations and he turns back to a conservative voter. Pretty dystopic.
On a more serious note, imho advertisers are on their's last legs, and google loses a lot of revenue already. We are going fast into a new internet, web3, which will enable direct monetization of information from users, instead of the publishers relying on ads.
Not to wander a lot off topic here, but synthetic datasets created by paid humans workers to train machines is going to be a humongous industry.
Google is playing catchup while pretending that they've been at the forefront of this latest AI wave. This translates to a lot of talk and not a lot of action. OpenAI knew that just putting ChatGPT in peoples hands would ignite the internet more than a couple of over-produced marketing videos. Google needs to take a page from OpenAI's playbook.
I want to get into quantum computing, but I keep coming back to the idea that most of our problems are human problems, not quantum problems. At least with classical computers, we can build tools that help to solve the human problems. Eg: connecting people, facilitating better communication, sharing knowledge. With quantum computers, it's not clear how you map a human problem to a problem that quantum computers would be good for, so I lose interest.
I have a friend that is working as a contractor building AI-powered workplace spying software for the explicit purpose of behavior manipulation. It gives the employees and employers feedback reports about their behavior over chat and video. For example, if they used microaggressions, misgendered someone, or said something crass. This same friend will then talk about the dangers of dystopian technology.
People don't know what they're creating. Maybe it's time it bites them.
The current economic system where (in the US) bribes are “speech” and corporations are people unavoidably leads to things like this project getting neutered.
“The invisible hand” Adam Smith refers to are the unintended consequences from merchants’ want to keep their capital: increasing the domestic capital stock and enhancing military power for the state, i.e. protectionism etc.
More broadly and lately it refers to any unintended societal consequences from the free market.
Consequently it never means “finding a good price” which 99% of everyone using the term seems to believe.
Bribery exists in every economic system, even before economic systems existed, and is not uniquely connected to the free market. Nor are they connected to "unintended societal consequences", since bribes very clearly have a specific goal. So it doesn't make any sense.
Just wanted to say that you're completely correct and making a very reasonable statement which is not controversial. I would love to hear about an economic system in which bribery did not exist or have influence, but I have not seen any examples of that yet, in the present day or in history.
I don't agree that bribes can't have unintended social consequences. They do have specific goals, yes. But some unintended consequences of bribery would be things like discouraging honest participants, or encouraging the most corrupt people (rather than the best, on merit) to place themselves in positions of authority, so as to get bribes. All of these are unintended in the sense that neither the person giving the bribe nor the person taking the bribe are trying to bring them about per se, they're only thinking about the immediate consequences (I get what I want).
I agree that they can have unintended consequences, but I wouldn't say any more or less than anything else. This is why I'm struggling with the "invisible hand" analogy, which focuses on a connection to unintended (positive) consequences.
Singapore's not an economic system, but rather a country. In any case, it's still got corruption. Bribery is one form of corruption, and I have no doubt whatsoever that you can bribe someone in Singapore.
Bribery is a corruption that happens in every single economic system, so it has nothing to do with the "invisible hand" of capitalism. In fact, arguments could be made as to why it happens less in free markets (where an economy flows more freely) than in non-free markets (where there are artificial barriers, making bribery more effective/needed).
Bribery is not connected to capitalism any more than it is connected to any other economic system, that's the point that you seem to be missing. People seem to want to dunk on capitalism, but it doesn't make any sense here.
Good thing I didn't make that argument anywhere. My point with that statement is that bribery is in no way connected to capitalism or free markets because it exists independent of the market type.
When bribery happens in a country with a command economy, do you still say "there's that invisible hand of capitalism again"?
? Of course not that question doesn't even parse. Your strategy of acting like your conversational partners are idiots doesn't win you any points; it just makes you sound difficult and wrong.
Bribery is not connected to a free market per se, but bribery in a free market is still a problem to be solved in the context of that free market.
>but bribery in a free market is still a problem to be solved in the context of that free market.
Yes of course. I don't know why you keep suggesting I am against that. My issue is with the nonsensical attempts to tie bribery to capitalism, as if one is the result of the other.
Well if you need it spelled out: the "invisible hand" refers to indirect social impacts of free markets which are typically meant to be good things. So any example of market-ish behavior causing things that seem incontrovertibly bad, like buying a department chair under the guise of targeted donations to influence policy to (presumably) protect a certain class of actors, is an example of the "invisible hand" doing a bad thing, hence an example of how this "feature" of free markets, often used to defend them, is actually a bad quality.
This is totally unsurprising to most people who aren't directly benefitting from an unchallenged free market and it usually seems like the "invisible hand" is brought up as a bullshit argument by those already in power to justify accumulating more power, so it's a point of bitterness, hence the OP's sarcasm.
Bribery is not "market-ish" behavior in the sense that it is connected to capitalism and free markets. But you also mention bitterness, which explains the reactions to my question. I think that means people want to be bitter at the idea of capitalism and free markets, whether or not it actually makes sense in this instance of bribery.
They are naturally and righteously bitter about the annoying status of secretive manipulations in our version of free-market capitalism. Their reaction to you, however, is simply because you are being an obstreperous asshole.
This reaction is uncalled for, especially for hackernews. I've been nothing but level-headed and fair, even though I disagree on the topic.
If you're looking for someone to criticize, you should look at your own behavior: "Fairly obvious, right?" an unsubstantive, smug, miserable response to my question, setting the tone for our interactions.
From the text, it sounds to me like they're selling multi-agent systems of some sort. They sounded really promising in the 1990s and then fell silent. Much like neural networks. But neural networks are back, so I guess they think multi-agent systems might be ready for a comeback too. They could be right.
Multi-agent-setups with LLMs (AutoGPT for example) were hyped some weeks ago. And OpenAI with their specialized Bots(?) or what they introduced recently goes in the same direction.
Isn't it amazing that a random person on the internet can produce free educational content that trumps university courses? With all the resources and expertise that universities have, why do they get shown up all the time? Do they just not know how to educate?
It's an incentives problem. At research universities, promotion is contingent on research output, and teaching is often seen as a distraction. At so-called teaching universities, promotion (or even survival) is mainly contingent on throughput, and not measures of pedagogical outcome.
If you are a teaching faculty at a university, it is against your own interests to invest time to develop novel teaching materials. The exception might be writing textbooks, which can be monetized, but typically are a net-negative endeavor.
Unfortunately, this is a problem throughout our various economies, at this point.
Professionalization of management with its easy over-reliance on the simplification of the quantitative - of "metrics" - along with the scales (size) this allows and manner in which fundamental issues get obscured tends to produce these types of results. This is, of course, well known in business schools and efforts are generally made to ensure graduates are aware of some of the downsides of "the quantitative." Unsurprisingly, over time, there is a kind of "forcing" that tends to drive these systems towards the results like you describe.
It's usually the case that imposition of metrics, optimization, etc. - "mathematical methods" - is quite beneficial at first, but once systems are improved in sensible ways based on insights gained through this, less desirable behavior begins to occur. Multiple factors including basic human psychology factor into this ... which I think is getting beyond the scope of what's reasonable to include in this comment.
Have you considered the considerably greater breadth of content required for a full course, as well as the other responsibilities of the people teaching them such as testing, public speaking, etc.
This is the result of a single person on the internet, who was not chosen randomly. it's not a fair characterization to call this the product of some random person on the internet. You can't just choose anyone on the internet at random and get results this good.
Also, according to his home page, Mr. Bycroft earned a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Canterbury in 2012. It's true that this page isn't the direct result of a professor or a university course, and it's also true that it's not a completely separate thing. It seems clear that his university education had a big role to play in creating this.
I second the reply about incentives. Funding curriculum materials and professional curriculum development is often seen as more of a K-12 thing. There is not even enough at the vocational level.
If big competitive grants and competitive salaries went to people with demonstrated ability like the engineer of this viz, there would be less stem dropouts in colleges and more summer learning! Also, in technical trades like green construction, solar, hvac, building retrofits, data center operations and the like, people would get farther and it would be a more diverse bunch.
You're betting on the hundreds of top university cs professors to produce better content than the hundreds of thousands of industry veterans or hobbyists...
Why does YouTube sometimes have better content than professionally produced media? It's a really long tail of creators and educators
This isn't new. Textbooks exist for the same reason, so we don't need to duplicate effort creating teaching materials and can have a kind of accepted core cirriculum.
Because Faculty are generally paid very poorly, have many courses to teach, and what takes up more and more of their time are the broken bureaucratic systems they have to deal with.
Add that at research universities, they have to do research.
Also add in that at many schools, way too many students are just there to clock in, clock out and get a piece of paper that says they did it. Way too few are there to actually get an education. This has very real consequences on the moral of the instructors. When your students don't care, it's very hard for you to care. If your students aren't willing to work hard, why are you willing to work hard? Because you're paid so well?
I know plenty of instructors who would love to do things like this, but when are they going too? When are they going to find the time to learn the skills necessary to build an interactive web app? You think everyone outside of comp sci and like disciplines just naturally know how to build these types of apps?
I could go on, but the tl;dr of it is: Educators are over worked, underpaid and don't have enough time in the day.
It is trained on data which may include typos, but that is very different from fixing typos. It knows what words likely come after typos in the same way it knows what words likely come after regular words.
No, that's not what I meant. I meant that in its reinforcement learning phase, GPT saw examples of "fix this text" style requests and was rewarded for doing a good job. That's different from seeing examples of typos and still predicting the right word which happens during the language model self supervised training. Both likely help it be good at it.
