I remember seeing the ChatGPT announcement and not being particularly impressed or excited, like “okay, it’s a refined version of InstructGPT from almost a year ago. It’s cool that there’s a web UI now, maybe I’ll try it out soon.” November 2022 was a technological advancement but not a huge shift compared to January 2022 IMO
Fair enough. My mental image of the GPT models was stuck on that infernal “talking unicorns” prompt, which I think did make them seem reasonably characterized as mere “stochastic parrots” and “glorified autocompletes,” and the obvious bullshit about the “safety and security concerns” around releasing GPT-2 also led me to conclude the tech was unlikely to amount to much more. InstructGPT wasn’t good enough to get me to update it; that took the much-hyped ChatGPT release.
Was there a particular moment that impressed you, or did you just see the Transformers paper, project that correctly into the future, and the releases that followed since then have just been following that trend you extrapolated and so been unremarkable?
I remember being very impressed by GPT-2. I think I was also quite impressed by GPT-3 even though it was basically just “GPT-2 but better.” To be fair, at the moment that I was feeling unimpressed by ChatGPT, I don’t think I had actually used it yet. It did turn out to be much more useful to me than the GPT-3 API, which I tried out but didn’t find that many uses for.
It’s hard to remember exactly how impressed I was with ChatGPT after using it for a while. I think I hadn’t fully realized how great it could be when the friction of using the API was removed, even if I didn’t update that much on the technical advancement.
Something like
GPT-3.5/ChatGPT was qualitatively different.
I remember seeing the ChatGPT announcement and not being particularly impressed or excited, like “okay, it’s a refined version of InstructGPT from almost a year ago. It’s cool that there’s a web UI now, maybe I’ll try it out soon.” November 2022 was a technological advancement but not a huge shift compared to January 2022 IMO
Fair enough. My mental image of the GPT models was stuck on that infernal “talking unicorns” prompt, which I think did make them seem reasonably characterized as mere “stochastic parrots” and “glorified autocompletes,” and the obvious bullshit about the “safety and security concerns” around releasing GPT-2 also led me to conclude the tech was unlikely to amount to much more. InstructGPT wasn’t good enough to get me to update it; that took the much-hyped ChatGPT release.
Was there a particular moment that impressed you, or did you just see the Transformers paper, project that correctly into the future, and the releases that followed since then have just been following that trend you extrapolated and so been unremarkable?
I remember being very impressed by GPT-2. I think I was also quite impressed by GPT-3 even though it was basically just “GPT-2 but better.” To be fair, at the moment that I was feeling unimpressed by ChatGPT, I don’t think I had actually used it yet. It did turn out to be much more useful to me than the GPT-3 API, which I tried out but didn’t find that many uses for.
It’s hard to remember exactly how impressed I was with ChatGPT after using it for a while. I think I hadn’t fully realized how great it could be when the friction of using the API was removed, even if I didn’t update that much on the technical advancement.