> ChatGPT was outright lying to people. And making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service.
I find it interesting that any user would attribute this issue to Soundslice. As a user, I would be annoyed that GPT is lying and wouldn't think twice about Soundslice looking bad in the process
While AI hallucination problems are widely known to the technical crowd, that's not really the case with the general population. Perhaps that applies to the majority of the user base even. I've certainly known folks who place inordinate amount of trust in AI output, and I could see them misplacing the blame when a "promised" feature doesn't work right.
The thing is that it doesn't matter. If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think. People get false ideas all the time of what kind of services a business might or might not offer.
It is the kind of thinking that almost all businesses have. You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.
Down voters here on HN seem to live in a egocentric fantasy world, where every human being in the outside world live to serve them. But the reality is that business owners and leaders spend their whole day thinking about how to please their customers and their potential customers. Not other random people who might be misinformed.
If people repeatedly have a misunderstanding about or expectation of your business you need to address it though. An llm hallucination is based on widespread norms in training data and it is at least worth asking "would this be a good idea?"
An LLM will say that you sell your competitors products or that your farm sells freshly harvested strawberries in the middle of winter. There are no limits to what kind of lies an LLM will invent, and a business owner would be a fool to feel responsible for anything an LLM has told people about their business or products.
The best LLMs available right in this moment will lie without remorse about bus schedules and airplane departure times. How in the world are businesses supposed to take responsibility for that?
Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my neighbour – the notorious liar?
>Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my neighbour – the notorious liar?
If you are a store own, AND
1. People repeatedly coming in to your shop asking to buy something, AND
2. It is similar to the kinds of things you sell, from the suppliers you usually get supplies from, AND
3. You don't sell it
Then it sounds like your neighbour the notorious liar is doing profitable marketing for your business and sending you leads which you could profitably sell to, if you sold the item.
If there's a single customer who arrives via hallucination, ignore it. If there's a stream of them, why would you not serve them if you can profit by doing so?
There are obviously instances you'd ignore and you seem to be focussing on those rather than what OP was obviously talking about, repeat instances of sensible ideas
I guarantee that most businesses have nothing against stocking or offering items that people come in and ask them for - but it has to be possible also. If you're asking for a Polish sausage in a hardware store because your neighbour sent you, then they probably don't have the licenses to sell food items, and probably their profit margin is higher selling hardware than selling sausages so they have no reason to start offering them.
There's usually a good reason why a business might not offer something that people think they should offer. Usually it is that they can't be profitable enough at a price point which customers will accept.
I think the issue here would be that we don't really know just how widespread, nor the impact of the issue.
Ok, sure, maybe this feature was worth having?
But if some people start sending bad requests your way because they can't or only program poorly, it doesn't make sense to potentially degrade the service for your successful paying customers...
> You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.
But, this story (and the GP comment) is not talking about "any person with an opinion". It's talking about actual ChatGPT users. People who've used ChatGPT as a service, and got false information from it. Even if they were free-tier users (do we even know that?), i think it makes sense for them to have some expectations about the service working somewhat correctly.
And in the concrete case of these LLM chat services, many people do get the impression that the responses they give must be correct, because of how deceptively sure and authoritative they sound, even when inventing pure BS.
> You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.
A frighteningly large fraction of non-technical population doesn't know that LLMs hallucinate all the time and takes everything they say totally uncritically. And AI companies do almost nothing to discourage that interpretation, either.
> Every kid with a laptop thinks they're the next Zuckerberg, but most can't debug their way out of a paper bag
I feel like I've seen this quote many times over the years.
Also, how do they calculate employment rate? If you get a job at McDonald's while having a civil engineering degree or nutrition science, that counts as employed as well, no?
Would be good to see how many are actually employed in their field of study
> If you get a job at McDonald's while having a civil engineering degree
That would be under_employment (vs un_employment).
Un_employment refers to people actively seeking work but unable to find it, while under_employment encompasses individuals who are working but not fully utilizing their skills or working fewer hours than they would like
Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology? Why do other people get to say what my "full utilization" is without even knowing me?
Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition, and that one actually does seem to respect people's interiority.
> Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology?
No, not by the common definition of underemployment. You're not over-qualified to work at Jane Street and presumably you want to work there.
But it would be worth tracking if you wanted to work in academia and ended up at Jane Street. It's about measuring labor demand vs. supply, because labor supply is difficult to measure over time (because people don't just sit forever waiting for a job in their field to open).
> Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition
These are related concepts and tracked for similar reasons. You're "not working as many hours as you'd like at a job you're qualified for and would like to have". The number of hours you're working at that desired job is 0, and you're replacing it with some undesired job instead.
I maintain it is patently silly to use any definition of underemployment that can expand to include a full-time quantitative trader on Jane Street, even theoretically, but I respect your commitment to the bit.
If you want to get technical and read the small print, in this study "the underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree"
Since most people working at Jane Street have a college degree, you would not be considered 'underemployed' in this particular study.
(I think you are right to ask if a survey can accurately capture "underemployment", there are many problems with the definition and how to capture the right information to measure it.)
You're darn right I am right to question it. These questions only leave me further convinced this is a bad term.
"""
93. Would you rather have a job more closely related to your education, training and experience?
94. Considering your education, training and experience, do you feel that you are overqualified for your current job?
95. Considering your education, training and experience, do you feel that you have been overqualified for most of your jobs?
"""
93 is not a question I suspect most people answer faithfully. Because most people with tertiary education could probably find such a job - but it would be at a substantial pay cut. Yet the angle of compensation is nowhere to be found in the question itself.
94 is subject to the same bias that makes 90% of people think they're in the top 50% of driving, parenting, lovemaking and/or karaoke.
95 has that same issue, but also brings in a narcissistic wound aspect to it. No, of course you're better than all of those hams, shams, and japeths who you worked with/under/over through the years.
These numbers are all hard to measure. I only more or less worked in my engineering field of study (not CS) for 3 years but, other than going back to grad school for 2, was never underemployed by any serious definition of the term.
I looked into similar projects and the business model seems to be that you pay for certification, they do the test, and they certify your product if it passes.
So if they publish poor performers, then it kills their business model because nobody would want to pay for certification if they risk getting revealed as a poor performer.
BTW ICP-MS lab tests are like $100/pop which is probably why nobody has a table of real data.
Nationalism is not the thing stopping most people.
It's your friends, family and the feeling of belonging. This is culture, not nationalism. I lived in Canada for 10 years before moving back home. I had a great life in Canada, fulfilled things I quite literally never dreamed possible, but I didn't belong.
I lived my life between vacations, just waiting for the time that I can go back home and spend time with family. I realized this is no way to live life.
Yeah, people who have only spent a year or two abroad so not understand the consequences of staying there permanently.
Estranged friends and family. Aging and dying parents. Feeling like a foreigner in your country of origin (reverse culture shock). Your own children, at the end of the day, belong to a foreign culture rather than your own. Etc.
This. Big chance you'll lose all of your friends, and family ties will suffer greatly. One of my friends moved from Europe to Australia. I think I'm the only one that visited him.
It is one of those things that sounds "obvious" when somebody points it out to you, but I can tell you from personal experience and from several other people that when you are in the midst of moving abroad you have lots of other things in your mind and, frankly, rose colored glasses on.
What you find online tends to be the many people who spent a year or two abroad talking about what a cool experience it was, not long-term immigrants publicly admitting the downsides of their past choices. It is a very common feeling that is rarely spoken about outside of immigrant communities.
If you pay attention to the comments, you will find that the people who only talk about the positives of moving abroad either haven't done it, or did it but they went back to their country of origin. Where are the long-term immigrants --typically with spouses and children-- talking only about the positives? And for the many who return... if living abroad was so great, why did you move back? Why don't you tell people about that as well?
Living abroad is great. Not seeing your old friends so often any more is hard. But you have the same issue whether you move half the world or two hours away from them.
Opportunities that require big risks is also another factor. My academic acquaintances abroad may be doing well financially and travel-wise, but they all have to live their foreign bosses' ambitions despite being very bright people. It's far easier to take crazier entrepreneurial risks with the safety nets in one's own home-country.
Entrepreneurship sure may be difficult as a whole. However, some difficulties are not really necessary. For me, it's a matter of seeing the end goal and removing as much obstacles as possible to get there faster (optimizing for time). I see the need to have a proper job or chase funding as additional obstacles if you are abroad.
Curious, do run into any network/IO performance issues? Last time I checked, networking is horrible, I mean `npm install ` would time out when it works on the host without issues, and this was a well known issue. Haven't touched WSL for a while because of this.
The average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies.
Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
I second this! I was recently looking into a way to build something like this for my grandfather, but wasn't even sure where to start from the hardware side.
I wanted to have hardware plug into TV receiver, generate subtitles for live TV program and then play it back on TV. Delay would likely be less than a minute but even a few minutes is not a problem really.
Many people with a hearing problem would benefit from this and with AI getting so good at Speech-to-text, this can be done for quite a large population.
If anyone has a recommendation on where to start with this, I'd appreciate it! Was thinking of using Whisper for subtitle generation, but not sure about hardware that can take in, and output HDMI and run this software
I keep thinking about something similar. Also hardware. Also for my grandparents.
My grandma is 95. Her vision is bad. Even using the phone (I'm talking old school landline) is getting hit and miss, because she can't see the buttons.
Years ago, I set her up with an Echo Show. That works well enough for her to say "Call Leo". But Alexa is dumb. Sometimes, she'll mishear something and start playing music. Or start a monthly subscription... :)
So what I'd like:
- box
- screen
- far-field mic array
- AI backend
You could do a number of things with it:
- manage a grocery shopping list (AI will notice duplicates and other oddities and ask)
- communicate with the outside world (initiate calls, send emails and faxes, including to local businesses)
- optional human oversight and/or permission settings (preventing the AI, say, from ordering groceries for more than $50 a week without a family member approving the order)
Something like your "subtitle mode" could also work:
"Listen to what is currently being spoken in the room (including the TV), and display it on the screen".
My grandma has her TV running all day. So maybe one could ditch the screen and make it a "set top box". Add an IR port to it, so it can control also the TV itself. Something like that might work.
I think it's worth a read because it does contain nuance and food for thought that would get lost in a summary. It's not that long, and I'm a slow reader.
But, to try and summarize:
- Issues with Gemini were not (in author's opinion) an initial instruction set fluke, but top to bottom design of the system.
- Rather than presenting the information you asked for it's presenting what its makers think the world and information you asked for should look like (i.e their ideology)
- If you can't know how the product is trained and set up, you can't trust anything it gives you because you'll never know if you're getting the information as is, or are getting the world view of the company who's product you're using.
- "...ask yourself what would Search look like if the staff who brought you Gemini was tasked to interpret them & rebuild it accordingly? Would you trust that product? Would you use it? Well, with Google's promise to include Gemini everywhere, that's what we'll be getting.."
I find it interesting that any user would attribute this issue to Soundslice. As a user, I would be annoyed that GPT is lying and wouldn't think twice about Soundslice looking bad in the process