It's funny to me how so many AI / ML post discussions on news.ycombinator devolve into does it truely understand, isn't humans just a bunch of pattern matching machines, what does it mean to truly understand.<p>Then someone mentioned Qualia and we are off to the races... Someone counters with AI is what machines currently can't do..<p>I like the simple question of: is it useful? Like #chatgpt my brother in law uses it daily to actually solve coding problems and he works for google. Sister in law same for SAP. Not just syntax but solving business and technical problems described in English in code.<p>That is useful.<p>Just wait till a generation of finance people discover ChatGPT can generate excel macros for their business requirements they can just paste in.<p>Discussing this google music generation with a friend today: https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/
He is like it is only for background music not stuff you actually want to listen to. Background music is useful. If this can generate pop that is useful.
If you can use it, it's useful.<p>That being said, not every useful thing is safe. My kitchen knife is useful, but if I operate it absent-mindedly then I get cut. AI is largely the same way; you can trust it to do it's job, but you can <i>never</i> trust it to work safely without supervision.<p>So, AI really just needs to be applied right. People are right to squabble over how it generates it's answers, because largely that decides whether the output is fact or fiction. In this case, ChatGPT is trained on a combination of facts <i>and</i> fiction, with no way for it's model to differentiate them.
>Just wait till a generation of finance people discover ChatGPT can generate excel macros for their business requirements they can just paste in.<p>I think we are very very far away from this point. We will get there eventually, but not now. Even, ChatGPT could get to tasks which are naturally easy for almsot all people but hard for it. Try something involving probability.
No. Being useful is a property of a tool. AI is a specific thing with particular history and future expectations.<p>AI as research program is concerned with learning, planning, goal making, knowledge representation, etc.<p>The aim of AI is artificial beings with minds. Not useful tools.