I'm ceaselessly amazed at people's capacity for impatience. I mean, when GPT 4 came out, I was like "holy f, this is magic!!" How quickly we get used to that magic and demand more.
Especially since this demo is extremely impressive given the voice capabilities, yet still the reaction is, essentially, "But what about AGI??!!" Seriously, take a breather. Never before in my entire career have I seen technology advance at such a breakneck speed - don't forget transformers were only invented 7 years ago. So yes, there will be some ups and downs, but I couldn't help but laugh at the thought that "14 months" is seen as a long time...
Over a year they have provided an order of magnitude improvements on latency, context length, and cost, while meaningfully improving performance and adding several input and output modalities.
Your order of magnitude claim is off by almost an order of magnitude. It's more like half again as good on a couple of items and the same on the rest. 10X improvement claims is a joke people making claims like that ought to be dismissed as jokes too.
$30 / million tokens to $5 / million tokens since GPT-4 original release = 6X improvement
4000 token context to 128k token context = 32X improvement
5.4 second voice mode latency to 320 milliseconds = 16X improvement.
I guess I got a bit excited by including cost but that's close enough to an order of magnitude for me. That's ignoring the fact that's it's now literally free in chatGPT.
Thanks so much for posting this. The increased token length alone (obviously not just with OpenAI's models but the other big ones as well) has opened up a huge number of new use cases that I've seen tons of people and other startups pounce on.
All while not addressing the rampant confabulation at all. Which is the main pain point, to me at least. Not being able to trust a single word that it says...
I am just talking about scaling laws and the level of capex that big tech companies are doing. One hundred billion dollars are being invested this year to pursue AI scaling laws.
You can be excited, as I am, while also being bearish, as I am.
If you look at the history of big technological breakthroughs, there is always an explosion of companies and money invested in the "new hotness" before things shake out and settle. Usually the vast majority of these companies go bankrupt, but that infrastructure spend sets up the ecosystem for growth going forward. Some examples:
1. Railroad companies in the second half of the 19th century.
2. Car companies in the early 20th century.
3. Telecom companies and investment in the 90s and early 2000s.
Comments like yours contribute to the negative perception of Hacker News as a place where launching anything, no matter how great, innovative, smart, informative, usable, or admirable, is met with unreasonable criticism. Finding an angle to voice your critique doesn't automatically make it insightful.
Well, I for one am excited about this update, and skeptical about the AI scaling, and agree with everything said in the top comment.
I saw the update, was a little like “meh,” and was relieved to see that some people had the same reaction as me.
OP raised some pretty good points without directly criticizing the update. It’s a good balance the the top comments (calling this *absolutely magic and stunning*) and all of Twitter
Peoples' "capacity for impatience" is literally the reason why these things move so quick. These are not feelings at-odds with each other; they're the same thing. Its magical; now its boring; where's the magic; let's create more magic.
Be impatient. Its a positive feeling, not a negative one. Be disappointed with the current progress; its the biggest thing keeping progress moving forward. It also, if nothing else, helps communicate to OpenAI whether they're moving in the right direction.
> Be disappointed with the current progress; its the biggest thing keeping progress moving forward.
No it isn't - excitement for the future is the biggest thing keeping progress moving forward. We didn't go to the moon because people were frustrated by the lack of progress in getting off of our planet, nor did we get electric cars because people were disappointed with ICE vehicles.
Complacency regarding the current state of things can certainly slow or block progress, but impatience isn't what drives forward the things that matter.
Tesla's corporate motto is literally "accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy". Unhappy with the world's previous progress and velocity, they aimed to move faster.
It's pretty bizarre how these demos bring out keyboard warriors and cereal bowl yellers like crazy. Huge breakthroughs in natural cadence, tone and interaction as well as realtime mutlimodal and all the people on HN can rant about is token price collapse
It's like the people in this community all suffer from a complete disconnect from society and normal human needs/wants/demands.
Hah, was thinking of that exact bit when I wrote my comment. My version of "chair in the sky" is "But you are talking ... to a computer!!" Like remember stuff that was pure Star Trek fantasy until very recently? I'm sitting here with my mind blown, while at the same time reading comments along the lines of "How lame, I asked it some insanely esoteric question about one of the characters in Dwarf Fortress and it totally got it wrong!!"
There are well talked about cons to shipping so fast, but on the bright side, when everyone is demanding more, more, more, it pushes cost down and demands innovation, right?
IMO, for fear of being label a hype boy, this is absolutely a sign of the impending singularity. We are taking an ever accelerating frame of cultural reference as a given and our expectation is that exponential improvement is not just here but you’re already behind once you’ve released.
I spend the last two years dismayed with the reaction but I’ve just recently begun to realize this is a feature not a flaw. This is latent demand for the next iteration expressed as impatient dissatisfaction with the current rate of change inducing a faster rate of change. Welcome to the future you were promised.
Especially since this demo is extremely impressive given the voice capabilities, yet still the reaction is, essentially, "But what about AGI??!!" Seriously, take a breather. Never before in my entire career have I seen technology advance at such a breakneck speed - don't forget transformers were only invented 7 years ago. So yes, there will be some ups and downs, but I couldn't help but laugh at the thought that "14 months" is seen as a long time...