This is the biggest impact I have noticed in my job.
The inundation of verbose, low SNR text and documents. Maybe someone put thought into all of those words. Maybe they vibed it into existence with a single prompt and it’s filled with irrelevant dot points and vague, generic observations.
There is no way to know which you’re dealing with until you read it, or can make assumptions based on who wrote it.
Workplace safety, environmental protection and human rights laws will never be enforced in the manufacturing industry because they cannot be enforced on the Chinese manufacturing industry.
Western governments would rather citizens lose some rights and years off their life than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese manufacturing.
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Western governments could make models trained on stolen IP toxic if they wanted.
It may not be worth it. The trade off of model capability vs the value of IP law might be worthwhile.
But western governments should show a little dignity and openly make that trade off. We don’t need to appeal to “but China”.
Western governments were willing to give up their manufacturers sectors, or at least large parts of them, to maintain better environmental/labour laws than China.
It’s not clear that was a good decision, but tariffs and similar restrictions at least provide hope of a remedy. But we can’t use tariffs on open source software.
>Western governments were willing to give up their manufacturers sectors, or at least large parts of them, to maintain better environmental/labour laws than China.
Their motivation wasn't the maintenance of better environmental and labor laws, but higher profits from exploiting China's more business friendly (less regulation, fewer labor rights) environment. Had it been economically and politically viable for Western governments to domestically enact the same environmental and labor standards as China, they would have done so. And as soon as the quality of life in China improved enough that labor there was no longer economically viable, many companies moved their outsourcing elsewhere, such as to Vietnam or Africa.
You can learn an incredible amount. I do quite a bit of research as a core part of my job, and LLMs are amazing at helping me find relevant research to help me explore ideas. Something like "I'm thinking of X. Does this make sense and do you know of any similar research?" I also mentor some students whose educational journey has been fundamentally changed by them.
Like any other tool, it's more a question of how they're used. For example, I've seen incredible results for students who use ChatGPT to interrogate ideas as they synthesize them. So, for example, "I'm reading this passage PASSAGE and I'm confused about phrase X. The core idea seems similar to Y, which I am familiar with. if I had to explain X, I'd put it like this ATTEMPT Can you help me understand what I'm missing?"
The results are very impressive. I'd encourage you to try it out if you haven't.
You can learn a lot, if you want to. I can ask it a question with regarding to pharmacodynamics of some medication, and I can ask more and more questions, and learn. Similarly, I could pick up a book on pharmacology, but LLMs can definitely make learning easier.
Does it satisfy customer support requests at a much higher rate than previous generations?
Every time I’ve encountered an AI first-line support agent I still find myself looking for the quickest escalation path to a real human just like before.