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Friedrich_Cainer OP t1_j00fcdu wrote

That just speeds up the process, I’m just trying to figure out if this is going to be a slow burn or massive job market disruption.

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SwipesAndCrappiness t1_j00gxr2 wrote

It's going to be hard to tell. All current AI is still pretty "stupid" in that it can't really take a task from start to finish.

My personal prediction is that helpdesks/software support will be one of the biggest areas hit. If a commercial model can be tuned towards a specific business/product it would be a lot cheaper than staff/not require an office/always available/etc. Anything requiring interaction with the physical world will be a long way off imo. Marketing departments (especially dealing with online) will be heavily hit as well.

I also think dealing services will spring up to handle dealing with legal/bureacratic services using AI.

Currently AI has shown no ability at all to discern where it has made a true novel discovery vs spewing nonsense but I expect as a tool it would help a lot of scientists/engineers/creatives be more productive.

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visarga t1_j04gkok wrote

Good job ideas. We were thinking small because it was too expensive or hard, now we can finally fix some things including customer support.

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SwipesAndCrappiness t1_j04gsgd wrote

Definitely. What we have seen so far is really interesting because as you say it definitely is the death knell for certain jobs but because it is also massively expanding what we can do with computers (and who can do it) it seems like many employment opportunities will spring up as well.

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kaki234 t1_j00k4r4 wrote

What do you think about digital marketing agencies?How long will it take to be eaten by ai?

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SwipesAndCrappiness t1_j00obns wrote

It is hard to say. What we have seen of AI so far indicates to me that it can't fully replace people (outside certain roles that are overly focused on one task) but it will lead to a big increase in productivity for individuals.

The practical impact of that would seem to me to be that competition will be more fierce between marketing agencies and employees within them. But businesses will still need marketing and from what I can see of AI currently it is not well-suited to replace all the roles a skilled digital marketer will provide for a business:

  • Marketing Plan
  • Market research
  • Assist on sculpting the campaign
  • Identifying who to target with the campaign
  • etc

The general way I am thinking of AI atm (at least what we have seen) is that it is exceptionally good at certain very specific tasks but struggles to change context. So it can be amazing at certain games/writing things/folding proteins/creating images, but can't piece any of these individual tasks into something that creates full value. Even some of the things it seems best at like generating images, the images still likely need a minor touch-up by a real artist depending on what it is being used for (although this may change especially as if you are after something like a book cover an AI can create something an order of magnitude more cheaply than an artist).

For me, the real question is what exactly is GPT-4 going to be able to do. Rumours say it has 500x more parameters than GPT-3. If we assume this is true (which I have no hard verification on and it could easily be false) what would it mean exactly? Is 500x more parameters equal to 500x as powerful? Or does it mean something else?

Apparently GPT-4 should be with us by the end of February so my plan is basically to keep going exactly as I was in terms of work etc until then and then reassess.

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kaki234 t1_j01357v wrote

Wonderful answer.Thank you very much!

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spreadlove5683 t1_j01vqsq wrote

No, 500x parameters doesn't mean 500x more powerful at the very least because GPT3 was trained using incorrect scaling laws. They figured out since then that number of parameters wasn't the bottleneck. I forget if the bottleneck was data, or compute, but don't expect way higher parameter counts in GPT-4 if higher at all. I'm not an expert.

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AdditionalPizza t1_j02u2or wrote

>For me, the real question is what exactly is GPT-4 going to be able to do.

Yep, this is the burning question. Since it will have the most SOTA scaling methods/tuning, if it's a much larger scale model than GPT3, we will may be able to extrapolate a lot better on where we're headed with subsequent models in the future. We currently don't really have any baseline to compare outside of GPT2 to 3 which isn't really that useful to compare anymore.

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genshiryoku t1_j02mzn4 wrote

Slow burn, not because it isn't capable enough to automate away a large swath of jobs. But because society is slow at adoption.

The biggest problem the economy faces right now is that there are too many "bullshit jobs" and that companies aren't cutting out jobs but irrationally retain them.

The story about jobs being rapidly automated away is largely a myth.

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[deleted] t1_j07nzjl wrote

Individual people are quick at adoption though so take it to gain an advantage in your business or work. I already use it for posts and copywriting, its awesome!

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