chat

China isn't counting the same numbers i tell you that

That's true; the very quality of results you can obtain with some recent models locally suggests the possible optimizations are huge. But it's also diminishing returns: the moat between state of the art models and one I run on a P40 locally is really small these days; the amounts they need to sink to get even slightly better results at this stage are more and more. They're text generators; yes, if you run ten of them in parallel, vote; have them cross-check their results, introduce harnesses at every steps, etc. (all examples of actual bandaids I evoked above) you can improve results. But all of this is trying to make a tech that fundamentally doesn't answer the problem answer it nevertheless. And all of it costs a lot.

And I dearly hope China is not spending too much effort on backing these domestic initiatives, because again: outside of a few limited use cases (easily identifiable, I've listed a few in another comment in this very thread: those where having no relation to the truth in a portion of the generated text is acceptable), the tech doesn't work.

It's incredibly useful for letting humans interact with a computer system in natural language and maybe you shouldn't take from that "hey we should have it do highly sensitive stuff where the slightest error could have great consequences"

There are use cases where having the computer completely invent actions or do shit randomly isn't that bad, I guess; games come to mind. But ultimately and more generally I disagree, it's shit for that too. Try one as a daily runner, just for laughs. Or just try an entire shell session where instead of typing the commands, you complete a description of what you want to do through one and then do it. It goes bad very fast, let me tell you.

And I get it: what you describe would be awesome - a SF dream. I like tech and I wish all of this would work; and like many initially I genuinely wondered as well if scaling/attention was all you needed, and had some measure of hope; quickly dashed, though.

it does a great job of summarizing reddit threads

Again, no it does not. You have no guarantee it won't pull shit out of its virtual ass; and just as crucially (and even more likely), no guarantee it won't ignore significant parts of the source material. You'll get a result that seem like it summarizes the thread, with no confidence level, and no guarantee of its reliability.