> There are solutions that cost less than GPT-4, and they don't require integration of a black box that is gatekept by a single provider.

Management has a different perspective on costs than you and me. The way cost-benefit is analyzed in a company is whether by increasing the input cost X% can the profit then be increased by a corresponding Y% due to an increase in scale (number of contracts). They are also shit scared of the new guy on the block and losing existing business to the 100 or so startups that will come up over the next week flashing the shiny new thing in front of customers. They also don't have the same perspective on open as us, where they see black boxes as a partnership opportunity.

I'm not saying you're wrong, in fact I agree with your sentiment and it's the same as mine, and I've tried to put forth some of these arguments to my boss for why we should still be building products in-house instead of GPT-everything. What I realised is when you talk to somebody on the business side you'd get a very different response to the ironclad defense that works perfectly in your head.

That's an argument much easily put forth philosophically than to a business head.

Because there's no valid answer to the follow up questions "what if we do?" and "but what if our competition offers it?".

> But yes, anyone reading please don't use ChatGPT instead of google search unless you don't care about the responses being made up.

The general public is not reading this sub, and ChatGPT is being sold to them by marketing and sales hacks without this disclaimer. We're way past the point of PSAs.

Amongst other things, RLs major benefit is for learning from a sequence of reward over simply "a reward" which would be the assumption when you treat this is a SL problem. Do remember IID observations is one of the fundamental premises of SL.

grad school

Well I'm on this sub and ML is my job so I obviously see that and I agree but as a thought experiment consider this- if you basically paywall Twitter/get rid of the feed curation entirely it's already going to have some sort of spam reducing effect.

With where he's going with the verification process and his previous rant about bots I think something that'll soon be Twitter is what 2010 Facebook was like - you only see content from people you friend and only they can see your posts unless you want to take the risk of opening up to the public. Only way to make this model profitable though is the $8 fee to absorb the impact of not showing ads in the feed, and if a critical mass of your users sign up you can make all posts "verified only".

Not saying you can solve a hard problem like spam without ML, but you can greatly reduce the noticeability of spam if you don't let anybody interact with anybody else without their explicit consent.

The downstream effect this has is you can invest 1/10th the budget you originally had to fight spam and still not have your platform go down the gutter.

Oh, ok well Musk holds the exact opposite view as a general rule[1] and a guy I follow on Twitter who was a Senior ML engineer in one of the content teams there was laid off, and he's not the only one from his team let go either.

While you've picked a great example from a technical perspective, company wise it's the last place where I'll expect any expansion of ML funding/budget over the next year unless Elon hires somebody else to be CEO.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyqw3EMCckU

Wait what, Twitter's hiring again? They literally just laid off entire divisions a week ago, which included a lot of ML teams from what I read.