ChatGPT

53 Articles

Wrencher-2: A Bold New Direction For Hackaday

April 1, 2024 by 44 Comments

Over the last year it’s fair to say that a chill wind has blown across the face of the media industry, as the prospect emerges that many content creation tasks formerly performed by humans instead being swallowed up by the inexorable rise of generative AI. In a few years we’re told, there may even be no more journalists, as the computers become capable of keeping your news desires sated with the help of their algorithms.

Here at Hackaday, we can see this might be the case for a gutter rag obsessed with celebrity love affairs and whichever vegetable is supposed to cure cancer this week, but we continue to believe that for quality coverage of the latest and greatest in the hardware hacking world, you can’t beat a writer made of good old-fashioned meat. Indeed, in a world saturated by low-quality content, the opinions of smart and engaged writers become even more valuable. So we’ve decided to go against the trend, by launching not a journalist powered by AI, but an AI powered by journalists.

Announcing Wrencher-2, a Hackaday chat assistant in your browser

Wrencher-2 is a new paradigm in online chat assistants, eschewing generative algorithms in favour of the collective expertise of the Hackaday team. Ask Wrencher-2 a question, and you won’t get a vague and made-up answer from a computer, instead you’ll get a pithy and on-the-nail answer from a Hackaday staffer. Go on – try it! Continue reading “Wrencher-2: A Bold New Direction For Hackaday” →

Tech Support… Can AI Be Worse?

March 28, 2024 by 56 Comments

You can’t read the news today without another pundit excitedly reporting how AI is going to take every job you can imagine. Of course, AI will change the employment landscape. It will take some jobs and reduce the need for others. What about tech support? Is it possible that an AI might be able to help people with technical issues better than humans? My first answer was no way, but then I was painfully reminded of something. The question isn’t if AI can help you better than any human can. The question is if AI can help you better than the low-paid person on the other end of the phone you are likely to talk to. Sadly, I think the answer to that question is almost certainly yes.

In all fairness, if you read Hackaday, you probably don’t encounter many technical support people who can solve a problem you can’t. By the time you call them, it is a lost cause. But this is more than just “Hackday folks are smarter than the tech support agents.” The overall quality of tech support at many companies is rock bottom no matter who you are. Continue reading “Tech Support… Can AI Be Worse?” →

Generative AI Now Encroaching On Music

March 22, 2024 by 62 Comments

While it might not seem like it to a novice, music turns out to be a highly mathematical endeavor with precise ratios between chords and notes as well as overall structure of rhythm and timing. This is especially true of popular music which has even more recognizable repeating patterns and trends, making it unfortunately an easy target for modern generative AI which is capable of analyzing huge amounts of data and creating arguably unique creations. This one, called Suno, does just that for better or worse.

Unlike other generative AI offerings that are currently available for creating music, this one is not only capable of generating the musical underpinnings of the song itself but can additionally create a layer of intelligible vocals as well. A deeper investigation of the technology by Rolling Stone found that the tool uses its own models to come up with the music and then offloads the text generation for the vocals to ChatGPT, finally using the generated lyrics to generate fairly convincing vocals. Like image and text generation models that have come out in the last few years, this has the potential to be significantly disruptive.

While we’re not particularly excited about living in a world where humans toil while the machines create art and not the other way around, at best we could hope for a world where real musicians use these models as tools to enhance their creativity rather than being outright substitutes, much like ChatGPT itself currently is for programmers. That might be an overly optimistic view, though, and only time will tell.

Learn AI Via Spreadsheet

March 18, 2024 by 8 Comments

While we’ve been known to use and abuse spreadsheets in the past, we haven’t taken it to the level of [Spreadsheets Are All You Need]. The site provides a spreadsheet version of an “AI” system much like ChatGPT 2. Sure, that’s old tech, but the fundamentals are the same as the current crop of AI programs. There are several “lesson” videos that explain it all, with the promise of more to come. You can also, of course, grab the actual spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is big, and there are certain compromises. For one thing, you have to enter tokens separately. There are 768 numbers representing each token in the input. That’s a lot for a spreadsheet, but a modern GPT uses many more.

Continue reading “Learn AI Via Spreadsheet” →

Large Language Model Can Help You Develop For The Amiga

March 5, 2024 by 13 Comments

Developing for the Amiga used to involve reading dense programming manuals and trial and error. In contrast, developing these days can be as simple as barking orders at ChatGPT to spit you out some Python code. However, that technique doesn’t work so well for Amiga languages, as ChatGPT hasn’t read much about the now-ancient platform. However, as covered by AmigaNews, there is now a ChatGPT model trained specifically on Amiga development. Enter Amiga Guru.

The work of [Cameron Armstrong], Amiga Guru was built after his early experiments with ChatGPT spat out non-functional gibberish when Amiga-compatible code was requested. The model has been trained on a corpus of official Amiga programming manuals, third-party books, and even the documentation for AmigaOS 3.2 and 4.1.

Using the model yourself requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus, which prevents this writer from testing it directly. However, it makes sense that having been directly trained on Amiga manuals, it would be more capable at answering Amiga programming queries than conventional ChatGPT 4.

It’s easy to see the value of such a system. Learning to program for older platforms can be hard, with less resources available for new learners. Having an AI to help could be useful for some eager to develop for the 68K-based machine.

If you’d like to try Amiga Guru, you can access it via this link. Be sure to let us know how you go, and whether you think it has any value for speeding up your own Amiga development. Otherwise, if you’ve been doing anything else nifty with the platform that Commodore bought and paid for, don’t hesitate to let us know!

[Thanks to Stephen Waters for the tip!]

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024

February 4, 2024 by 20 Comments

Things may not have gone as planned last week for the flying cellphone on Mars, but just because Ingenuity‘s flying career is over doesn’t mean there’s no more work to do. NASA announced this week that it’s going to try a series of “wiggle” maneuvers on Ingenuity‘s rotors, in an attempt to get a better look at the damage to the blade tips and possibly get some clues as to what went wrong. The conjecture at the moment seems to be that a large area of relatively featureless terrain confused the navigation system, which uses down-facing cameras to track terrain features. If the navigation program couldn’t get a bead on exactly how far above the ground it was, it’s possible the copter came in too hard and caused the rotor tips to dig into the regolith. There seems to be some photographic suggestion of that, with what looks like divots in the ground about where you’d expect the rotor tips to dig in, and even scraps of material that look out of place and seem to be about the same color as the rotor blades. All this remains to be seen, of course, and we’re sure that NASA and JPL are poring over all available data to piece together what happened. As much as we hate to say goodbye to Ingenuity, we eagerly await the post-mortem.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024” →

Audio Synthesizer Hooked Up With ChatGPT Interface

December 25, 2023 by 15 Comments

ChatGPT is being asked to handle all kinds of weird tasks, from determining whether written text was created by an AI, to answering homework questions, and much more. It’s good at some of these tasks, and absolutely incapable of others. [Filipe dos Santos Branco] and [Edward Gu] had an out of the box idea, though. What if ChatGPT could do something musical?

They built a system that, at the press of a button, would query ChatGPT for a 10-note melody in a given musical key. Once the note sequence is generated by the large language model, it’s played out by a PWM-based synthesizer running on a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Ultimately, ChatGPT is no musical genius. It’s simply picking a bunch of notes from a list that are known to work together melodically; that’s the whole point of musical keys. It would have been wild if it generated some riffs on the level of Stairway to Heaven or Spontaneous Devotion, but that might be asking for too much.

Here’s the question, though. If you trained a large language model, but got it to digest sheet music instead of written texts… could it learn to write music in various genres and styles? If someone isn’t working on that already, there’s surely an entire PhD you could get out of that idea alone. We should talk!

In any case, it’s one of the more creative projects from the ever-popular ECE 4760 class at Cornell. We’ve featured a bunch of projects from the class over the years, and noted how the course now runs on the RP2040. Continue reading “Audio Synthesizer Hooked Up With ChatGPT Interface” →