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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that makes these GPT3 startups hard, and in my opinion most likely non viable, is that GPT3 is not ready for production.

It can produce text that at a glance looks like it could have been written by a human, but a human that is not very competent at the task it set out to do and makes basic mistakes. For example:

https://www.buyforlife.com/products/efa8b0c1-d7da-4485-b7f0-...

- Blade will rust easily unless oiled.

- The locking mechanism is not as secure as it could be, and can be difficult to disengage when the blade is being used for heavy cutting tasks.

- The blade is softer than most stainless steel blades, so the knife will dull quicker than others.

There's also no way for the startup to fix these issues, unless they have the resources to actually improve GPT3 itself.

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What am I missing? What is wrong with those? I read the complete review and honestly, if I didn't know better, would have thought that a human wrote it.

> - The locking mechanism is not as secure as it could be, and can be difficult to disengage when the blade is being used for heavy cutting tasks.

This sentence seems particularly bad.

A locking mechanism on pocket knives holds the knife open. "Not as secure as it can be" implies that the knife closes in on itself (possibly snagging your fingers) under heavy use.

But... the next sentence says "hard to disengage during heavy use", which is the exact opposite (the knife will stay open after heavy use, and its difficult to close).

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- The blade is softer than most stainless steel blades, so the knife will dull quicker than others.

- Blade will rust easily unless oiled.

These two seem to contradict each other, but that's my knowledge of knife-steels talking. Softer steels are less prone to rusting but dull more quickly.

> A locking mechanism on pocket knives holds the knife open. "Not as secure as it can be" implies that the knife closes in on itself (possibly snagging your fingers) under heavy use.

> But... the next sentence says "hard to disengage during heavy use", which is the exact opposite (the knife will stay open after heavy use, and its difficult to close).

I own Opinels, and these points are actually not mutually exclusive. The Opinel locking mechanism serves to keep the blade closed as well as keeping it open, and it is sometimes not as secure as it could be, causing the knife to open when you don't want it to (e.g. in your pocket), but it can also be difficult to disengage when the knife is open (still love them though!).

> These two seem to contradict each other, but that's my knowledge of knife-steels talking. Softer steels are less prone to rusting but dull more quickly.

I don't think this is necessarily GPTs fault—it seems to be a pretty divisive issue. If you Google now "stainless steel vs high carbon knifes", in the top few results you'll find articles claiming that stainless holds an edge longer and others claiming that high carbon holds an edge longer. I always thought that stainless held an edge longer while high carbon is easier to sharpen (and rusts easier, of course), but maybe I've been wrong on that.

Opinel also makes carbon steel blades that rust if not properly maintained. It looks like one of those reviews may have slipped in to the list.

Is this an issue with GPT-3 itself or with how it's aggregating multiple (potentially contradictory) reviews?

> A locking mechanism on pocket knives holds the knife open. "Not as secure as it can be" implies that the knife closes in on itself (possibly snagging your fingers) under heavy use.

> But... the next sentence says "hard to disengage during heavy use", which is the exact opposite (the knife will stay open after heavy use, and its difficult to close).

I disagree entirely with this assessment.

There are plenty of badly made mechanisms that fail (eg, the knife flexes enough to slip past the lock) but are stiff and difficult to disengage.

As a specific example of a knife with this exact problem the CRKT M16-01 has complaints about it being stiff to disengage[1] and complaints about the lock failing[2]

[1] https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/frame-lock-way-too-stiff...

[2] https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/crkt-m16-14sf-lock-failu...

I'd say the bigger challenge is building something that is defensible. It's not that hard to design a GPT-3 prompt that summarizes reviews or writes ad copy, so you quickly find yourself with a bunch of competition and not much to differentiate on besides price.

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