Look back at crypto and apply the same logic. It "changed everything" if you are part of the money makers, for the average joe nothing changed
The AI models just seem so clearly and instantly more useful to me.
To you yes. Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment
Crypto seemed very useful to many people, and they still do, you'll find thousand upon thousands of comments and this very website preaching cryptos as the next game changer
With AI, the biggest claims I see are overwhelmingly from people who are not doing cutting-edge work in the field, who have no real foundation for a belief that these AIs will continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Because to really change the world, they do need to get a lot better.
I'm a big believer in the "capability overhang" idea, which is that the existing language models still have a huge array of capabilities that we haven't discovered yet.
That theory seems to be proved correct on a constant basis. Even the classic "let's think about this step by step" paper came out less than a year ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 - May 2022.
This paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682) also touches on a pretty fascinating phenomenon - that when scaling up large language models they seem to "naturally" obtain new emergent abilities that do not exist on smaller models.
I wanted to refute your point by giving some YouTube videos about practical uses and their views. Then I checked YouTube's trending videos and compared the view counter to that of a PewDiePie video of 2 days ago and now I agree. You are right.
But honestly you sound just like someone in 1996 going "Oh the internet isn't going to change anything and is just a fad", and here we are decades later and the internet has changed almost everything in our lives. Every person you know uses the internet every day on their cellphones in one way or another.
Also if you use vim you can try my npm package `askleo` `npm i -g askleo` (not tied to the website but requires your own OpenAI API key) with `:r ! askleo Go function to reverse a list of numbers` or whatever .
The person I responded to was saying that they (as a dev I believe) have been seeing huge productivity gains _right now_ and that's what I'm interested in.
I couldn't get Copilot to spew anything like that (a single simple test at best, and it fails at that more frequently than it produces something useful).
It's also quite good at converting relatively simple programs or configs between languages. For example, I used it to convert PostgreSQL DDL queries into Hibernate models (and also in reverse), JS snippets into OCaml, XML into YAML, maven pom.xml into gradle build scripts, and a few more.
write a function using the python requests library which makes a get request to the URL example.com, parses the JSON response and returns the value of the "foo" field. Throw an exception if the get request fails, the response is not JSON or is invalid JSON, or if the foo field is not present in the response.
I just tried this and got a correct (and reasonable) function on the first try.
This kind of high level description to low-level implementation is a huge timesaver but it saves time in a different way than copilot.