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Comment by martinflack | Hacker News Reader

It's probably a short-term social phenomenon. We don't bother detecting mathematical output from calculators or spreadsheets; we just like that folks give us the right answer, even if they had easy tooling to produce it. However, watching someone do things the old way would seem bemusing. If you watched a manager notating all over a physical spreadsheet with a pencil (as was commonly done at one time) it would seem quaint or backwards depending on context. Likewise, waiting for someone to write a letter and taking more than 90 seconds because they didn't co-author it with AI might seem slow.

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"Write an email that says I did X and they should do Y, but if Z then W, and we should schedule a meeting with P and Q."

I feel like for most emails I write, information density is close to a maximum. This means there's no actual gain to be had from a language model. The email I would write myself is going to be about the same length as the prompt I'd have to write anyway.

There is a huge gain if English is your second language, and you use ChatGPT to rewrite, or translate.

Even if English is your mother tongue, if your written English is crappy or you need to write in a style you are unfamiliar with (e.g. formal), then ChatGPT can help.

If you're writing in a style you're unfamiliar with, how do you know the model is doing it correctly?

I also think writing yourself might be far better practice. This tool can easily become a crutch. This is unlikely to be free anytime soon. In fact it's likely to be quite expensive.

I think we all tend to be better at picking out a correct answer than generating a correct answer from scratch.

I can ask ChatGPT to rewrite an email in the style an American news reporter from 1950, and I can judge whether some of the cliches it generates feel correct. I cannot write in that style at all.

ChatGPT is free now, although there is a paid tier, and MS and Google are building similar capabilities right into their search interfaces.

ChatGPT won't be free forever.

Whatever LLM search stuff comes along will only be free as long as it brings in ad revenue. Which involves making the models fundamentally worse most likely. Or they'll use it to collect personal data. Probably both.

Computationally, GPT is wildly expensive. This idea people have that it's gonna be used all over the place for all sorts of tiny tasks, as if it's just another REST API, is nuts. Unless something fundamentally new comes along that makes these models much cheaper, adoption is likely going to end up much more limited than people expect. Or siloed off into expensive business-facing products.

The cost estimates I see are things like less than half a cent per query and a few cents per conversation.

If I'm making (or valuing my free time at) $20 an hour, then ChatGPT only needs to save me one or two seconds and half a minute respectively.

And like everything, the price will drop rapidly as the models become smaller through advances. There's already sparseGPT.

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