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Comment by omneity | Hacker News Reader

Here's the catch, people are still adapting to GPT tech, still figuring out ways to make use of it, to include it in their workflows, etc.

Social impact of ChatGPT even in its current form is only getting started, it doesn't need to progress at all to be super disruptive. For example, see the frontpage story about the $80/h writer who was replaced by ChatGPT, and that just happened recently, months after ChatGPT's first release.

We (humans) are getting boiled like the proverbial frog.

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But is that because of rapid breakthroughs in tech, or in marketing?

GPT 3 is nearly three years old at this point, and was pretty capable at generating text. GPT 3.5 brought substantial improvements, but is also over a year old. ChatGPT is much newer, but mostly remarkable for the better interface, the extensive "safety" efforts, and for being free (as in beer) and immediately accessible without waitlist and application process. Actual text generated by it isn't much different from GPT 3.5, especially for the type of longform content you hire a $80/h writer for. ChatGPT was just launched in a way that allows people to easily experiment and create hype.

I'd like you to look at what you just typed in reference to a product like the iPhone that turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. There were smartphones before the iPhone, but the iPhone redefined the market and all phones after that point use it as the reference.

People who made money with their phone had fully adopted Blackberry devices long before the iPhone came around. It may not have been as fun or slick, but when $80/hr. was on the line you weren't exactly going to wait around until something better showed up like the average consumer could.

The parent is right. The success of ChatGPT in business is that it brought awareness of the capabilities of GPT that OpenAI struggled to communicate beforehand. It was a breakthrough in marketing, less so a breakthrough in tech.

Engineers rarely become billionaires, salespeople do.

You could have the best most magic product on earth and sell one of them versus the person that puts it in a pretty box and lets grandma use it easily.

This is something that many people on HN seemingly have to relearn in every big innovation that comes out.

>We (humans) are getting boiled like the proverbial frog.

This is such a primitive way of thinking. It's more of an instinct, where you consider by default that your sole value is in your ability to generate/work. Why the hell are we working for? Isn't it to improve our lives? Or should we improve them up to the point where we still have to work? Why not use the tech itself to find better ways of organizing ourselves, without needing to work so much? UBI and things like that. Why be such limited? Why only develop tech up to the point where we would have to work less but not at all, and who decides where that point is? There's so much wrong in this framework of thinking.

GPT4 is really bad at writing. It is noticeably generic.

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