I have 110% replaced it with ChatGPT. Perhaps SO would still have a chance back in its glory days but there's no comparison to having a direct, specific, instant answer vs having to fight against SEO or moderators for hours.
That's not very convenient, atleast for now. I got so used to search engines by now, that it only takes a few keywords to get the expected result. Be it a SO-answer or a documentation page. And as people have mentioned, chatGPT was learned on the stuff that's on the internet, so if there will never be any new stuff, because people just use AI, then it will not learn and won't answer your new questions. For some edge cases I might try AI here or there, but usually it's not for me.
Hell, there comes even an example to my mind. I recently just asked chatGPT what a single-issue 5 stage pipeline on a CPU actually means. I wanted to know if, especially, the "single-issue" meant that only one instruction is present in the pipeline at a time, or if a new one gets shifted in on every clock cycle (if there is no hazard). It just couldn't answer it straight-forward. It was also kinda hard to find the exact definition on the internet. I found it in a book from the 90s which was chilling in my book shelf (Computer architecture and parallel processing by Kai Hwang). Hint: Single-issue just means that only one instruction can be in one stage at a time, but still multiple get processed inside the pipeline. The keyword is 'underpipelined'
I'll just keep an eye on AI progress, but will probably not make it my goto for some time. Maybe later (whenever that is)
That's because you are comparing asking ChatGPT to write full code to searching for a question on Stack Overflow and adapting their answer (which is comparing apples and oranges).
Try using ChatGPT like you use Stack Overflow instead (i.e. the question is "How would I record an audio stream to disk in Python" rather than "write me an application / function which...").
As an aside, try "How would I record an audio stream to disk in Python"" in both GPT4 and searching for an answer on Stack Overflow and see what has the better answer! (Clue: GPT4, and if you don't like GPT4's answer just ask it to clarify/change it)
That's my point though. I get, that it can produce quite good results, if you are specific enough. And for some applications it makes sense to take your time and describe that as much as possible.
Most of the time I just need some small snippet though and usually I can get that with just a few keywords in my favorite search engine, which is way faster. So the conclusion is: There is no one or the other. They should be used complementary, or atleast that's what I am doing (as in use the search engine for quick hints and chatGPT for some more verbose stuff 'write me a parser for this csv in awk'.)
Plus I can ask follow-up questions in a context-driven way ("Can I do this without importing a library?").
I'm aware that different people will have different feelings on this though and personal tastes will differ, but while search engines stagnate I suspect the needle will continue to shift towards AI.
I currently pay for it but I'm not sure if it makes any difference.
Ask it how to use it
My experience - the free version made up a lot of things but still felt very useful - enough to want to upgrade to the paid version. With the paid version, I notice very rarely that it hallucinates. It does make errors but it can correct them when I provide feedback. It is possible that I just do not notice the errors you would notice, it is also possible that we use it differently. I would like to know.
Paid.
> Would you kindly provide links to a few examples of very fundamental things incorrect?
No, definitely not.
> I notice very rarely that it hallucinates.
Unsure of what "hallucinates" means in this case. Some examples of things I've used it for: docker configuration, small blocks of code, generating a cover letter, proofreading a document, YAML validation, questions about various software SDKs. The outcome is usually somewhere on the spectrum of "not even close/not even valid output" to "kind of close but not close enough to warrant a paid service". When I ask for a simple paragraph and I get a response that isn't grammatically correct/doesn't include punctuation, I'm not sure what I'm paying for.
The term "hallucinations" is now commonly used for instances of AI making stuff up - like when I asked ChatGPT (before I had paid account) to recommend 5 books about a certain topic and two of the recommended books looked totally plausible, but when I tried to find them, I discovered there are no such books. This is where I see a big difference between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.
>> I get a response that isn't grammatically correct/doesn't include punctuation
What punctuation? If you mean stuff like commas separating complex sentences, my English is definitely not good enough to spot that. But your mention of punctuation reminded me of problems that ChatGPT has with my native language... any chance you are using ChatGPT in a language other than English?
Here is an example of using it to write simple powershell scripts:
* https://chat.openai.com/share/17a9d185-4a8c-4c10-97a2-0c5b08...
Here is an example of using it to merge different types of json configuration files:
* https://chat.openai.com/share/ed0c9cf9-7586-43df-9271-7b5859...
You need to pay for it if you want access to the latest version of the model, along with some beta features like plugins. Plugins are extremely useful and it is worth paying just to get access to them. For instance, you need to have a certain plugin to get it to read links.