At the same time for many of those of us for whom it is useful, a lot of the initial use was experimentation to find the right use cases. I still use it, but I use it for the things where I know it works for me, and so I use it less than at the peak when use was dominated by learning.
Others will have found areas where alternatives like self-hosted LLMs are good enough.
Use will like grow again over time as people get more experience and build useful things on top of it. But it won't be the same rush.
We used to just call that "a search engine". Remember that? Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got.
It was the ad-ification of search engines that killed that. So, AI allows us to go back to the Internet circa 2000? That's a big innovation? I mean, I'll take it, but that's a pretty low bar ...
I spent some time talking to chatgtp about the history of art philosophy and technology, as if we were writing a book together.
I found it was great to just get a very broad overview and then ask questions about the things I wanted to know more about.
Not a groundbreaking way to use an LLM but I really enjoyed it.
I'm going to take your idea of talking to it about books too.
Google is choosing to lose the SEO war because they think it would impact their ad revenue.
Every site that takes longer than 100ms to load? Gone. Wipes out vast quantities of ad-infested sewage. Login required? Gone. Websites now have to choose between reach and subscribers and the ones that choose subscribers will have to get better. Javascript required to access content? Gone. No more ad bidding system at all and no vectors for spreading virii. Tracking stuff from Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/etc.? Gone. No more analytics tracking everybody.
We don't need AI to fix this. We need an alternative search engine. If "AI" is what gets us there, I'll take it. But it ain't "AI".
The difference is that reading someone's blog post forces you to take their trajectory through the material and it might not go over the exact points you're curious or confused about. With a forum like StackOverflow you often have to settle for problems that are merely close enough to your own that the solutions apply to it.
Models like ChatGPT allow you to ask for blog posts on any topic on demand and then ask for follow-up blog posts about whatever aspect of the previous blog post you want to elaborate.
well then they wouldn’t be people now, would they?
your reaction is fair. and rare.
He read something he didn’t like and then attacked the person who said it by basically calling them an unthinking robot. It’s not fair and it’s incredibly common.
speaking of comments both unfair and incredibly common… this gross oversimplification does a disservice to all parties involved.
op lamented a lack of introspection and a nastiness to judge a thing as useless or bad based upon an individual’s success or lack thereof with the thing.
if you found it offensive, perhaps it’s worth thinking on.
Isn't this a bit of an oxymoron?
I feel like every comment on HN of mine now lately is just defending ChatGPT, but I don't think that's a reason to self-censor my comments... yet.
I was watching a car chase on youtube yesterday and used an LLM to tell me the city location based on a description of the news station logo. So that was a "niche" I guess. I also got it to teach me how to use the https://gene.iobio.io/ software as I was using it, and I'm pretty good at it now! I asked it to help me to understand the connotations of several similar sentences in another spoken language I'm learning. It's helped me with understanding property tax appraisal records. We use it at work daily to analyze code, it shortens research by 30% or so. Calling it "niche" is 100% correct: yes it's very good at its "niches" which happen to be... almost everything except math? Have it craft a choose-your-own-adventure detective story and get back to me, because that niche is surprisingly fun.
If you can predict the implications of this technology or make an insightful assessment beyond "we don't have flying cars yet" ... let me know.
I actually use it and I find that that 99% is ridiculously high.
> The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use
There may be use cases where it isn’t wrong a lot, or you may jave a high tolerance before annoyance hits, or you may be failing to detect it being wrong, but that certainly doesn’t match my experience.
1. Data reformatting, data parsing, anything that requires transforming data in anyway. E.g. give me all blah in this massive raw content of whatever. Give this data as json, this as csv.
2. Writing small scripts to do various other data related actions, automations.
3. Summaries. Extracting key points. Asking questions about content I don't understand well. Asking clarification questions.
4. Bulletpoints, outlines, asking for feedback for my own content, what could I be missing, brainstorming.
5. Coding obviously, but with Copilot mainly rather than ChatGPT specifically.
6. Asking it to review/criticise whatever work or output I do.
7. Anything learning/research related, I use it avidly. If I want to learn about any subject. I haven't found hallucinations to be an issue at all, because I view the content with grain of salt in the first place and I double check if I think something is out of place, but it's really, really good for learning, because I can actively question it compared to a course or whatever, and me being able to debate with it is amazing for learning. And compared to a person I never have to feel that my question may be stupid, I can just spew to it whatever immediately comes to mind and get clarifications. If I had a person as a mentor, I might be more careful, but this removes the aspect of social anxiety completely. I can keep asking clarifying questions infinitely.
8. Decisions. Trying to understand pros and cons of various decisions. Allowing it to brainstorm those pros and cons. I combine with my own pros and cons of course.
To me it's like this dream thing you can bounce your thoughts back and forth with, without having to worry about judgment etc.
Microsoft could 'embrace' a significant portion of ChatGPTs use cases, if they trained up something 80% as good as ChatGPT and bundled it with Office 360.
We've seen AI techniques find new homes in Photoshop, 3D modelling software, ect.
ChatGPT needs it's own use case.
Even without ChatGPT, looking for information you're not already an expert on can be a minefield of opinions disguised as facts, false dichotomies, biased perspectives/framings, omissions, etc..
And it's already bad enough before you consider that someone may have intentionally attempted to mislead you.
But my original comment wasn't really about me in particular, it was a general question about what the difference between the two groups are.