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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> In 80% of cases people overestimate the usefulness of AI.

Looking at my chatgpt history, my partner and I seem to average about 3 conversations a day. We would use it a lot more than that if we had a way to invoke it with our voices, like Siri. Our usage is increasing over time as we figure out the sort of questions it’s good at answering.

I’m not saying all the hype is justified, but if anything I think people underestimate how useful AI can already be in their lives. It just takes some learning to figure out how and when to use it.

This is markedly different from both web3 and VR. It’s 2023 and I still make purchases with my Visa card and play most video games with mouse and keyboard (while my quest - cool as it is - gathers dust).

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You are an extreme outlier. Most of us on HN are.

As of the end of august only 18% of US adults had tried ChatGPT at all (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-amer...).

For me, the biggest obstacle to get over is trust. I have seen ChatGPT make up facts far too often for it to be useful for a lot of what I ask of google. I also would be VERY leery of integrating it into customer support, etc. At some point I expect some company to have its chat bot enter into a contract with a customer and end up having to deliver.

That makes sense. I suppose my answer is that for most questions I ask chatgpt, I'm ok with the answer being a bit wrong. For example, I asked it how long & hot to heat my oven when I baked cauliflower. It would have been a pity if we burned the cauliflower, but the answer was spot on. Likewise it gave a great answer when I asked for a simple crepe recipe. (The crepes were delicious!).

Another time I asked this:

> C minor and G major sound good together. What key are they in?

And it answered that incorrectly, saying there wasn't a key which contained both chords. But thats not quite right - they're both contained in C harmonic minor.

When you ask it to write code, the code often contains small bugs. But that can still be very helpful a lot of the time, to a lot of people.

And its also utterly fantastic as a tool for creative writing, where you don't care about facts at all. For example, the output of prompts like this are utterly fantastic:

> I'm writing the character of a grumpy innkeeper in a D&D campaign and I want the character to have some quirks to make them interesting for the players. List 20 different weird quirks the innkeeper could have.

I just put it in and got things like this:

4. Height Requirement: Refuses to serve anyone taller or shorter than him, with a height chart at the door for reference.

9. Historical Enthusiast: Dresses and talks like he's from a different era, insists patrons do the same to get service.

Uh.... C minor and G major are keys/scales, not chords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_chord (I am not a musician, but I know the circle of fifths, keys, and chords).

Maybe I would have gotten a better answer if I specified the C minor and G major triads. I assumed chatgpt would figure that out from context. (And it sort of did, but it said they didn’t have any shared key).

Can you try and report back (I don't want to try to reproduce your exact experiment).

https://chat.openai.com/share/c904d3a0-9564-4d6f-8b62-406d3f...

I’d like it to say “C harmonic minor” but honestly my knowledge of music theory might not be good enough to properly evaluate its response. What do you think?

both chords are in the notes of the key/scale, but I don't know that they would sound good if played together or sequentially.

Think about that for a second though: 18% of US adults used a product that didn't exist five years ago. That's an immense success and proves that the OP isn't an extreme outlier but in fact is just one of very many.

If anything what should amaze us is that ChatGPT managed to command that kind of market share in such a very short time. That's approximately 46 million individuals.

I wish there was more data on how much it is getting used. To say that 18% of people used something is one thing. The question for me is, what percentage of people used the free version once or twice for novelty purposes and then never touched it again.

A different poll from the same org found that the number of people who had used it was 14% back in May.

If I'm remembering the timeline right, it really hit the zeitgeist hard in February, so it seems as if the growth is leveling off.

In any case, getting 18% of people in the US to use your product in less than a year is still nothing to sneeze at.

I would argue that trying to estimate the value of statistical engines by taking into account only GPT, text is a narrow domain. How about visuals like SD, text like GPT, and music like Audiocraft? Music is still not very advanced but it's coming. Human voice audio as well should get into the mix, for audiobooks n stuff. How about word transcripts from videos etc? I use that all the time.

If 18% of adults have used GPT at least once, that sounds accurate, but how about every other tool?

Probably many more, but this one statistic was the one mentioned. And if that's the size of it then it is already very impressive. Phonograph, Radio, TV, Computers and Mobile telephony for instance took much, much longer to reach similar numbers.

But most of those 18% have tried it on the web interface for free. The rest of those things you mention are/were very expensive, especially at first. My dad was lugging home expensive workstations from his office for years before anyone in my circles could really afford a home computer.

Free+Hype makes me not that impressed with the number of people who have tried ChatGPT. Smartphone ubiquity today is way more amazing to me than a lot of people giving the weird new chatbot a try.

If you can come back and tell me a year from now that even 10% of adults use something like ChatGPT once a month as anything other than a search engine replacement, I will be impressed. Really, I will. When the chatbot market gets bigger than a rounding error of the smartphone/tablet market, then I will be impressed.

I think they are fun. I can and do run the big models locally on my research hardware. People in my lab are doing some pretty neat things with LLMs and other tools in the current hype cycle. I personally like them. But there is massive, so-far-unwarranted hype.

This is exactly it. Many people have become users of ChatGPT, in the same way that plenty of people became users of TV by watching it through the shop window.

What percentage of people are paying users, or have somehow integrated the product of ChatGPT/AI into their lives/work beyond just telling it to make a picture of a horse with tentacles to see if it could.

> ...about 3 conversations a day...

Do you mind sharing examples of what you guys use it for? I basically never use LLM's and I am curious what uses others have found for it. From what I have seen, it is mostly used by students as a better search engine

Here's a random selection from the past couple weeks:

> I'm visiting Oxford University for a few days. What are some things I should know before I travel? How do I fit in with people on my trip? Take the persona of a stuffy old Brittish aristocrat while answering.

> Help me edit this text to write it in a way which is less likely to cause offense: (...)

> I’m writing a story with different city states, where each city state has a different mix of cultural values. For example, one city might be very individualistic while another is more communal. The values exist to support storytelling. Each should be justifiable but also have interesting strengths and weaknesses that can be explored through stories told in those cultures. What are some other values by which real or fictional cultures could diverge in interesting ways?

> Is rapeseed oil ok / good for baking? We’re oven baking broccoli and potatoes. (followup): How hot should you make an oven to roast potatoes and cauliflower? How long should it be in the oven for?

> How do you make crepes?

> We’re in an Airbnb and the bathroom smells like arse. Any idea why?

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