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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

"It's just ChatGPT with a pre-prompt" is of course true.

"It's just Custom Instructions with a nice UI" is also true.

However, never underestimate the world-upending impact of "a nice UI". GPT-3 was available for years. But almost nobody knew or cared* (despite me telling them about it forty times! LOL) until they made a nice UI for it!

This looks like another "tiny tweak" of usability that has a similar "quantum leap" level of impact.

* On an unrelated note: people often ask me my opinion about GPT / AI. I ask them if they've used it. "No". "You know it's free right?" "Yes". WTF? This mindset is bizarre to me! What is it? Fear of the unknown? Laziness? Demanding social proof before trying something?

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> However, never underestimate the world-upending impact of "a nice UI". GPT-3 was available for years. But almost nobody knew or care

I’ve been using GPT-3 through the API since it was available for my discord bot. The difference with ChatGPT (gpt-3.5) was astounding, they weren’t even close in capabilities.

Though GPT-3.5 was available a few months before ChatGPT came out (code-davinci-002 was the GPT-3.5 base model, text-davinci-003 had some instruction tuning and RLHF applied). But somehow almost nobody noticed the steep increase in capabilities compared to GPT-3 (davinci).

That "some" RLHF is part of what made such a big difference.

But text-davinci-003 was available before ChatGPT.

text-davinci-003 was awful compared to the ChatGPT model. You can try right now text-davinci-003 and gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct and the difference is monumental.

But you can't try code-davinci-002 right now, which could do things ChatGPT-3.5 (probably even 4) couldn't do.

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/706441900479152128/no...

OpenAI removed the model from the API, apparently because it was too powerful.

> On an unrelated note: people often ask me my opinion about GPT / AI. I ask them if they've used it. "No". "You know it's free right?" "Yes". WTF? This mindset is bizarre to me! What is it?

Free in terms of money doesn't mean it doesn't come with a cost. Time, at least. To try ChatGPT you need to create an account, many people hate creating accounts, you have credentials to manage, you give out your email address to who knows who might spam you. And there are privacy concerns, justified in this cases as some users prompts have been known to leak, and who knows how secure it is.

Maybe it is obvious to you that ChatGPT is safer than offers from Nigerian princes, but it is not obvious to anyone, that's why they are asking. And I prefer my friends to ask me "stupid" questions than to ask no one and get scammed.

And you say "on an unrelated note". This is not unrelated. A nice UI lowers the cost in terms of time and effort. If you are using GPT professionally, it directly translates into money.

They already have a nice UI for logging in: with two clicks you can login with your (presumably existing) Google, Microsoft or Apple account.

Not sure the Nigerian prince thing is a fair comparison, it's more like an army of Nigerians helping kids cheat on their homework for free.

I think even that is an oversimplification. These GPTs simplify Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for the personal use case. You can provide "Knowledge" in the form of files and also defined "actions" where have your GPT can take action or reach out to urls. This is a pretty strong step forward in terms of general use.

It's a great democratization of personal use AI and has everything you need to build useful personal bots. It could theoretically provide the same sort of utility as sites like ITTT but for GPT-4.

I can see power users creating workflows which trigger by talking to their GPT and telling it to "execute xyz". It then uses the actions and its 128k context to download some data (GET action), run some logic on it, and send the output via json to another endpoint via actions (POST action). With these simple components and a creative mind, you could build something interesting or perhaps automate your dayjob.

Right. The entire value is in a scaffolded CRUD application that simplifies RAG and API connectivity.

Now, this doesn't work as well as I'd like it to, but I have reason to believe it'll improve over time. Getting simple retrieval/RAG and API connections to GPT is what every analyst has been asking for since it came out. Now they're making progress here and capturing everyone at $20/month (well, when signups are back) to use this feature set.

The actual prompting and all the grifting going on with "AWESOME PROMPTS" are useless, of course. Mostly. It's in the private distribution of these GPTs to co-workers and employees with updated knowledge files and likely a custom omni-API that can be hit by the GPT.

> GPT-3 was available for years

This is a common misunderstanding. ChatGPT launched with GPT-3.5 (not GPT-3) and was the first model to have RLHF. GPT-3.5 over the API was noticeably better at most tasks then GPT-3.

That's not quite accurate: InstructGPT was an earlier thing that made GPT-3 much easier to use (it could answer questions rather than just deal in completion prompts), and that was exposed through the GPT-3 API for quite around 11 months before ChatGPT was released.

https://openai.com/research/instruction-following is from January 2022

"These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as the default language models on our API."

You're right, I shouldn't have said "first" there. Instruct had RLHF.

But I don't think ChatGPT would have worked nearly as well using InstructGPT as the model. GPT-3.5 was still a better model, especially for chat, than InstructGPT.

> We trained this model using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using the same methods as InstructGPT, but with slight differences in the data collection setup. We trained an initial model using supervised fine-tuning: human AI trainers provided conversations in which they played both sides—the user and an AI assistant. We gave the trainers access to model-written suggestions to help them compose their responses. We mixed this new dialogue dataset with the InstructGPT dataset, which we transformed into a dialogue format.

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt

Yeah, you make a great argument. I agree, ChatGPT without the extra RLHF would likely have had much less of an impact.

They require a phone number for signup. Not everyone is keen to give theirs out for an unknown thing. Also, signup fatigue.

This feels like a classic example of the Chrossing the Chasm curve: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Technology-Adoption-Lif...

Us early adopters have been on ChatGPT for a year now. Word is beginning to get out to the Late Majority and Laggards that this thing is worth signing up for and handing over a phone number.

> This mindset is bizarre to me! What is it? Fear of the unknown? Laziness? Demanding social proof before trying something?

i worked on a chatbot using a service corollary to openai's api around the time when transformer's paper was published.

i still don't see the value in using chatgpt.

there was an instance where something i wanted to find online was hard but i could get a semi-usable answer from their 3.5 model. but after understanding how they iterate the model over time, it probably took someone more knowledable on the topic to have a similar conversation with their service.

this is a major red flag for me in terms of privacy.

the same people prefering stackoverflow over rtfm will gravitate towards this way, and more power to them. i am happy to be considered ignorant in the meanwhile.

> the same people prefering stackoverflow over rtfm will gravitate towards this way, and more power to them.

Oh! I'd forgotten how big a productivity boost over manpages/offical docsites SO was.

GPT-3 wasn't available to your average hairdresser or plumber. Hell I wasn't even sure how to get access (and as it seemed the use case was just spam I didn't look into it hard). ChatGPT came out with both a better model, more refined, and a UI anyone can try.

Perhaps this will help with your confusion about mindset: it still doesn't have any concept of being right, just convincing, and I don't particularly need any more of that in my life. (With a side order of "people keep coming up with great examples of it doing things that don't particularly need doing".) So I'm watching carefully (especially simonw's impressive work with it - but even his successes are only after tweaking/thumping/banging on it a lot) but otherwise, I see it as "free-as-in free to play video game" in terms of actually using it.

The UI helped of course, but the massive media blitz didn't hurt.

The media blitz was earned, not planned. OpenAI didn't expect ChatGPT to get a fraction of the attention it did - in fact some people within OpenAI thought the entire project was a waste of time: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai...

> GPT-3 was available for years

GPT 3 sucked without training. It was sooo cool with training.

3.5 was out in April but the big update wasnt until September right? Heck, GPT4 is on an entirely different level than 3.5.

One cannot overstate the usability difference between 3 and 3.5.

Fear is what the politicians sell us ("I'm -tough on crime- vote for me, they're stealing your identities!").

Fear is what the journalists sell us ("They're stealing identities, experts say! Find out first and subscribe!").

Fear is what the military sells us ("Those foreign bastards are selling your stolen identity Fund us to stop them!").

Fear is what the companies sell us ("We can protect you against stolen identities!").

Is it any wonder why many, or even most, humans act out of fear?

Is it any wonder why The Bible states (some variation of) 'Fear not' 365 times?

A humans core is a mess of fears. There's the balled-up repressed self fears that are wrapped up in family fears and those are slathered in societal norm fears which are then bound by punitive fears, boundary crossing and overstepping fears, and all of this is coated in a hardened and solidified experiential fear shell.

Each layer of fear builds upon the next. A foundation. A fortress of fear.

Why do humans walk? We saw, we wanted, we extended, and we fell. Fear of falling. Why did we crawl? Fear of being left behind.

Humans ARE fear. But we're fear that's brightly painted and covered over with spackle. Look between the spackle-cracks, and you'll still see that naked fear hiding. Waiting.

BOO!

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