Apple and Google avoid naming ChatGPT as their 'app of the year'

I agree, but I think the crux of my point is that this is because ChatGPT the app doesn't stand out from a platform perspective, rather than because advertising ChatGPT would go against the platform goals.

Essentially I have no real reason to question the integrity of the awards processes here, because they seem to be awarded for the same reasons as they always are, and that ChatGPT just doesn't tick the boxes they're looking for.

I'm not naive enough to think some exec hasn't been happy with the convenience of this, but it seems a little conspiracy-theory like to assume malice here.

Now, that would definitely still take some work from Apple. Right now as I understand it the device listens for “Siri…” all the time using some on-device ML. They’d need a way for that to work with chatgpt and hand over to the audio stream. And have a chatgpt conversation from a lock screen without breaking sandboxing.

But all of that would definitely make my phone a much more useful device. I won’t hold my breath though.

A little bias is inevitable. But there's no reason to cynically throw the baby out with the bathwater. We can still strive for fairness and balance. We should still complain when we see blatantly biased source, and seek out good journalism. We'll just never fully achieve it.

But thats ok. We can try anyway.

ChatGPT is about as accurate as random websites on the internet, and you don’t get obliterated with ads.

Simple example, ChatGPT will give you a clear recipe for whatever you want, sans life story designed to make you scroll past a million ads.

1. you don't know the answer, but you can check yourself and easily whether a given answer is roughly correct

2. you don't know the answer and wouldn't be able to check how valid a potential answer is

LLM-based tools are great for 1 to synthesize various sources into one coherent answer, since in this case, you won't become a victim of their hallucination. E.g. "write a one-off Python script to do this": you can quickly check if it does the job, even though you couldn't say whether that's idiomatic Python.

I still believe anyone using these tools on a day-to-day basis should have a sense of "trust but verify."

Example: Using a small part of a new, big, unfamiliar library. Rather than digging through the library docs, I can ask ChatGPT about it, which often points me to the relevant parts, which I then can still confirm in the official docs.

- if I'm working in a field that's new to me or that I don't understand, I ask for help understanding the basics and vocabulary of the field. it does very well at this.

- if I have a well defined problem, but am simply not familiar with the libraries for a given situation, it tends to do a good job translating my english queries into the right code. I do examine and test the code afterwards to make sure it's correct. You can really see this in action when you ask it to do data analysis; and the REPL loop in that mode is also great at catching bugs.

- if I have like a copy-paste from a documentation site, I can ask it to transform that into code or into a better-formatted version. this saves a lot of time, and I don't have to remember regexes or vim keybinds

No, I'm talking about things like writing SQL queries (even complex ones), CMake files, Docker configs or plotting stuff in Python. Of course, if you're not already an expert in these things, you'll have a hard time distinguishing useful replies from hallucinations - that's why I said it's mostly for senior devs. Without expert knowledge, you will likely not be able to benefit from it in its current state. But if you have that and know how to write efficient queries, it can easily up your productivity by a factor of 10 (i.e. going back and forth for 6 minutes with GPT4 to make it get your requirements can save you an hour of work looking through documentations).

Sometimes it comes up with really good techniques that are different from my usual approaches, other times is plain wrong and I'm correcting it.

I am more productive with the ChatGPT in my life. Whenever stuck on some weird error, instead of googling I paste the log and discuss with the bot what can be going wrong there. We can talk about pointer analysis, performance bottleneck comparisons. Could I do it all on my own? Sure. However it is boring and quite certainly would require 10x more time to perform all calculations on my own.

In the end of a day it is just another tool. Brings advantage when used properly.