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Comment by Finbel | Hacker News Reader

Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities.

The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

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Maybe? It's a plausible theory. But these operations are all wildly unsustainable financially at the moment, and it's not clear where they'll get future data from, having destroyed a lot of the incentives that generated their current source content.

Bubbles are not a great time to form intuitions. WebVan [1] and Kozmo [2] also seemed to herald a new age. Decades later, brick-and-mortar grocery stores and convenience stores are still doing fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

We are in the golden age of AI. Things are going to get worse at some point. It happened to google, it will happen to AI.

> the golden age of AI

a.k.a. the third? fourth? AI summer

  > The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

Someone in 2004:

  A few years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button to fix your outdoor plumbing. 

  The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

It's still insane to do that today. Using any LLM to get info for things is a terrible idea, because they will slip inaccurate info into the mix and you have no way of knowing where it is.

I would still call you nuts for trusting ChatGPT with learning any construction or plumbing tasks. Atleast PVC is dead simple though since you basically just glue it together.

They already have all the data, all the money and all the chips. It’s actually the best it’ll ever be, as newer models will have to start paying off all that capex, newer models will be trained mostly on slop, and the SEO and influence op leeches will have begun their arms race to insert their products and values into the training data. We’ve seen this pattern before. AirBnB, Uber, social media, streaming video, et cetera didn’t get better once the VC money ran out and they needed to start turning a profit, they got much much worse.

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