Ask HN: I'm feeling awe, unsettled and disoriented by GPT-4. How about you?

I am feeling surprisingly indifferent. I've been changing my work and non-work habits quite a bit, automating a lot of tedious tasks, doing tasks I'd find too tedious in the past, using it for jumping off points on creative things, "looking up" things I wouldn't have looked up before, refreshing my memory on books I've read before...

...and yet, getting used to it very quickly and not particularly confident that it's going to be a massive "change everything", maybe because I don't really have any prediction how it will change everything. But also, I guess, because I don't know if we're on an S-curve to 20% change or to 1000% change or what.

I share what I do with it with friends and family. I hope not to be to obsessive "that guy" about it and to suss out if they're interested, and so far they also try it out and share their results, and right now I think that's the best I can do for them and for myself. It's early days.

I have a 7yo, she doesn't read much yet. I expect it will be incorporated into her education later on, and no real clue how. I think the best I can do for her is stay on top of things myself.

It might all be coming fast, but change will be limited by how fast people can process it. I think readers here will basically all be well ahead of the majority of the wave.

Stuff goes mainstream fast these days, and there's also a huge population of people hacking on things now, and so we may be surprised by how much might get ahead of us in the peripheral, but we are probably the best people situated to stay ahead of the wave overall, even without much effort.

Those of us who have spent the last several decades learning how to break down information technology problems into their constituent pieces, many times down to the byte, are being suddenly presented with a system that requires none of that expertise and produces results which are nearly as good. The more you know about technology, the more you are amazed. How long would it take you to code by hand some of the things that LLMs can do with a simple prompt? The less technical people are just like, "Oh, the computer is doing magic again, shrug," because they have no idea the difference between what Siri does and what ChatGPT is doing. The rest of us however are mind boggled by what we're seeing. When I saw how Microsoft "programmed" the Bing chat (Sydney) simply by prepending a series of rules in plain English to the prompt, I nearly fell over.

Prompts are like programming without the details. Like a product manager's user stories - simply describing what is expected is enough to get the LLMs to spit out useful results. And it's getting better faster than any of us thought possible. Even if progress stopped today, what's already out there is going to have a profound impact on office work, and thus society, as we know it. But it's not stopping.

I've explained to my 20yo that he needs to learn to embrace the new tools as soon as possible, understand what they can do and can't do, and make sure he focuses his skills and education on the bits that AI aren't great at. As for me, I'm focusing on figuring out the best way to package the power of AI in various niches so that I can use it to provide that power to users in an easily understandable way, which is what I've always done in tech. I'm just using going to be using different tools to do it.

There's plenty to be done to train models, feed AIs data, and package the output for use in a million contexts. That Quick Oil Change company down the block still entering information on Windows GUIs (or worse, DOS computers) aren't going to see AI affect their interfaces for another decade. Between now and then there's plenty to do.

I compare this to Google (or internet search engines in general), and I think the shift from no search engines to Google was much more significant than the shift from Google to LLMs.

62 years old, three kids. Not anxious at all. I still work as a programmer and haven’t seen any effects, though a couple of my customers are trying LLMs for customer service chatbots.

The GPT-generated code I’ve seen doesn’t worry me — writing code isn’t the hard part of software development.

I’ve weathered quite a few supposed existential threats to my career (40+ years) and to humanity (child of cold war nuclear war scares). I figure I’ll survive ”AI” too, it’s almost certainly overhyped.

In any case worry doesn’t change anything, it’s a useless emotion when the cause of the worry is not something you can change or control.

I can predict even without looking into comments that we will see all five stages here but probably mostly still denial. I'm excited primarily because this is really the best educational tool I've ever seen, I want to see what I can create with this.