11–20 of 65 posts
It’s a tech demo, data acquisition and research/prototyping operation for OpenAI that’s highly subsidized and aimed at building a qualify dataset for GPT 5+ - effectively using their initial models trained in an unsustainable fashion and only offering temporary moats into investor narrative and a combination of new data and users, both potentially new moats and closing the gap to google. It’s not a serious product.
Also:
* It has a horrible habit of inventing properties on objects or methods in libraries.
* It will very happily straight up lie to you about things it does
* Often when you ask it to make a specific change, it will give you back exactly the same as last time.
* For the love of God, don't put any company-owned code into it.
* Maybe I'm just bad at prompting...
Use it to save time. Stuff like writing boilerplate, documentation drafts, summarizing things, looking up stuff you'd normally use stack overflow for, things like that.
you dont use a hammer for all carpentry work.
I don’t use it for programming though, and I do worry about otherwise talented engineers using it as a crutch. There has been more than one occasion in code review where an answer to one of my comments was “well, this is what copilot said…,” which I take a pretty dim view of. In that sense it’s like the early 2000s when people started thoughtlessly deferring their intelligence to sat nav.
Note: I'm a technical freelancer, mostly doing code but also some 3D modeling, game development etc
Most of these use cases work around the "problem" of hallucination (except perhaps the 2nd one); it's ideating for you and you judge what's useful or not. As such, it's one more productivity tool I feel people should learn to use, with the relevant understanding and care.
> is there any stigma with using ChatGPT in the workplace? I work in a big tech company. ChatGPT (and equivalent systems) is becoming pervasive in developers tooling. There's no stigma, it's used is actually encouraged. I don't think it's a life changer or that it'll save engineers the time to learn their craft.
Can you explain how you use it? Every time I try to use it for programming, the output is somewhat nonsensical. I also tried copilot but that was even worse (for terraform and python)
It will eventually hallucinate some property that doesn't exist, but since I kinda know what I'm looking for and just need the information condensed to move further I'll then verify the API/library docs with the given output and find my way through much faster than I would by starting on my own.
To me it does not become a code generator aside from boilerplates and starting points in languages I'm not an expert, it even helps me a lot to learn a new language (like Rust) where I can get a simple skeleton out of it for a task I want to do and code on my own later, just returning to ChatGPT to ask things like "how could I open a file with write access in ".
It's never helped me with any business logic properly (and I don't feed it my company's code, I will write a more generalised case as a prompt, or swap to an analogy to what I'm trying to do), it probably needs a lot more context that I'm not happy nor comfortable to feed into OpenAI's training dataset.
I'm been playing with Mistral's models locally through ollama and it's quite promising what one can do with a local model that you can feed a lot of context without caring about where private data is being stored, I see a big future if those models keep evolving as code assistants.
> is there any stigma with using ChatGPT in the workplace? I work in a big tech company. ChatGPT (and equivalent systems) is becoming pervasive in developers tooling. There's no stigma, it's used is actually encouraged. I don't think it's a life changer or that it'll save engineers the time to learn their craft.
At companies I've worked at, it's actively encouraged _if you follow the rules_. Specifically, you shouldn't be using SaaS LLMs like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc with your personal account for business purposes. That's likely a violation of your NDA.
However, it's absolutely encouraged to use the tools that the business blessed. That's what they're there for. Local LLMs seem to depend on licensing for the weights, etc but are also kind of a "don't ask don't tell" situation.
Of course, if the business hasn't gotten an approved tool by now... well, in that case there are going to be lots of employees using whatever they want, and you should probably be looking for a new job because that business is behind.
Also I wouldn't agree there's "no stigma". I know some people that use it to just make up word vomit for peer evaluations or extremely WET/cargo-culted code they don't understand for which I definitely judge them.