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Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#131

Post by tymscar »

ttymck wrote: post #104
enumjorge wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay money to watch someone like you work. Like other responders, I've tried using chatgpt multiple times, and very often when I've used it for tasks where I was familiar with the subject matter, I was disappointed in the results. It's possible I haven't learned the proper way to get what I need from it and would love to learn how others are using it to solve real problems. I mean it. I'd pay money to watch stream…

Seconded. I remember the first time I watched a Netflix developer livestreaming their workday using an impressive neovim setup. It was eye opening. I need the same experience for this ChatGPT fanaticism.

The funny bit is that the same developer (primeagen) is not a massive fan of ChatGPT

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#132

Post by tymscar »

roboman wrote: post #95
nunez wrote: post #56

I'm not bearish on OpenAI or AGI in general but I'm extremely meh about it. I'm not chomping at the bit to use it like so many are, and I constantly feel like a huge luddite or something for not being super excited about it. The value and time it saves makes sense for folks who struggle with a search engine (many) or doing tasks that are typically considered menial, like writing emails or coding boilerplate. However,…

"(I personally don't mind coding boilerplate stuff, especially since I can learn how the framework works that way)" ^ Isn't that what folks used to say about programming in assembler? How much time do I want to spend learning frameworks (beyond what I already know) vs. how productive do I want to be?

I fully sympathise with this analogy and I think I have used it before myself. But there is a tremendous difference in practice. A compiler doesn’t produce randomly different code each time you run it, while an LLM, no matter how good will. At which point if something breaks, you have to take the reins.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#133

Post by anonzzzies »

eachro wrote: post #18
ghshephard wrote: post #9

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two. I've got a monitor dedicated 100% of the time to ChatGPT, and I interact with it non stop during the flow of technical scenarios and troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in, and shutti…

How do you control for hallucinations?

I don’t understand the obsession with hallucinations. People are completely wrong all the time; your co workers ‘hallucinate’ answers all day long. You verify and correct; what’s the difference?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#134

Post by anonzzzies »

dcchambers wrote: post #84

Yes and no. I think it's obvious there's a ton of value in the product and it's a massive force multiplyer for certain types of tasks. But it inherently cannot be trusted and still requires someone with expertise to verify and implement. I don't think they're going to achieve real AGI. I don't think we ever will. I think they'll get something "close enough" and claim they have it, but I don't think the path to AGI is…

LLMs won’t be the end of the line; openai (and others) have enough money to try a lot of different approaches to augment LLMs and in the end even take over.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#135

Post by _lvbh »

I’m pretty bullish on OpenAI as a company but less so the current LLM hype.

Everyone is trying to make the nth AI company and OpenAI profits most from it all. Meanwhile, they take the actually good ideas and integrate it into their own offerings, killing the competition.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#136

Post by mercer »

crotchfire wrote: post #66
dkrich wrote: post #51

Yes. Ben Thompson has recently written a lot of commentary about it and, to be fair, he seems quite bullish on it. But so far to me this seems to be almost universally loved by programmers while I don’t really know anyone else who uses it at all. I think after the past 15 years which saw some of the most rapid technological advances in history along with the greatest bull market in history, people’s credulity is off…

> to be almost universally loved by programmers If AI-generated code is considered acceptable in your project then you aren't using a powerful-enough programming language. And you're paying the cost in code bloat. How many Coq programmers find ChatGPT useful? How many nontrivial Coq programs written (and not merely memorized) by ChatGPT even pass type checking ? If you're considering AI-written code then you have a b…

How many Coq programmers 'anything', tho?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#137

Post by Rastonbury »

It depends what you think the goal is, AGI or making a ton of money. OpenAI doesn't seem that close to AGI.

But in terms of value creation they have turned numerous industries and jobs on their head. Things like copywriting or how they are destroying stackoverflow and quora. The next lowest fruit they are disrupting is front line chat/email support - this is usually never part of a core product but the market is massive, almost every company needs support - look at Zendesk or imagine the costs of Uber's offshore support army.

They are going for the AWS platform approach - every niche GPT wrapper that gets a modicum of success and has happy paying users, these users likely are likely to stick because it improves their work in obvious ways. OpenAI gets their slice, think of how AWS made it easy for anyone to spin up a service, sure some failed but the hurdle is much lower - with such a powerful general model, I don't need to spend millions training my own to launch. The issue for them is it'll likely be less sticky if competitors/open source models catch up - hasn't happened yet but it might.

I've never seen such disruption to ways of working in so many industries in my lifetime. If you're on HN you may not see any use in your work if specialised, but at the entry level (majority of workers), doing writing work in 30% of the time has been game changing.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#138

Post by Rastonbury »

busyant wrote: post #111
ghshephard wrote: post #9

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two. I've got a monitor dedicated 100% of the time to ChatGPT, and I interact with it non stop during the flow of technical scenarios and troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in, and shutti…

> OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two. Seconded. Let me tell you what I used to do. First, Imagine I have an error executing code or an error running some bit of 3rd party software. I go to Stack Overflow and search. I find posts related to my problem and I spend a great deal of time try…

As a non-professional coder, I'm honestly surprised there seems quite a few professional coders in this thread who don't do the first Stackoverflow first scenario. As someone learning code, shoehorning SO code when I don't understand 20% of the replies made the learning curve so steep, chatGPT has made this so much easier by changing it and telling me why will/won't work, even when watching out for or correcting hallucinations, overall its a time save

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#140

Post by bastawhiz »

bmitc wrote: post #36
ghshephard wrote: post #9

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two. I've got a monitor dedicated 100% of the time to ChatGPT, and I interact with it non stop during the flow of technical scenarios and troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in, and shutti…

Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point, it provided some solution, and then you were able to continue to expand upon that solution. I keep reading responses like yours, but I haven't seen any specific examples of problems being solved, so it all sounds very abstract. In my interactions with ChatGPT, it felt like just interact…

Not that I'm trying to change your mind, but some specific things that LLMs do for me:

- Helping to refactor SQL

- writing jq commands (I simply cannot)

- writing shell code (it happens just infrequently enough that I can't justify spending the time to get good)

- brainstorming names or puns. Word association is easier with a second person (or an LLM)

- figuring out why my AWS CLI commands aren't doing what I'm expecting them to be doing

- asking for reasons why a piece of code wouldn't work

I can competently do all of these things on my own if I havw to, but now I don't have to do them on my own so my life is easier.

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