GPT is a useful tool, but I don't think it's cost effective yet, and we might see an AI crash until that changes.
Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
141–150 of 321 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#142I sometimes use it to reformat some text or code, or write some very simple boilerplate code. So honestly it only saves me a few minutes a day typically.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can start by paying $20 for ChatGPT 4 and try it on tasks where you're familiar with the subject matter. I've tried it and I've been amazed.
Please, please, reference the tasks or chats that were especially impressive. For example, trying to get chat gpt to do something very simple for my work, like implementing a convolution it took me in circles and circles. It gets the general idea right, sure. But it actually makes significant minor errors that ended up being more confusing than helpful.
I had some code that I figured had a concurrency bug in it, but I wasn't sure.
I pasted it to GPT4, said "I think this code has a concurrency issue, can you find it for me?" and sure enough, it told me what line of code was causing the issue.
It is also great for doing things that I don't do often. For example, I almost never write bash scripts (like once or twice a year). Now days I just use gpt4 to write the script for me. For example a couple days ago I needed to walk through a folder full of files and pass them one by one into another program, and if that call was successful, append the processed file to a list of files that had been successfully processed. Trivial, but again, I never write bash scripts. GPT4 had it up and running in a few seconds.
I can throw a file at GPT4 and ask it to create mocks for my objects so I can go ahead and start writing unit tests.
Awhile back I had setup a new express server, but after I added my CORS config everything stopped working. I spent an hour debugging, no luck. I asked GPT4 what the issue was, and it noticed I had defined CORS on the wrong line (after I had started my server up). Oops.
GPT4 is also great at coming up with sample command line options for utilities. Sometimes good examples in man pages exist, sometimes they don't.
Honestly, I don't use GPT4 as much as I should!
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#144Whether or not you think it’s a fad, ChatGPT has close to 200 million users actively using their product. No crypto company was ever close to that.
Whether OpenAI’s API is a viable or risky product is a secondary and separate question. Yeah, there are a lot of wrappers out there. But that doesn’t matter with regards to the usefulness of LLMs generally.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#145Hype != vacuity. As long as Google, Amazon, and basically every huge tech firm are following their lead on LLM's and multi-modal but failing to catch up, there's only reason to be bullish on OpenAI
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 expec…
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#147Nope. Learn how to use it in almost everything you do. It’s a game changer. LLMs aren’t AGI. They’re far it. But they have massive uses for reasoning on available context. I’ll give you an example. I’m trying to set up some bulk monitoring for api across 200k jvm s. The api documents are horribly out of date. But I get the raw uri on the monitoring tools. I can just get these uri, send them into chatgpt and ask for a…
> Learn how to use it in almost everything you do. It’s a game changer.
This type of rhetoric is part of the reason so many compare the current crop of AI to cryptocurrency hype: proponents constantly telling others to shove the technical solution into everything, even where it’s not necessary or worse than the alternative.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#148OpenAI, 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…
I prompted it with “what is wrong with this code” and my broken sql and it told me exactly what was wrong.
I could have looked up the individual parts and found the problems myself, but then I would have spent at least 15 minutes on it instead of 30 seconds.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#149Honestly, I basically never use GPT. I tried, keeping it open and asking it questions and all that, but it just never provided me anything particularly useful. Just reading the documentation or talking to real people was just infinitely more valuable.
WolframAlpha and visual stuff have been more impactful for me, but they existed a long time before GPT. Even then, I don't use them that much.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
#150Yes. 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…
Hm, my wife uses it daily for her classes which aren't tech related. She describes it as a very patient professor who meets her where she is at and doesn't judge. English isn't her first language too and sometimes she can ask what a term means in English.
> English isn't her first language too and sometimes she can ask what a term means in English.
That’s a good example of a subpar use for an LLM. Dictionaries have existed since before computers. Digital dictionaries are faster, more reliable, and less power consuming than any LLM.