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Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

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151–160 of 321 posts

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

#151

OpenAI has changed education. I'm a teacher who is constantly learning new things. I can learn things I would have never been able to learn before because of AIs like ChatGPT. My students are learning more and faster than ever before. Learning Management Systems like Canvas and Blackboard made a lot of money. I could argue they are obsolete now.

> OpenAI has changed education.

No, it objectively has not. Maybe it has changed how you teach, but “education” is much larger than any of us. Until school curriculums around the world incorporate ChatGPT—quite the dystopian scenario—they have not changed education.

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

#152
The concept of AGI is mostly hand-wavy fluff and not thought through very well on any philosophical level. Too many people talking about this have gotten their concepts of AI from science fiction novels, not careful thought and analysis.

The actual tools, though, are definitely useful, even if they have a ton of issues still. Personally it gives me basic factual errors constantly, but I’m sure this will be worked out in time.

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

#153
post #36

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two.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…

My experience is much the same, far from "I've essentially got 15-20 high-priced world-class consultants in every field that I chose to pull from, working at my beck and call..." that OP mentions.

I suspect it is because I tend to have off piste questions which are not recipes or high-level ideas. It is where it'd be most useful to me, but it is at the same time where least training data is going to be.

It is also where actual legitimate experts are most useful: the special sauce, not the meat and potatoes.

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

#154

The concept of AGI is mostly hand-wavy fluff and not thought through very well on any philosophical level. Too many people talking about this have gotten their concepts of AI from science fiction novels, not careful thought and analysis. The actual tools, though, are definitely useful, even if they have a ton of issues still. Personally it gives me basic factual errors constantly, but I’m sure this will be worked out…

Prompt for ChatGPT4: give me a quick breakdown regarding how i can become a "space bear trainer" who specialises in preparing bears for space missions.

Answer:

To become a "space bear trainer," a role that combines aspects of zoology, space mission planning, and training for extreme environments, you would need to follow a multi-disciplinary approach …

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hall…

> I'm honestly surprised there seems quite a few professional coders in this thread who don't do the first Stackoverflow first scenario

You just found your path to become a better developer than the majority then

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

#156
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using 3.5 or 4? And what kind of things are you trying to do ? It's not like asking it, copy + pasting results + paste errors loop takes a long time to validate if it works or not. Even when it doesn't work it saves me time vs google-ing and also not solving my problem. Or gives me insights.

In all honesty I've only been using InstantClaude so far due to the larger context window being something I'd want down the line. What should I be using in your opinion to get the best results? Examples I can think of where it gave wrong info was: - I asked to compare the size of the MacBook m1 and the 16" framework laptops - I asked how to add the nixpgs-unstable channel in NixOS. - I asked to help write a power she…

So shouldn't you try gpt4 before complaining?

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All SRE type work. Where it specifically shines is whenever you need to dig deep into linux kernel specifics, networking specifics, code in different languages to handle issues (Rust (which I don't know), Go, Python, Bash, etc...), All sorts of error messages it knows so often what precisely needs to be done to resolve, using and configuring graphing, database, TSDB type queries, formulating a clever tcpdump query fo…

> having to dig in and learn the fundamentals on a lot of things - which is unsustainable if you are touching 30-50 different technology stacks. IMO, this is the crux of the problem, and it’s caused by allowing dev teams to use whatever stack they want, without also requiring them to support it. More cynically, it will always be the case if teams are allowed to use whatever they want, regardless of “service ownership…

> More cynically, it will always be the case if teams are allowed to use whatever they want

Are you a manager?

My cynical take is that this happens when managers choose tech as they know nothing and push for LinkedIn driven development

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

#158

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…

Have you checked the results it has given you? I tried it with some science related stuff. It literally made up a paper that didn't exist. I pointed this out so it linked to a real paper on an unrelated subject. For coding related stuff it is like a better stack overflow, but again it doesn't work well with niche libraries, or even some fairly big ones.

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

#159

The concept of AGI is mostly hand-wavy fluff and not thought through very well on any philosophical level. Too many people talking about this have gotten their concepts of AI from science fiction novels, not careful thought and analysis. The actual tools, though, are definitely useful, even if they have a ton of issues still. Personally it gives me basic factual errors constantly, but I’m sure this will be worked out…

Prompt for ChatGPT4: give me a quick breakdown regarding how i can become a "space bear trainer" who specialises in preparing bears for space missions. Answer: To become a "space bear trainer," a role that combines aspects of zoology, space mission planning, and training for extreme environments, you would need to follow a multi-disciplinary approach …

There is at once nothing “wrong” with this response, and it is ridiculous. It is not a question — which without considerable pre-hedging — a person could consider seriously and most would assume an alternative hypothesis for why it is being asked.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompt for ChatGPT4: give me a quick breakdown regarding how i can become a "space bear trainer" who specialises in preparing bears for space missions. Answer: To become a "space bear trainer," a role that combines aspects of zoology, space mission planning, and training for extreme environments, you would need to follow a multi-disciplinary approach …

There is at once nothing “wrong” with this response, and it is ridiculous. It is not a question — which without considerable pre-hedging — a person could consider seriously and most would assume an alternative hypothesis for why it is being asked.

Pasting huge prompts into HN comments is really irritating. Make whatever point you’re trying to make without doing that.

It indeed does tend to assume that you’re speaking hypothetically and for a potentially fictional purpose. Which is a better approach, as far as I’m concerned. I prefer that to it constantly being a nanny that questions everything.

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