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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?

#31

Post by quickthrower2 »

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OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two.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

The same way you control for hallucinations with say Medium articles or Stackoverflow answers. You verify the answer.

Being given some code and reviewing it is a lot quicker than writing that code. Copilot is great. Half the time it spits out the wrong answer but you can see what it was “thinking”.

Phind giving you an answer and references lets you quickly double check. Sometimes it hallucinates but the answer and references combo is much better than a Google search which in turn is better than nothing.

Of course I recommend people not use AI for everything. I will go straight to MDN for any WebAPI question and use —help as my first port of call on the command line. This is like your L2 cache as a developer. Using AI for everything is like swapping to disk for everything.

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

#32

Post by aprdm »

theossuary wrote: post #19
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OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two.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…

This interesting, I've had the opposite experience so far. I tried to do that because if it worked it'd be game changing; but it seems every question I ask it, I get half truths and lies back. Its impossible to figure out what is and isn't true either, because the LLM says everything with such a certainty. I end up having to research everything it says again to figure out what to trust. Sometimes it's good to get a f…

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.

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

#33

Post by throw111123 »

I think both Bitcoin and ChatGPT are revolutionary.

I use Bitcoin regularly, because I live in a third world country where it's really hard not to get your salary seized.

I use ChatGPT every day for lots of things and it has replaced Google search for me. And StackOverflow, of course.

Notice how I said BITCOIN and CHATGPT. Not "crypto" and "ai".

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

#36

Post by bmitc »

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 interacting with a search engine. There were zero continuations between questions and responses, and nearly 100% of the responses contained incorrect information.

Edit 1: As an example, I just asked ChatGPT to implement the Warren Abstract Machine for me. It gave me two different implementations, both with caveats that they are simple examples and not the whole thing, and neither implementation even type checked. It feels just like reading someone's homework where they copied off of someone else's work and had no idea what's going on. I don't see the point in this if it's just going to give me some high-level idea, which I already have, and an implementation that isn't remotely complete, much less one that doesn't even run. "Additionally, you'd need to ... handle backtracking". You don't say, ChatGPT?

Edit 2: I've kept on asking it to implement things I already know how to implement, even things that it probably has my code (being it was on GitHub) in its training data, and it keeps giving me code that doesn't even typecheck. ChatGPT is just doing what I've always imagined it doing: it's just doing a statistical merge. It has zero concept of anything I'm asking or it's saying.

Edit 3: I asked it something regarding WebGPU. It gave the typical, oh that's complex and "Here's a simplified example using GLFW and WebGPU through the F# WebGPU bindings provided by FableGL". But FableGL isn't a thing that exists, and even if it did, it wouldn't have anything to do with WebGPU which has nothing to do with OpenGL. And it imported Fable.Import.WebGPU and Fable.Import.GLFW, neither of which exist.

I mean, this is literally all smoke and mirrors. It boggles my mind when I hear people say they successfully use it every day. I haven't ever got it to tell me anything remotely correct.

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

#37

Post by bloppe »

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…

Mind if I ask what kind of projects you work on? And any specific examples where GPT really shined and delivered a lot of value?

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

rossdavidh wrote: post #17

I am reminded of the situation on HN five years ago, when if anyone said anything remotely skeptical about blockchain or crypto, there was an avalanche of comments saying the opposite. It should by now be apparent to all that it was in fact mostly people whose job or investments relied on blockchain/crypto hype, trying to silence anything that got in the way of their cashout. There are some valid uses for neural netw…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by floxy »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #26

> What am I missing here? I’m guessing you haven’t actually been using it personally beyond some superficial examples. Once you use it regularly to solve real world technical problems it’s pretty huge deal and the only people so far that I’ve met who voice ideas similar to yours, just simply haven’t used it beyond asking it questions which it isn’t designed for.

I wonder if anyone has a favorite pointer or two to their favorite real world examples.

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

#40

Post by alchemist1e9 »

throw111123 wrote: post #33

I think both Bitcoin and ChatGPT are revolutionary. I use Bitcoin regularly, because I live in a third world country where it's really hard not to get your salary seized. I use ChatGPT every day for lots of things and it has replaced Google search for me. And StackOverflow, of course. Notice how I said BITCOIN and CHATGPT. Not "crypto" and "ai".

This is a good point. “crypto” and “ai” are very much buzzwords for scammers.
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