Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

1) I needed to display a very high resolution image to a user. I have experience in GIS and imagery, so I knew I should use an image pyramid in some way, and from previous experience assumed I needed some server to cleverly serve the tiles. But I didn't want to implement it myself, and googling 'map server' led to rabbit holes. I consulted with chatGPT, and while it gave me several fake solutions, eventually it suggested using gdal2tiles.py to create the pyramid and then serve it directly with a CDN. This never occurred to me, and is a much better fit to this problem. This saved a LOT of time (on either building my own server or fudging with other solutions) 2) I have a streamlit service, and needed to use some of my infra inside, infra that was written using async-await. Unfortunately, streamlit and asyncio don't play nice together (boo streamlit). I went to chatGPT hoping it would find me a way to make it work anyway, and after trying everything it suggested (which failed), I tried googling myself, and spent several days without a solution. Eventually, I went back to chatGPT and it suggested building a small HTTP service that would serve the results, and access it in streamlit using requests, no async-await required. It's a hacky solution, but significantly faster than reimplementing my streamlit dashboard in another framework or rewriting my infra without async-await. It saved loads of time.

I think you'd agree these aren't junior level issues. ChatGPT definitely didn't solve every problem I came to it with, probably not even most, and even when it did I had to intervene signficantly. I feel the more experienced you are as a developer, the less valuable it is. But when you need to tinker in a field you're not proficient at, or if you need to brainstorm a solution to a tricky problem, it can be a great tool. I understand why many swear by it. It takes a while to learn what sort of issues are good to turn to chatGPT with and which aren't, and also how to phrase those issues

I am switching to teaching / consulting in AI. Chatbots are a part of that. I've reviewed some chatlogs, and some people get abyssimal results, which are entirely explainable and are 100% their fault.

It's not able to output complete code.

It always adds comments, even when I ask it not to.

It doesn't follow instructions in general.

In complex issues it has less "memory", that is it's not able to observe multiple constraints at the same time. The limit was much higher before.

Just take any code which is EDIT: I had some deprecation warnings in python recently, which it quickly fixed. Googled that on a different computer and found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76689364/how-to-fix-depr...

This is the transcript. Forgive my dumb last question, I didn't understand the code, what it did worked well.

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User: Please fix the deprecation warning on this code: for i in range(0,3): df.loc[df['date'] ChatGPT: The code you've provided updates the 'date' column in a DataFrame df by adding one year to each date that is earlier than June 1, 2023. However, this operation is performed multiple times due to the loop, which is likely not intended and could be the source of inefficiency or unexpected results.

To fix this, you should update the dates in a vectorized way without using a loop. Here's the corrected code:

  import pandas as pd
  # Sample DataFrame creation for demonstration (you should use your own DataFrame 'df')
  # df = pd.DataFrame({'date': pd.to_datetime(['2022-05-01', '2023-07-01', '2024-08-01'])})

  # Correcting the date manipulation
  df.loc[df['date'] 

  import pandas as pd

  # Original code
  df = pd.DataFrame({'date': pd.to_datetime(['2022-05-01', '2023-07-01', '2024-08-01'])})
  for i in range(0,3):
      df.loc[df['date']