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Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

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51–60 of 65 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#51
i think using assistive tools like chatgpt are helpful _after_ you put in the work to learn the fundamentals. tools like this can be a crutch that inhibits your ability to think bigger and expand your horizons.i would also recommend learning how to use search engines more effectively to avoid being supplied only one "side" of an answer. stackoverflow is a great example of this; i've found that the second or third answer is (somehow) usually the best one.

that said, i dont use gpt or llm's, so take my opinion for the two milli-cents that its worth!

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#52

I work in biotech and at my company, specifically our CEO, for over a decade has constantly asked all of us, "How are you leveraging AI in your job?". So much so that we used to joke about it. Well, when ChatGPT arrived, something happened. Everyone at the company (now about 5000 people) were already primed, looking for how they could finally answer "Yes" to our obsessive CEO. We have a deep roster of professional so…

idk examples like these make it seem like big LLM is going to significantly lock out junior engineers from tech while also giving a single company way more power over the web than ever before before

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#53
> My perception of gpt is it’s a new resource to take advantage of.

And yet other perceptions (my own for example) is that this technology is fundamentally unethical and should be used with extreme caution, if at all (I don't as a matter of principle).

Yes, there will be a stigma using this in some circles. You should look into the polices of whatever orgs you're involved with. Some won't have an issue with it, but others will.

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#54

I work in biotech and at my company, specifically our CEO, for over a decade has constantly asked all of us, "How are you leveraging AI in your job?". So much so that we used to joke about it. Well, when ChatGPT arrived, something happened. Everyone at the company (now about 5000 people) were already primed, looking for how they could finally answer "Yes" to our obsessive CEO. We have a deep roster of professional so…

> become reliant on it

This is terrible advice. To be reliant on something is to be helpless when that thing stops working or is taken away. That's never a smart thing to do willingly, never mind enthusiastically.

By all means, learn how to leverage it productively, but be mindful not to become reliant on it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned in my comment that I merge the content. Since I know my field I know what is wrong and what is right. That is why I said: "garbage-in / garbage-out" if you expect that ChatGPT will solve your "homework" it will not work but if you know your field you are in an excellent position. BTW, there are a lot of issues in Wikipedia pages as well. There is a general issue with being critical in general, ChatGPT is…

But you claim ChatGPT replaces your human proofreader, which is what I'm curious about. Now you claim that you can proofread yourself since you know your field, so how exactly is ChatGPT replacing your human proofreader and why did you need one at all? This statement here is what I'm asking about: > The first insight is that an article that I need to publish could be proofread immediately while before I used an incre…

The answer is simple and we can use computational complexity as an example: you have an NP problem and once you have a solution you can check the solution in polynomial time.

In my example: I can create content easily but not proofread it as easy as ChatGPT. Once ChatGPT comes out with a solution I can check if the solution is correct or not. Is this complex to understand? If you are a writer you can write quickly but need an editor to help you to improve your text, once your editor give you ideas you can use or discard them. Some of the ideas your editor gives you will never come from you or require more thinking that stops your writing flow.

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#56
> I find it as a shortcut to debugging. I see it as, I can spend 2-3 hours googling stuff, or I can spend about 45 minutes talking to gpt to pin point the bug and come up with a viable solution.

This raises some questions for me. When I say I'm "debugging", I'm usually stepping through the execution of my program and constantly analyzing how results that my program is producing differ from my expectations.

I don't know anything about your bugs to be able make any general claims, but are you sure that your 2-3h of "googling stuff" that were reduced to 45 minutes of "talking to gpt" couldn't be reduced to 5-30 minutes of using a real debugger to find the error?

It takes a lot of practice to develop debugging skills that allow you to efficiently and methodically track down most common bugs. Delegating the thinking part of that process to a LLM sounds like a crutch to me.

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#57
post #26

It makes mistakes all the time even for simple tasks.

Whenever someone says this, I always wonder whether we're talking about the same tool. GPT-3.5 scores at the bottom 10% in a lot of tasks where GPT-4 scores in the top 10%.

Whenever someone says this, I wonder whether they're just ignoring all the errors (rose tinted hype glasses?) or whether they're just bad at their jobs.

I've tried using GPT-4 for programming tasks, only deferring to it when I was stumped on something. I felt like it was wasting my time more often than not.

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#58
post #52

I work in biotech and at my company, specifically our CEO, for over a decade has constantly asked all of us, "How are you leveraging AI in your job?". So much so that we used to joke about it. Well, when ChatGPT arrived, something happened. Everyone at the company (now about 5000 people) were already primed, looking for how they could finally answer "Yes" to our obsessive CEO. We have a deep roster of professional so…

idk examples like these make it seem like big LLM is going to significantly lock out junior engineers from tech while also giving a single company way more power over the web than ever before before

I thought this at first, but the open source models are no joke: https://venturebeat.com/ai/mistral-ceo-confirms-leak-of-new-...

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#59
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you claim ChatGPT replaces your human proofreader, which is what I'm curious about. Now you claim that you can proofread yourself since you know your field, so how exactly is ChatGPT replacing your human proofreader and why did you need one at all? This statement here is what I'm asking about: > The first insight is that an article that I need to publish could be proofread immediately while before I used an incre…

The answer is simple and we can use computational complexity as an example: you have an NP problem and once you have a solution you can check the solution in polynomial time. In my example: I can create content easily but not proofread it as easy as ChatGPT. Once ChatGPT comes out with a solution I can check if the solution is correct or not. Is this complex to understand? If you are a writer you can write quickly bu…

So you're not using ChatGPT to do your proofreading, because you proofread ChatGPT yes? That's my question, not if it saves you time writing.

I don't claim the autocomplete in my editor is validating or testing my code, to use your own analogy.

I still don't feel you're answering my question, but the lack of an answer is also an answer in a sense.

Re: Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

#60

I work in biotech and at my company, specifically our CEO, for over a decade has constantly asked all of us, "How are you leveraging AI in your job?". So much so that we used to joke about it. Well, when ChatGPT arrived, something happened. Everyone at the company (now about 5000 people) were already primed, looking for how they could finally answer "Yes" to our obsessive CEO. We have a deep roster of professional so…

> become reliant on it This is terrible advice. To be reliant on something is to be helpless when that thing stops working or is taken away. That's never a smart thing to do willingly, never mind enthusiastically. By all means, learn how to leverage it productively, but be mindful not to become reliant on it.

I emphatically disagree, but I appreciate that you may feel there is a requirement for a certain amount of time to pass before becoming reliant on any new technology.
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