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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?

#61

Post by LVB »

ghshephard wrote: post #60
bmitc wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

Random example from today - we have a new product being deployed from a prominent vendor, and they started running into a ton of "out of socket" errors. This product was important to one of our telemetry organizations Q4 OKRs, and they weren't getting traction with the vendor, so they started reaching out internally. I got tagged as someone with a background in networking (though this was clearly not a networking iss…

“endlessly enthusiastic savant intern” is a good description!

I’ve had to sharpen my skills at verification and cross-checking, but the volume of pretty good insight from a much wider domain than I myself could consider has been so worth it.

It’s also worth noting to that I feel like I used to get this type of help, roughly, from good search engines. Maybe not quite as spoon fed but pretty good. But now… just blogspam and paid listings.

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

#63

Post by throw111123 »

dangus wrote: post #48
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".

Well, regarding your last sentence, I think that’s what OP is getting at. ChatGPT made one great product. Bitcoin is one great “product.” But the successors in the same category aren’t doing anything wildly more useful than the original “killer app.” Crypto never really revolutionized finance, it just provided one solid digital currency product. Smart contracts and NFTs went pretty much nowhere and I struggle to iden…

I agree. The benefits of Bitcoin started and ended with one thing: removing the middleman. We're seeing its real benefits in war or sanction contexts. If I want to move money from one country to another, without any KYC bs, my goto is Bitcoin and it has worked for me for the last decade. As a store of value, I'm not sure if its good, but that's secondary. So its kind of a niche thing and frowned upon because people will also use it for "bad" things, i.e., ransoms, terrorism, buying drugs, etc. But for me, a degree of crime is necessary for a healthy civilization.

All the crypto killer apps lost the plot, especially NFTs.

As for LLMs and more specifically, ChatGPT, they are not a niche thing so I agree in that their potential is way bigger. I'm not yet sure what that is, but I think it will change things profoundly. Replacing Google/SO is just a side effect of something bigger. But that's just my humble opinion.

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

#64

Post by appplication »

nunez wrote: post #56

I'm not bearish on OpenAI or AGI in general but I'm extremely meh about it. I'm not chomping at the bit to use it like so many are, and I constantly feel like a huge luddite or something for not being super excited about it. The value and time it saves makes sense for folks who struggle with a search engine (many) or doing tasks that are typically considered menial, like writing emails or coding boilerplate. However,…

I had a similar issue. I was trying to sort out how to do some niche mocking situation with pytest and despite its confidence and 5 attempts, ChatGPT was unable to produce a functional result or work through the crux of the problem.

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

#65

Post by aprdm »

dkrich wrote: post #51

Yes. 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.

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

#66

Post by crotchfire »

dkrich wrote: post #51

Yes. 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…

> to be almost universally loved by programmers

If AI-generated code is considered acceptable in your project then you aren't using a powerful-enough programming language. And you're paying the cost in code bloat.

How many Coq programmers find ChatGPT useful? How many nontrivial Coq programs written (and not merely memorized) by ChatGPT even pass type checking?

If you're considering AI-written code then you have a bloaty-code problem. Letting an AI write bloaty code conceals the symptoms (keystroke count) but tech debt will still kill your project sooner or later.

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

#67

Post by aprdm »

bmitc wrote: post #36
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 interact…

I think this speaks to the bubble you're in and how your kind of software development probably represents 0.1% of what's out there. I don't even know what WebGPU, Warren Abstract machine or "whatever is that you're trying to do" is.

I've been doing dev for ~20 years now, most of the work out there is essentially plumbing events/databases/REST APIs/regexes/JSON/configs/ web UIs in existing and well established frameworks/tools to solve business problems.

You likely work more R&D style environments, which again, probably represent a very low % of devs out there

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

#68

Post by gaganyaan »

bmitc wrote: post #36
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 interact…

Are you using GPT-3.5 or GPT-4? A hallucination like FableGL sounds like 3.5, which is not something you should base your expectations of the tech on.

Also, although I haven't seen it before, the Warren Abstract Machine seems like too big of a job for GPT-4. It excels at smaller tasks such as "Convert this C code to idiomatic Rust", or "Write a SQL query that grabs records from X, joins with Y, filters by Z". You might need to make small adjustments manually or by saying "Rewrite it with this in mind".

One really neat trick it did recently is that I uploaded a chart png I found on the internet, and asked it to write Seaborn code that matched the chart's style. It took ~3 follow-up tweak prompts, but then spat out code that worked. It also handles things like "How do I adjust this label that's positioned in chart coordinates over by 10 pixels?", which is an absolute pain to figure out from the docs.

Especially since you're getting answers noting the complexity, I think you're just asking too much of it for now. Try smaller tasks for now, and wait a while to try the big ones again.

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

#69

Post by aprdm »

theossuary wrote: post #43
aprdm wrote: 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…

I don't know, I've only used chatgtp 3.5, haven't tried other things. Out of your questions I would think only the last one would be a good fit.

The first one is open ended and I don't think M1 came before the "cut date of knowledge" in chatgtp. The 2nd one is too niche, likely not enough data to grab.

For the 3rd one, I don't know if the "date of knowledge cut" isn't recent enough - powershell became a thingy more recently and isn't wide adopted.. but I would expect to be a good fit

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

#70

Post by gaganyaan »

jprete wrote: post #54
soasdfg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything beyond one off asks is pretty hit or miss at least for me on if what ChatGPT is telling me is correct or not. Write me a complex SQL query that does this, write a python script that will do that, show me the regex that will find these patterns in a string, all of those work really nicely and do save time. When anything gets more complex than that, I feel like the main value it provides is to see what directi…

> I've tested both cases: correcting it when it was really wrong, and correcting it confidently when it was actually right. Both times it agreed that it was wrong and regenerated the answer it gave me. This is the peril of using what really is fundamentally an autocomplete engine, albeit an extremely powerful one, as a knowledge engine. In fact, RLHF favors this outcome strongly; if the human says "this is right", th…

The "just autocomplete" view is incorrect. I have actually had it push back on me when I incorrectly said that it was wrong.
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