I've spent a couple of hours playing with ChatGPT since it was released and I am convinced people are not freaking out about it enough.
It is well beyond merely retrieving compressed knowledge; I see a lot of capability for synthesis and what I can only call 'understanding'.
I think a lot of people are getting tripped up by the fact it's trained to be very conservative in terms of what topics it will discuss. It's easy to think it's avoiding questions because it can't answer them. But often if you reframe the question you realize it is able to answer.
I also think there's an art to formulating your query. It's easy to get a bad response because your question is interpreted too literally, or didn't really say what you meant. Reframing can often get much better results.
It also appears bad at numbers/counting.
I think these are causing many people to underestimate it.
It's also easy to overestimate it sometimes - it often generates plausible but not quite right answers. You've got to read quite closely to make sure it's actually right.
But it's very good at a lot of things. Code synthesis. Summarization, Reformulation, explanation, information retrieval.
I think it's going to change whole industries.
It's also getting really hard to definitively say "well, AI definitely can't do X". X is getting small.
I think this is a watershed moment and people should be thinking hard about the implications.
This sample shocked me:
https://mobile.twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/15981025960653...
I got it to write a poem, altered it step by step so that's clearly not something it will have seen before, and then asked it questions.
The bit where it explains why chocolate frogs mightn't make Ron from Harry Potter sick because of some wierd fact in that world, shocked me, because it's a really good retrieval of a very deep fact, relevant to a clearly out of sample input, and a good synthesis of that fact with reality.
It's amazing.
