Earlier quoted context omitted.
One mistake I've seen people who are unhappy with GPT make is they ask it questions they already know the answer to, topics they are an expert in, and then tear down the response. Try asking it things you would google for. I'm finding it to be a pretty good "I'd like an answer to this question, I don't want to wade through a bunch of google results trying to find the one that answers this question" engine. Sometimes…
If the answer is wrong for topics you do know, why trust the answers for things you don’t? What’s going to be the term for Gell-Mann amnesia[1] but applied to LLMs instead of the media? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190808123852/http://larvatus.c...
The examples I'm thinking of where people completely dismissed ChatGPT were asking things like "tell me about ", "Explain this thing I wrote my thesis on".
In other words, throwing a toy problem at it, getting a bad answer, then making up their mind that it's not useful.
I'm not advocating blind trust in it, I'm just saying don't try a couple things and decide it's garbage. You're doing yourself a disservice.
I love asking it for unit tests and docstrings for my code. Is it perfect? No. But does it give me a starting point for something that I otherwise might not do? Absolutely.
I've asked it a lot of things that I'm familiar with the topic and can immediately eyeball it's answer, either because I'm having a brainfart or because it's a little fiddly to work out. It can be good at those.
I've asked it a lot of questions with things that I'm not at all familiar with, probably the best example is Powershell, and it's provided good answers, or answers that were at least able to lead me in the right direction so I can iterate towards an answer. But then I also tried to use it to write an AWK script and it failed miserably, but got 80% of the way there. Which, honestly, is about the best I've ever been able to do with any complex AWK script. :-)