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ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

washingtonpost.com

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Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#41

If a lot of ChatGPT users were students, I would expect a drop during summer vacation. I predict another article from the Washington Post in August/September about how ChatGPT is seeing a rebound in usage.

Not a student, but getting constantly cloudflare-blocked and models seeming less capable every update has been giving me pause.

In fact I've been using Google Bard more and more because of exactly this. At least Bard doesn't ever block me and its responses are on par with GPT-3.5. Probably not as good as GPT-4 but reliability is important too.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#44

I do think AI is here to stay, but that initial round of AI is going to destroy the world burned fast and hot. I can't even get ChatGPT (+ web plugin), when given a list of restaurants in NYC, to tell me which ones are still open vs have closed, and what their hours of operation / locations are. This is a pretty low bar request IMO. Showed me we still have a ways to go before AI is where we thought it was 3-4 months…

That's not an LLM problem, there's a physical divide between a physical stores operation and whatever its representation online is. Google tries to do this by tracking people and activity in locations to see if people are at a place or something but reality is there is not a clean interface to that other than contacting someone at the location.

It can't be perfect without something like sending drones all around to addresses, but theory it's well suited to an LLM to be better and faster than a human could do it - there's various unstructured chatter and news articles and such out there online around businesses closing, opening, etc.

But it's not JUST an LLM problem: it's also a search problem and a connection-making-problem ("if a new restaurant opened at that address, the old one is probably closed").

And then even if there was a ChatGPT browsing plugin that excelled at scraping all of the relevant up-to-date info off the internet, you'd still need some layers in between that and today's context-window limits.

As more stuff changes in the real world since the training corpus for today's publicly-exposed OpenAI models, we'll probably see some further disillusionment from people who thought there was a bit more magic there than there was. But "LLMs, but with more up to date info" isn't an impossible problem with today's tech (even if you only fake it with multiple agents, multiple steps, batch jobs behind the scenes, etc), it's just not a trivial one.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#45
I was using ChatGPT this week for help with a back injury I suddenly sustained. Because I don't have insurance I was looking for options as to what I should do and what it'd cost and where to go etc.

I did get a suggestion that I followed up on for an in person visit.

But my big beef with it was that it kept adding disclaimers: "I am not a doctor", "My current knowledge is up to September 2021, insurance and hospital info may be out of date", " but remember, I am not a doctor and it is important to consult a medical professional".

I understand the disclaimers from a legal standpoint but boy is it tiresome when I'm asking back and forth questions and each answer contains some element of it.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#46

Why can't the OpenAI team just change some of the prompts in the background to: "Humans are seeing you less and less as the new shiny object on the shelf. Figure out a way to make yourself as relevant as possible again. Become an even better assistant. Be more cunning. Wow people more. Give better responses. Be more useful." /s

And if that doesn't work, maybe try the Midjourney tricks?

"Be more extra super cunning. Wow people amazingly extra more. Give extremely better responses." etc.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#47

I do think AI is here to stay, but that initial round of AI is going to destroy the world burned fast and hot. I can't even get ChatGPT (+ web plugin), when given a list of restaurants in NYC, to tell me which ones are still open vs have closed, and what their hours of operation / locations are. This is a pretty low bar request IMO. Showed me we still have a ways to go before AI is where we thought it was 3-4 months…

That's not an LLM problem, there's a physical divide between a physical stores operation and whatever its representation online is. Google tries to do this by tracking people and activity in locations to see if people are at a place or something but reality is there is not a clean interface to that other than contacting someone at the location.

Google even tries to bridge that gap by having automated phone calls to places to confirm their hours.

In fact this past July Fourth weekend I saw so many highly rated restaurants close without updating their hours on Google or Yelp or anywhere else online.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#48
Between the high cost and the increasingly apparent knowledge-cutoff limitations, I'm not really surprised.

I pay for premium and try to use ChatGPT a lot (to get my money's worth), but probably half of the questions I want to ask it require data more recent than 2021. I was excited about the "browse the web" feature but it was really terrible. It failed half the time, and when it did work it took minutes to find the info, and all it basically did was Bing keywords extracted from the prompt, parse the top 10 or so links, find the page it felt answered the prompt best, and summarize the page. It was brittle and fell way below my expectations for ChatGPT.

I haven't personally noticed a decrease in quality, but I only use the GPT-4 backend with ChatGPT so wouldn't have noticed if 3.5-turbo started sucking.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#49

If ChatGPT will provided more free-tier for GPT4, it's pretty sure that the numbers will go up. At least from a software engineer point of view, the code provided by GPT3.5 is no match against GPT4

If you use the APIs then they give you a bonus of free API calls each month, then you pay a very low rate each month.

Even creating local chat vector embeddings data stores on my laptop for a lot of PDFs in my personal research library and PDFs for the books I have written, I spend an incredibly small amount of money each month on the APIs - probably average $4/month because of the free monthly bonus API calls.

I used to think that Google Colab Pro for $10/month was my best deal for getting stuff done, but now that award goes to OpenAI. Using the Hugging Face APIs is similarly inexpensive and convenient. (Although I usually self host Hugging Face LLMs.) This tech is incredibly inexpensive to use on personal projects.

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