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

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271–280 of 305 posts

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

#271

As anecdote, I just cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT a few days ago. It was fun to experiment with, but it’s obvious that 90% of their development effort has been going into censoring their models instead of improving their utility. I saw no tangible improvements over months. For example, the web browsing extension was released completely broken and then… remained broken. Meanwhile Phind.com has been doing web br…

> but OpenAI does not want my money.

For real, they could have done a demand based bidding system like AWS EC2 spot instances so serious light users could get in their tasks and big payers could launch their products and bulk processing users could have their jobs handled while most people are sleeping, but instead we got their weird waitlist that was probably more about giving M$ product ideas to steal.

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

#272

I asked ChatGPT last night how to debug a C function that was driving me nuts and it told me what I was doing wrong in one second.

Spot on.

I am not sure how people thought this was going to play out though. From 5/30/23 Pew survey

"58% of US adults know ChatGPT; only 14% have used it, with mixed opinions on its utility"

As much as that 42% that hadn't even heard of chatGPT is mind blowing, imagine hearing of chatGPT but not even being curious enough to be bothered.

90% can rot their brains on tiktok while 10% of us become actual cyborgs. We will see how that works out for the 90%.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you need to collaborate with the LLM, not just expect it to provide fully-formed answers. I've saved countless hours of work over the past few months using GPT-4 to help me solve problems. One general framework can be to use it to help you google a solution instead of a problem. Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate wheth…

>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going…

> I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine.

This is exactly what I don't want a search engine to do for me. Going through the list of results and evaluating them is an important part of my process, if what I'm trying to do is learn something new.

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

#274

Many have called this the come trough of AI disillusionment. It is the same thing that happens with a lot of new technology. A cool new technology is introduced, many folks go crazy over it, there are wild broad predictions of what it can do, the gap between the expectations and reality form, and this is where the trough is. It looks like we are up to here. But after that comes the more long term products, AI where p…

> Many have called this the come trough of AI disillusionment.

I don't this that's what's happening. I think it's more about a combination of summer break and people who were trying it out from curiosity and moved on.

I think the trough of disillusionment is still in the future.

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

#275
post #78

The more safeguards, regulations, copyrights they add, the less useful ChatGPT becomes. It's a thing with many products. And I don't think it's bad that it's happening - safeguards exist for a reason. And current generations of LLM is very prone to lying (I don't use term hallucination, as IMO it's an attempt to whitewash limits of AI). ChatGPT did a great job at showing people current state of AI. But they did even…

> I don't use term hallucination, as IMO it's an attempt to whitewash limits of AI Lying implies intent. I don't think the GPT models are purposely telling you misinformation. That's why we call them hallucinations. Because they model "thinks" it is telling the truth.

"Hallucination" is a term that is just as problematic as "lying", for the same reason. Both terms imply a cognition that just isn't happening. The model doesn't "think" it's telling the truth. It doesn't "think" at all, at least in that sense. Nor does it "believe" or "disbelieve" anything.

A better term than "lying" or "hallucination" would be "erroneous".

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

#278
post #155

Good, maybe I'll get to stop cancelling subscriptions because they added a LLM to a product I liked.

Seems like a silly reason to cancel if you otherwise like the product.

It's not at all silly if it gets in the way of using the product, or if the product is constantly putting it in front of you.

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a product, as the company charges money for the service.

In my construct I would say they’re charging for access to the POC to cover costs.

As soon as you're charging for a thing, it's a product.

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

#280

The culprit seems to be: > " Chollet thinks he knows what’s going on: summer vacation... a significant portion of students using ChatGPT to do their homework. It’s one of the most common uses for ChatGPT, according to Sam Gilbert, a data scientist and author. " https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-suddenly-isn-t-boomin...

Given that ChatGPT was just released last fall and it was expected to revolutionize practically everything, isn't it still telling that usage is falling? Where are the scientists, lawyers, doctors, office workers etc? You'd expect a slowing in the rate of growth, not shrinking. I don't know, if high school and undergrad students being off for the summer is enough to shrink your app maybe it's not all that? Edit: I un…

Honestly does it really matter much if their B2C usage is primarily students?

I’m more curious about their B2B operations which is likely what will trickle into more people’s lives. Their APIs seem to enable quite a few interesting possibilities with a low up front technical investment.

Too me the whole “generate me a bunch of text and display it as text” is a niche use case for a lot of people. Integrations for web search, document search, summarization, data extraction/transformation, and sentiment analysis are more useful and less likely to have hallucinations affect the end product.

Regarding their revenue I’m curious how the Azure hosted OpenAI services work for OpenAI. Billing is all through Microsoft and the documentation tries really hard to make it clear these are Azure services. I wonder if Microsoft just pays a licensing fee or if there is some revenue sharing going on.

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