Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 305 posts

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

#291

Post by CRConrad »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #83
rafael-lua wrote: post #76

I use ChatGPT mostly for translation. It is amazing what it can do from Chinese to English. Sentences actually make sense and consider context. What are the most popular usages for it? Homework?

Translation is a killer feature. All https//bitecode.dev is in english, but I'm French. When I needed some complicated translation, deepl and google translate were rarely up to the task. They has about the same level of proficiency than me with auto-correct, sometimes less. For single rare or technical words, I used Wikipedia a lot: you chose your topic in your language, you look for the article in English, and voila…

Exactement, that Wikipedia trick is something I've done – and advocated – for years now.

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

#292

Post by orwin »

throwawayadvsec wrote: post #184
orwin wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with that. It's very useful writing boilerplate and documentation, but two third the time I'm in front of a bug I'm to lazy to understand and ask ChatGPT, with context and all, the answer is wrong. I can fiddle with it to reduce that to a third of the time, but in the end, only the questions that are really, really hard to figure on your own are left. Still, it's way better and more efficient than Google.…

What tech stack(s) do you work with?

Sorry i'm a bit late. Depends. Professionally, its a mix a python, typescript (those i practically never use ChatGPT for, or rather, i use it for questions i usually ask google/reddit/SO), terraform/terragrunt on AWS with some Cisco config and some other hardware stack i don't remember but that require custom terraform providers. I automate the deployment of the hardware, so i think writing custom providers and terraform is roughly a third of what i do and i cannot use ChatGPT for that, its output is way too bad.

Personnally, a lot of bash, C, AWK at the moment (typescript + html/css until last april, now i'm back to the basics). The figure i gave in my post were more for that.

The last time i used it was yesterday, i wanted to hack something on an old game i used steam+proton for. I knew it was a weird Wineprefix, so i asked ChatGPT for it, i might have asked poorly, but after fiddling, i had the response (tbh i had to look how to get the game ID, so in the end i lost more time than not), then when it still didn't work, cause the path was shit, i entered all necessary context in ChaGPT4, and it couldn't find the easy "USER=steamuser" env variable to add before launching Wine. I stopped after 10 minutes, looked into a example Wine cfg file, understood the issue and fixed the problem myself.

I mean, it's probably good for really basic stuff, so it could have helped me when i was starting, but 80% of the stuff i code automatically without really thinking about it, and when i have to stop to think, ChatGPT isn't helping. Also tbh, VSCode is really, really good and fix my old, time-consuming task of "what's this argument again?"

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

#293

Post by JohnFen »

mrkramer wrote: post #286
JohnFen wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? I mean yes there is description of a search result but that doesn't tell you very much about the website or the quality of information that you are getting. Bing did a good thing with their annotations[0] because my thinking is that something like annotations lower the complexity of browsing and skimming through search results. [0] https://blogs.bing.com/…

> So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same?

They don't all look the same. They all tend to go to different places. I find that it's reasonably easy to spot a great deal of garbage sites just from their domain name or url, and that weeds out a large chunk. Ignoring multiple results for the same site also weeds out a large chunk (I only need one of them).

The rest, I just click on and take a look at the page. It's pretty quick and easy to weed out most of the garbage ones with a quick skim.

The rest, I sample, read captions and boxes, skim paragraphs and such to determine if it's along the lines of what I want. That's pretty quick too.

For the most part, it's the same process that you use when researching in a library.

The reason that I want to do this myself rather than outsourcing it is because I'll inevitably learn something in the process that will shift my viewpoint to one that's more targeted or meaningful for the purpose I have in searching.

It doesn't matter how good the engine is at collating and summarizing results -- even if it's perfect, my understanding not only of what I'm looking to learn, but also discovery of important but serendipitous or unexpected knowledge, is lessened.

It's a bit like the difference between reading Cliff's (or Cole's) Notes about a book and reading the book.

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

#294

Post by IanCal »

ChatGTP wrote: post #230
IanCal wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose for example that you talk to it about combating judicial bias. Ok, here you go. https://chat.openai.com/share/b083b98d-6904-4c85-94fc-abdc76... A quick discussion of where things are "now", some proposals, a selection of three and then ethical concerns about implementing the proposals. I propose a method of increasing diversity and have it critique it.

I did a Google search for the same topic and personally found the top link full of much more useful and practical information. YMMV but a high level summary like that isn’t necessarily what people want. You can probe the bot harder but why bother when I could just Google and read a little? It’s actually less effort for better information in some sense.

I'm not arguing here what I did was better than a search, but that it's not some forbidden information. I often feel like complaints about what you can do with these things come from not knowing how to use them. It did also take virtually no effort.

A benefit is being able to ask questions though, you can see I proposed a specific idea and had it reply - you can delve more or less into that. Don't want a high level summary? Ask for more details on the part you're interested in. Want a higher level one or simpler one? Ask.

As things get less direct this gets better. I talked to it about projects for my son, narrowed down through different interests and got some great recommendations. One involved building a radio, which it then could explain at several levels of detail for children. That gets into "hope someone made a list and then go through loads for relevant things, lookup more detail from them then find several different resources for kid friendly explanations".

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

#295

Post by NovaDudely »

JohnFen wrote: post #274
NovaDudely wrote: post #36

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.

You could well be right, it is far too early for any of us to call when this will happen. Most likely we will only know once it is in full swing.

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

#296

Post by worrycue »

RC_ITR wrote: post #250
worrycue wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading helps build vocabulary and probably helps improve her use of the language as a whole. It’s like running to lose weight but you decide to cheat by taking a cab instead. With math, when you are first learning the very basics it helps to do a few problems by hand to get a feel of things. Sure if you have a degree in STEM have have deal with advance math you can probably get away with just reading the theory only…

My argument is that reading is actually a very bad way to learn/communicate and always has been. We just built a very strong culture encouraging it because for a long time it was the most efficient way to do both things. Now it’s not, but the tradition of it being important is hard to shake. The closest analogue in my mind is how the classics in their original Greek were considered the only true way to learn for a ve…

Reading is a perfectly fine way to increase one’s vocabulary. It’s not the only way - TV and actually conversation would work too. I don’t see why it’s a bad way. It’s cheap and doesn’t require manpower per session.

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

#297

Post by nightski »

telltruth wrote: post #251

Most people don’t know this but OpenAI is actually very dysfunctional company and only accidentally successfully because of just handful of right people having a rather lucky hunch (Schulman, Redcliff et al). However, execution wise they are really really poor. You can see this i myriad of problems such as their dataset is still stuck in 2022, plugins was a complete disaster, web browser mode sucks, app is poor, unab…

I was with you until you said Bard. Sorry Google, no thanks. Open source is the future of these models.

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

#298

Post by juliensalinas »

nostromo wrote: post #89
verdverm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a student, stopped using ChatGPT because OpenAI is unreliable. Moved on to other models and providers

Can you name some models or providers? I've been frustrated with OpenAI's constraints and would love to know my options.

NLP Cloud (especially the Dolphin and Fine-tuned GPT-NeoX 20B models)

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

#299

Post by juliensalinas »

telltruth wrote: post #251

Most people don’t know this but OpenAI is actually very dysfunctional company and only accidentally successfully because of just handful of right people having a rather lucky hunch (Schulman, Redcliff et al). However, execution wise they are really really poor. You can see this i myriad of problems such as their dataset is still stuck in 2022, plugins was a complete disaster, web browser mode sucks, app is poor, unab…

Totally agree. Actually a couple of months ago Sam Altman even admitted that they had a very hard time doing proper "engineering" (meaning that they had the right team to create a very good LLM but not the right team to productionize and their models and APIs). Many people are actually finding the OpenAI API very unstable and do not plan to rely on OpenAI for their production workloads.

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

#300

Post by shrimpx »

IanCal wrote: post #294
ChatGTP wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a Google search for the same topic and personally found the top link full of much more useful and practical information. YMMV but a high level summary like that isn’t necessarily what people want. You can probe the bot harder but why bother when I could just Google and read a little? It’s actually less effort for better information in some sense.

I'm not arguing here what I did was better than a search, but that it's not some forbidden information. I often feel like complaints about what you can do with these things come from not knowing how to use them. It did also take virtually no effort. A benefit is being able to ask questions though, you can see I proposed a specific idea and had it reply - you can delve more or less into that. Don't want a high level s…

Btw I didn't mean to imply it's forbidden information. It's just not that good/impressive/sharp. It often just doesn't inspire going back for more.

Also like I said, I find it useful for software design. It ultimately makes a bunch of mistakes but I find the conversation useful and I walk away with usable ideas. I don't often start new software, so I don't go to it often for this.

I think it's useful at the high level stuff; giving you ideas and laying out options, like the chat log you posted. But as you dive into detail I find two things happen:

(a) It starts to make egregious errors.

(b) You bias it with your more detailed questions.

When I talked to it about electricity, it started contradicting itself about how energy is carried, whether by electrons' kinetic energy or by "the field". I asked it "so is electrical energy encoded in electrons' kinetic energy or not?" and then it started to say that oh yes, that's how it's encoded. It seems it used my question to reinforce that knowledge which previously it was confused about. Since I personally don't know how electrical energy is carried, I lost confidence that I'm learning correctly. This happens often. "I'm sorry about the confusion. You are right. ..."

Post reply on HN