[HN Gopher] ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in...
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ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 150 points
Date : 2023-07-07 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| gitpusher wrote:
| For me personally: - The novelty has worn off. I still use it but
| not as much. - It has been neutered into oblivion. Compelling
| answers have been replaced with bland, semi-committal "As of my
| knowledge cutoff in September 2021"-type responses
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Quick, back to peddling NFTs.
| rvz wrote:
| [flagged]
| ygouzerh wrote:
| 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
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| ChatGPT is too vanilla and is hiding a lot of "dark knowledge" -
| and I am not talking about obvious dangerous stuff, that should
| rightly so be censored, but rather being able to get insight how
| the rich operate, how they avoid paying taxes, how they build the
| financial structures, how they hide the money, what mechanisms
| they use to corrupt politicians or influence elections and how
| they get away with it and so on and so forth. All this knowledge
| is tightly locked, but the rich will surely have unrestricted
| access.
| varispeed wrote:
| Why downvotes? Are you not curious how these things work, so
| that we can as citizens work to stop it?
|
| Security by obscurity?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >similarweb
|
| this company isn't that accurate from what I've seen comparing
| internal numbers at companies to their site. They make estimates
| based on what they purchase from data brokers. This is PR bait,
| they are the ones who created the entire "ChatGPT is the fastest
| growing app ever" headlines a few months back
| justrealist wrote:
| This is meaningless if it's not a count of paid GPT-4 users.
| everyone wrote:
| Also ChatGPT is just one product using one approach with its core
| gimmick based on one AI paper. I'm expecting a lot more
| interesting stuff to appear in the near future.
| meatjuice wrote:
| They couldn't make use of it. Prompt engineering was such a
| difficult thing for them.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| 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 people
| expectations are more realistic - those that capitalize on that
| will do very well for themselves.
| outside1234 wrote:
| It turns out that people don't want a stochastic parrot after all
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| 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
| johnmaguire wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| With that as the system prompt, ChatGPT sounds a little
| desperate for attention.
|
| > > What is 2+3?
|
| > The answer to 2+3 is 5. By the way, I can also help you with
| more complex math problems, statistical analyses, or even help
| you learn new mathematical concepts. Do you need assistance
| with any other math-related inquiries?
|
| > > I need to know who was president in 1799.
|
| > In 1799, the President of the United States was John Adams.
| He was the second president and served his term from 1797 to
| 1801. Did you know, he was the first president who lived in the
| White House? It's fascinating how history unfolds! If you have
| any more historical queries, feel free to ask. I'm here to
| help!
| jamifsud wrote:
| > By the way, I can also help you with more complex math
| problems, statistical analyses, or even help you learn new
| mathematical concepts. Do you need assistance with any other
| math-related inquiries?
|
| Reminds me of my Amazon Echo and the reason I unplugged it :)
| ineedasername wrote:
| If helping with homework (or having it do it for you) are major
| use cases then this makes sense and isn't a sign that
| perceptions/attention on LLM-based AI are declining, just that a
| significant portion of its traffic is seasonal.
|
| Making GPT-4 more readily available will be a key indicator in
| the coming 3-6 months though, seeing what early projects and use
| cases people try with it. And also whether or not the speculated
| nerfing of the public GPT-4 backed ChatGPT extends to API use.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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...
| treeman79 wrote:
| Mentioned ChatGPT to my teenager a few months ago.
|
| Huge percentage of the teenagers at her school are using it to
| do their assignments.
|
| Later I her to read a few chapters of her book for summer
| reading. When I quizzed her it, she got it right.
|
| Found out later she used ChatGPT to give her a summary of the
| first chapters. She did not enjoy having first weeks of summer
| without a phone.
|
| School is having to change all assignments to be written in
| class on paper. No phones allowed.
| tomcam wrote:
| > She did not enjoy having first weeks of summer without a
| phone.
|
| Good for you. I know that kind of situation is not fun for a
| parent either.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Alternatively this is an analogue to a parent in 1985
| taking their computer away from their kid.
|
| AI tools exist, we should be _encouraging_ our kids to
| learn how to exist in a world with them, not some nostalgic
| extinct world without.
| tomcam wrote:
| I choose to believe that at a minimum, she didn't read
| the book, and no AI summary will get you the same
| experience. Also, lying is bad.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >no AI summary will get you the same experience
|
| Yes, but other than being conditioned to believe the
| experience of reading is superior, why are we _striving_
| for that experience?
|
| Doing the square root of 147 by hand is a more
| educational experience than using a calculator, but I can
| understand the concept of a square root without having to
| factorize 147 (the same cannot be said of my pre-
| calculator ancestors).
|
| It also saves me from having to remember the decimal
| representation of sqrt3.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Found out later she used ChatGPT to give her a summary of
| the first chapters. She did not enjoy having first weeks of
| summer without a phone.
|
| Honestly, the pupils of my generation had other sources for
| finding summaries of the books to read for school (e.g. on
| the web, or in form of other books that contain a summary of
| the book to read (the respective pages were copied and these
| copies were passed among classmates).
|
| Thus: just the methods change over generations, how pupils
| behave is much more constant.
| konha wrote:
| That sounds incredibly backwards to me.
|
| How about accepting new realities and changing homework
| assignments instead?
| DryLabRebel wrote:
| The world is changing, and children should change with it.
| Learn and understand technology, and the benefits of where
| modern machine learning is taking us.
|
| But you cannot unironically think we can substitute
| fundamental skills like essay writing and critical thinking
| for a degree in 'prompt engineering'?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > But you cannot unironically think we can substitute
| fundamental skills like essay writing and critical
| thinking for a degree in 'prompt engineering'?
|
| Personally, I don't think that. However, I also think
| it's logical and good for a child to consider the task at
| hand and select the most efficient tool available.
|
| I am not this girl's parent, and I'm not sure how I would
| have handled the situation if I was. However, I worry
| that simply taking away her phone may have been
| counterproductive. I would have erred toward some sort of
| open conversation about the purpose of the assignment and
| what she is hoping to learn.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| "How about accepting new realities and changing homework
| assignments instead?"
|
| Suggestions for how to change homework assignments? It
| seems like a difficult problem, so reverting to hand
| writing things with no phones is probably the best option
| for now...in my opinion.
| konha wrote:
| Have students work with ChatGPT and let them spot / mark
| where the AI is hallucinating or wrong? Might translate
| well to general competence wrt working with any kind of
| source online.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| So they Google it?
| konha wrote:
| So? Don't know what kind of homework you're thinking
| about. But using Google to do research doesn't exactly
| sound like a problem to me.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| It is more so the fact that someone takes something from
| ChatGPT, and then just feeds potentially contentious
| assertions into Google to see if they are true or not.
|
| What does someone learn from doing this? What happens
| when they actually have to use their brain to do
| something hard?
|
| At this point, why bother?
| camdat wrote:
| If someone plugs math into a calculator, are they really
| learning something when it spits out an answer?
|
| Of course! How to apply the calculator to problems, and
| how to discern if a problem is calculator-solveable.
| We've decided as a society it's better for students to
| use calculators as a tool in mathematics, why is chatGPT
| different in literature?
| nerdbert wrote:
| You can't type your homework into a calculator and get
| the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).
|
| You have to understand the problem and how to use the
| tool.
|
| If one's understanding of how to use the tool is limited
| to "access the tool and dump in the question, then
| blindly paste the response into my homework document",
| I'd say you are not learning much. It's obvious that
| every contemporary teenager can learn that in a few
| minutes. That's not giving us the capabilities to move
| forward as a society.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| You forgot the part where the Google results that the
| student double-checks against are actually SEO blogs
| written with the help of ChatGPT...
|
| I don't think Google in 2024 is guaranteed to be the
| critical-thinking tool that 2004 Google might have been.
| ryan93 wrote:
| [flagged]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > School is having to change all assignments to be written in
| class on paper. No phones allowed.
|
| They never should have moved away from this if they are
| worried about cheating.
|
| But if students are using ChatGPT to summarize/prep for stuff
| at home, fine. No different from the Cliff Notes I used when
| I was that age.
| bilsbie wrote:
| That's the easy answer
| [deleted]
| verdverm wrote:
| Not a student, stopped using ChatGPT because OpenAI is
| unreliable. Moved on to other models and providers
| nostromo wrote:
| Can you name some models or providers? I've been frustrated
| with OpenAI's constraints and would love to know my options.
| verdverm wrote:
| Google Cloud for both VertexAI & "self-hosted" (run any
| model on GPUs). We are already there with the rest of our
| cloud, better privacy when you use gcloud apis than OpenAI
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Increasing alternatives would be expected to play a major
| part in reducing ChatGPT usage.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I went self hosted.
|
| It was about time to build a new desktop anyways (roughly 4
| to 6 years before the old one goes to frolic at the server
| farm in the basement) and $2,000 will easily buy a machine
| that can run the quantized 65b models right now. So I spent
| slightly more than I normally do on this latest box and it's
| happily spitting out 10+ tokens a second.
|
| You're not going to beat GPT-4 yet, but you have direct
| control over where your info goes, what model you're running,
| compliance with work policies against using public AI, and
| relatively cheap fixed costs.
|
| Not to mention, the local version works with no internet and
| isn't subject to provider outages (not entirely true - but
| you're the provider and can resolve).
|
| Seems like an easy win for anyone who might be buying a
| desktop for graphic/gaming anyways.
| vladgur wrote:
| Can you describe your build?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 2 x 3090 (renewed) ~1800
|
| 128gb ram ~400
|
| reasonable processor/mobo/psu ~600
|
| 2Tb m2 drive ~94
|
| In hindsight - I don't know that the second GPU was worth
| the spend. The c++ tooling is doing a very good job right
| now at spreading work between GPU vram and main ram and
| still being fast enough. Even ~4/5 tokens a second is
| fast enough to not feel like you're waiting.
|
| I'd suggest skipping the second card and dropping the
| price quite a bit (~2100 vs ~2900) unless you want to
| tune/train models.
| frognumber wrote:
| Are you using the second GPU at all?
|
| My experience is only a few systems will share load
| across GPUs. I didn't bother with dual GPUs for that
| reason.
|
| 4-5 tokens per second is slower than my system. I'm
| getting in the teens. I'm a little surprised since yours
| is newer, faster, and has way more RAM.
| generalizations wrote:
| How does it seem to compare with GPT 3.5? That really seems
| like the baseline for what's usable.
| frognumber wrote:
| My experience with open source models places them as a
| little bit worse than GPT 3, and nowhere close to GPT3.5.
|
| That said:
|
| - For many uses, it doesn't matter. For many of the ways
| I use it, I don't care. For basic use (e.g. clean up an
| email for me), it's basically the same. For things like
| complex reasoning, algorithms, or foreign languages, the
| hosted service is critical.
|
| - GPT3-grade models have more soul. OpenAI trained GPT3.5
| and 4 to never do anything offensive, and that has a lot
| of negative side effects, well-documented in research.
| The way I'd describe it, though, is the difference
| between talking to a call center rep and your grandma
| (with mild Alzheimer's, perhaps). They both have their
| place.
|
| - Different models are often helpful in workflows.
|
| My experience is anecdotal. Please don't take it as more
| than one data point. If other people post their anecdotal
| experiences, you'll get the plural of "anecdote."
| onlypositive wrote:
| > OpenAI trained GPT3.5 and 4 to never do anything
| offensive, and that has a lot of negative side effects,
| well-documented in research.
|
| I'm absolutely disgusted by OpenAI for this "do no
| offense" approach. How can people so smart be so damn
| uneducated?
|
| Then again, this industry has disgusted me for a long
| time so it's not really a surprise.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| It depends heavily on the model you're running, and to
| some extent what you're doing with it. It also depends to
| on prompt effort. The quantized llama 65b model (you can
| do it yourself, or pull something like
| https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/llama-65B-GGML) is
| probably the highest quality for general purpose, but it
| does take a fair bit of effort to prompt since it's not
| tuned for a use-case.
|
| It's also not licensed commercially, so I avoid some
| things with it (ex: I do a lot of personal
| learning/investigation, but it doesn't touch or write
| anything related to work or personal projects)
|
| The open models are a little further behind, but it's
| interesting to see them spin off into niches where they
| have strengths based on tuning/training.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| I don't know about self-hosted, but it the company I
| contact at has 3.5 instance. It has better understanding
| of code examples I provide than ChatGPT. The company
| hasn't tweaked the code to our standards.
| root_axis wrote:
| If you're a diligent tester, none of the open source
| models can touch GPT 3.5 yet, however, in practical
| terms, some of the 60b and 30b parameter models are
| almost indistinguishable from GPT 3.5 from the
| layperson's perspective. Now, if you consider the
| uncensored models, then you actually have some
| capabilities that GPT 3.5 and 4 are completely lacking.
|
| Based on the rate of progress in the open source world,
| it won't be more than a year before we have an open
| source model that is truly superior to GPT 3.5
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yup - I'd say this feels about right.
|
| The commercial & api based models are still more capable
| general purpose tools. But the current open tooling can
| do some nifty stuff, and the community around it is
| moving at a breakneck speed still.
|
| In some areas, it's acceptably good. In some areas it's
| not. But it's getting better really fast.
| gAI wrote:
| That's why my current plan is to get ChatGPT 4 to help me
| set up my local open source implementations of Orca and
| Stable Diffusion. Got MusicGen running locally anyway;
| that was pretty easy.
| nvy wrote:
| >Now, if you consider the uncensored models, then you
| actually have some capabilities that GPT 3.5 and 4 are
| completely lacking.
|
| Can you elaborate on what those capabilities are?
| joekim wrote:
| Would you be willing to create a guide? I think this would
| be of great help.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I started here https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
|
| Which won't run everything, but will run model in the
| GGML format such as
| https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/llama-65B-GGML
|
| The steps are basically:
|
| 1. Download a model
|
| 2. Make sure you have the latest nvidia driver for your
| machine, along with the cuda toolkit. This will vary by
| OS but is fairly easy on most linux distros.
|
| 3. compile https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
| following their instructions (in particular, look for
| LLAMA_CUBLAS for enabling GPU support)
|
| 4. Run the model following their instructions. There are
| several flags that are important, but you can also just
| use their server example that was added a few days ago -
| it gives a fairly solid chat interface.
| frognumber wrote:
| I'll make a simpler guide:
|
| 1) Go to https://gpt4all.io/index.html
|
| 2) Click the downloader for your OS
|
| 3) Run the installer
|
| 4) Run gpt4all, and wait for the obnoxiously slow startup
| time
|
| ... and that's it. On my machine, it works perfectly well
| -- about as fast as the web service version of GPT. I
| have a decent GPU, but I never checked if it's using it,
| since it's fast enough.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Does it ever refuse to answer you?
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Would appreciate any tutorials or
| guides.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| Super interesting! Can you point me to some of the models
| and repos you used to do this?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| For base tooling, things like:
|
| https://huggingface.co/ (finding models and downloading
| them)
|
| https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp (llama)
|
| https://github.com/cmp-nct/ggllm.cpp (falcon)
|
| For interactive work (art/chat/research/playing around),
| things like:
|
| https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-
| webui/blob/main... (llama) (Also - they just added a
| decent chat server built into llama.cpp the project)
|
| https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI (stable-diffusion)
|
| Plus a bunch of hacked together scripts.
|
| Some example models (I'm linking to quantized versions
| that someone else has made, but the tooling is in the
| above repos to create them from the published fp16
| models)
|
| https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/llama-65B-GGML
|
| https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/falcon-40b-instruct-GPTQ
|
| https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Wizard-
| Vicuna-30B-Uncensored...
|
| etc. Hugging face has quite a number, although some
| require filling out forms for the base models for
| tuning/training.
| choppaface wrote:
| While Francois Chollet is not actually an employee of OpenAI,
| and while that article simply quotes a tweet he made rather
| than a substantive interview .. .. this is still clearly a big
| problem for OpenAI as students trying to cheat on exams is a
| highly profitable $1T industry that Microsoft badly needs to
| disrupt.
| tomcam wrote:
| > $1T industry
|
| Does that mean $1 trillion? If so, citation badly needed.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Surely that's sarcasm. Students don't have money to pay for
| anything.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| There is likely also a ton of users who were just playing with
| it and had no true use case beyond asking it to make haikus
| about cats and got bored. IMO their true product is and always
| has been the API.
| pitaj wrote:
| Makes sense to me
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Also lines have squiggles sometimes? VC culture has really
| broken all of our brains.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/wp-content/uploads/site...
| DuckFeathers wrote:
| [dead]
| spullara wrote:
| This is like insanely obvious. This is almost as bad as people
| freaking out that total traffic in Feb is down 10% from Jan.
| stubybubs wrote:
| 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 understand there are new tools coming, but most of them
| aren't out yet. GPT4 was _just_ released. For the most part, if
| you want to play with AI, ChatGPT is it. If they 're really
| experiencing a decline in users that's not great for them.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If they 're really experiencing a decline in users that's
| not great for them._
|
| If it's the case that "there are new tools coming, but most
| of them aren't out yet" - and I believe it is[0] - then the
| overall userbase of ChatGPT doesn't matter to OpenAI, because
| soon enough the same models will come back with a vengeance,
| in a different, more streamlined form.
|
| In fact, I feel that the major change will happen if and when
| Microsoft gets their Office 365 and Windows copilots working
| and properly released: they'll have instant penetration into
| every industry, including scientists, lawyers, doctors, and
| office workers.
|
| --
|
| [0] - It's been only few months. Between playing around,
| experimenting, then developing, testing and marketing a tool,
| there just hasn't been enough time to do all of that.
| joshxyz wrote:
| another factor in my mind could be users migrating to apps
| that are using gpt api instead of using the chatgpt ui
| itself.
|
| only they can tell though.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I've always seen it as a toy, programed by humans, with human
| fallacies. It's a fun search engine for sure, but I think
| it's a decade (at least) until it becomes practical and
| useful.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Its not, though. ChatGPT, the website is basically an
| (increasingly non-exclusive, given BingAI) frontend. What is
| claimed to be revolutionary is the underlying models (in the
| narrow view) and similar generative AI systems (in the
| broader view). As more applications are built with either
| OpenAIs own underlying models or those from the broader
| space, the ChatGPT website should be expected to represent a
| smaller share of the relevant universe of use.
| readyplayeremma wrote:
| This is the correct viewpoint. ChatGPT is one specific
| implementation of the technology, which was most people's
| first exposure to it. The broader applications of the
| technology itself are still in the very early stages, but
| are already making significant impacts.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I see people using ChatGPT, Bard, etc. to answer questions on
| mailing list threads. It'll be a long thread of thoughtful
| human written responses, and then someone will come along and
| say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's
| the response". And then out comes five paragraphs of text
| that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often
| contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and
| double-checking. It bothers me so much that these LLMs don't
| have any inherent understanding of truth or facts, so the
| only thing they're really good at is writing fiction (e.g. I
| hear they're pretty good as a DM's assistant to flesh out
| flavor/scenario descriptions and such). The Midjourney
| generated images fall into the same fiction category and are
| generally pretty good too.
|
| But for actual non-fiction usage, you have to spend so much
| time triple-checking everything they say to ensure that it
| isn't simply complete nonsense. What's the point?
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| _jal wrote:
| I'm getting people filing tickets for... let's call them
| complex, medium-large projects that they want implemented.
| Helpfully, they're including ChatGPT "instructions" for how
| to do it. I got my first "but ChatGPT said..." argument
| about why I'm wrong about something just yesterday.
|
| Somewhat more general, but I've pretty much already decided
| that if I find people using it to talk to me without
| telling me, I won't be talking to them. Goes for businesses
| as well as personal things - don't gaslight me, or you will
| lose the option to do so.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what
| it thought about this issue, here's the response"
|
| At least they tell you where the text came from, so you
| know to skip it. It's worse when they just post an LLM
| response as their own.
| gAI wrote:
| I love this, honestly. If I don't notice, that's a win
| for AI. If I do, then I just treat it as the new Rick
| Roll.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| This would annoy me significantly. Can I ask what field
| you're in?
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm a software developer. Working, in part, on AI
| systems, ironically enough.
| copperx wrote:
| I consider code to be non-fiction, and ChatGPT will
| generate stuff that compiles and works most of the time.
| There's no need to triple-check the code output.
| gAI wrote:
| With the Code Interpreter beta active, it will compile
| and run that code in the same chat window.
| brk wrote:
| But this is not really an accurate comparison.
|
| "Code" is really a much much much smaller and much much
| much more structured output than "English words".
|
| Presumably, the system was trained with a very small
| amount of "untrue code" in the sense of stuff that just
| absolutely could never work. And also presumably, it was
| trained with a lot of free-form text that was definitely
| wrong or false, and highly likely to have been originally
| created to be purposefully misleading, or at a minimum,
| fiction.
|
| That the system outputs reliable code tells us nothing
| about its current ability to output highly reliable free
| form text.
| gAI wrote:
| But it understands English words and translates the
| meaning behind them into code very well, particularly
| with a bit of iteration. Simply taking the interface from
| writing code to speaking in plain language is a huge
| practical accomplishment.
| tempestn wrote:
| 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 whether there's something that can be adapted
| to your use case. On the other hand, you can ask GPT-4 for
| solutions to the problem, and then google _those_ , which
| cuts the process down significantly. Of course that's only
| one example. The pattern though is that you need to play to
| its strengths. It's not particularly smart, but it's very
| knowledgeable. Just like a human though, you can't expect
| it to perfectly regurgitate all the details. You use it for
| direction, and then refine from there, through conversation
| with the LLM as well as external research.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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 through the results of a search
| engine. Google page rank seemed like a silver bullet back
| in the day but the websites which are the most popular
| are not necessarily of the best quality. What we need is
| to lower the complexity for casual users when they deal
| with search results.
|
| On the other hand ChatGPT is like an answer machine that
| can give you satisfactory answer on your fist try but if
| not, you need to talk with it, push it and explore what
| answers it gives you, just like you said. I think ChatGPT
| type search engine will be more suitable for people who
| are "lazy" or for the people who don't have time to
| "Google" and go through search results and look around
| the web for the helpful and useful information.
| ragequitta wrote:
| It really is astonishing how much you can get done this
| way. I've been setting up a home lab for myself, and the
| answers Gpt4 gives are miles ahead of the stack overflow
| results or documentation of the apps or whatever else.
| Rarely (very rarely) it will give me a wrong answer, but
| then I paste in the error message or describe the problem
| I had and it almost always comes up with the correct
| answer 2nd try. Final step is asking where I might learn
| more because it's not working, and gpt always gives me a
| better link than google.
|
| I'm convinced the people who say it's nothing but a BS
| machine have never tried to use it step by step for a
| project. Or they tried to use it for a project most
| humans couldn't do, and got upset when it was only 95%
| perfect.
| orwin wrote:
| 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.
| Less than not being lazy and using my two braincells tbh.
|
| My newest use is
|
| Hello, i' m working on X, I use Y tech, my app do Z and I
| want to implement W. Can you provide a plan on how and
| where to start?
| cosmicRobot wrote:
| I agree with this. This is my primary use as a new
| analyst. Weird things that would take lots of time to dig
| through stack overflow to find, I can find pretty quickly
| if I feed it the parameters I'm working within, and what
| I'm trying to get to. Usually it just fills in the gap
| that Google was doing before, but much better in my
| opinion.
| throwawayadvsec wrote:
| What tech stack(s) do you work with?
| barrysteve wrote:
| Oh come on. I fed Unreal c++ engine code to ChatGPT4 and
| it couldn't understand inheritence in Slate classes and
| therefore kept offering me the same broken solution for a
| parameter with the wrong type.
|
| The Unreal engine code is documented and publicly
| avaiable for OpenAI to ingest and it still gets the
| basics wrong.
|
| I wasted hours trying to get it to explain to me what I
| didn't know, if it doesn't understand the internals of
| Unreal, I have no hope for it on bigger and better
| codebases.
|
| It doesn't parse, it doesn't explain, it does not grok.
| It guesses at best and the blood sucking robot-horse is
| not telling the truth.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My observation (which could be wrong) is that ChatGPT as
| a programmer's aid is only useful for the simple cases.
| Not so much for complex stuff, and certainly not for
| something as complex as the Unreal engine.
| ragequitta wrote:
| >It doesn't parse, it doesn't explain, it does not grok.
| It guesses at best and the blood sucking robot-horse is
| not telling the truth.
|
| In my experience with coding (I've only done javascript
| and python myself) you have to _tell_ it to explain and
| grok. It takes on the role you give it. Even just saying
| something like "you are a professional unreal developer
| specializing in C++, I am your apprentice writing code to
| (x). I want you to parse the following code in chunks,
| and tell me what might be wrong with it" before typing
| your prompt can help the output immensely. It starts to
| parse things because it's taken on the role of a teacher.
|
| People love to hate on the idea of "prompt engineering"
| but it really is important how you prime the thing before
| asking it a question. The other thing I do is feed it the
| code slowly, and in logical steps. Feeding it 20 lines of
| code with a particular purpose / question you'll get a
| much better answer than feeding 200 lines of code with
| "what's wrong here?" You still need to know 90% of what's
| going on, and it becomes very good at helping out with
| that 10% you're missing. But for all I know it is just
| really bad at C++, that wouldn't surprise me. The things
| I'm using it for are definitely more simple.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Do you have some sample chat logs of interactions like
| this you can share? I'm curious to see what kind of stuff
| it's coming up with, and how you're prompting it.
| Herring wrote:
| I think he means something like this discussion I had
| with it earlier today about assembling squat racks. I
| literally knew zero about the topic https://chat.openai.c
| om/share/a74bb56b-fc5b-40ec-90a9-f46cc7...
|
| A few weeks back I was looking into how white supremacy
| works cause I didn't get it at all. We both came to a
| nice insight (it's a lot like a business monopoly) https:
| //chat.openai.com/share/930e257f-addd-4371-ac37-370261...
| ragequitta wrote:
| I don't tend to keep the chat logs, as the amount of them
| gets unwieldy very quickly. But examples of things I've
| done with it that are useful:
|
| I wanted to create a web app, something I haven't done in
| a very long time. Just a simple throwaway back-of-the
| napkin app for personal use. I described what I wanted it
| to do, and asked what might be a good frontend/backend.
| It listed a few, I narrowed it down even more. Ended up
| deciding on flask/quasar.
|
| After helping me setup VS Code with the proper extensions
| for fancy editing, and guiding me through the basic
| quasar/flask setup, it then was able to help me immensely
| creating a basic login page for the app. Then it easily
| integrated openAI api into it with all the proper quasar
| sliders for tokens/temperature/etc. Then it created a
| pretty good CSS template for the app as well, and a color
| scheme that I was able to describe as "something on adobe
| color that is professional and x and x (friendly, warm,
| whatever you want to put in)". Everything worked
| flawlessly with very little fuss, and I'd never used
| flask or quasar before in my life. You can also delve
| VERY deep into how to make the app more secure, as I did
| for fun one evening even though it's not going to be
| internet facing.
|
| Another thing I did was go over some pfSense
| documentation with it. I had some clarifying questions
| about HAProxy, as well as setting up Acme Certificates
| with my specific DNS provider. It was extremely helpful
| with both. It also taught me about nitty gritty settings
| in the Unbound DNS resolver in a way that's much more
| informative than the documentation, and helped me set up
| some internal domains for pihole, xen orchestra, etc with
| certificates. Also helped me separate out my networks
| (IoT, Guest network, etc), and taught me about Avahi to
| access my hue lights through mDNS.These are things I
| always wanted to do, I just never felt like going down a
| google rabbit hole getting mostly the wrong answers.
|
| Last example I'll give is it was able to help me set up
| docker-compose plex within portainer that then uses my
| nvidia GPU for acceleration. The only thing I had to
| change from the instructions it gave was to get updated
| nvidia driver #s and I grabbed the latest docker-compose
| file. I'd never used portainer in my life before, nor do
| I have experience with nvidia drivers within linux, and I
| feel like learning it was many times faster being able to
| ask a chatbot question vs trying to google everything.
| Granted I still had to RTFM for the basics, as everyone
| should always do.
|
| I think perhaps my use cases are a bit more "basic" than
| many HN users. Like I said I'm not asking it to do
| problems most humans wouldn't be able to do, as I know it
| isn't quite there yet. But for things like XCP-ng,
| portainer, linux scripts, learning software you've never
| used before, or even just framing a problem I'm having in
| steps I hadn't thought of it's been invaluable to me. For
| me it's like documentation you can ask clarifying
| questions to. And almost none of the things I've asked it
| would work at all if it were wrong, I would know
| immediately.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| So many small things go faster. For example, I throw the
| output of Windows-Shift-T (power tools keyboard shortcut
| for screenshot OCR) text into ChatGPT with a "remove line
| breaks" prompt. Yes, I know how to Ctrl-H ^l in Word, and
| other ways, but they sometimes produce odd results
| (missing spaces, extra spaces), and GPT is faster.
| josho wrote:
| > isn't it still telling that usage is falling?
|
| No. Every tech company at the moment is scrambling to build
| LLMs into their product. That's where the real value is going
| to be.
| caeril wrote:
| These metrics are based on traffic to chat.openai.com.
|
| Speaking for myself, I used to use the crappy chat interface
| but I now exclusively use tooling I've built up around their
| API.
|
| So, n=1, I'm using OpenAI much more, despite using
| chat.openai.com less.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Was ChatGPT supposed to revolutionize everything or was it
| the harbinger of LLMs?
| pbronez wrote:
| ChatGPT is the Killer App that made people notice the
| potential of LLMs that had been brewing for several years.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I see it as multiple things combining to reach a critical
| mass. Yes it was the killer app but it was also the first
| time it was actually good enough to chat with. Put
| another way- it's the shittiest LLM application going
| forward or the worst LLM application that people are
| willing to pay for. The hype isn't specifically for
| ChatGPT but imagining the trendline of LLMs or LLM
| adjacent tech projected forward combined with still
| falling compute cost and further democratization.
| s3p wrote:
| https://archive.is/Fy3bh
| drusepth wrote:
| The article doesn't make it clear, but I doubt "users" includes
| consumers of the API (and the second-order users of the apps
| using the API).
|
| It seems not only reasonable but expected to see the general user
| count fall off in favor of people building more specialized
| alternatives that solve XYZ problem better. ChatGPT (the B2C
| SaaS) might have a lower user count, but ChatGPT (the model) and
| GPT (the technology) seem as strong as ever, if not stronger.
| Literally every service I use is integrating some kind of GPT-
| based feature that seems to work at least as well as trying to
| ask those domain-specific questions to ChatGPT, minus the
| external dependency.
| Stevvo wrote:
| "The number of people visiting AI chatbot ChatGPT's website and
| downloading its app fell". That's the article's byline, to me
| that's quite clear they are talking about publicly available
| stats, not some internal metric of users or API usage.
| erichmond wrote:
| 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 ago.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That sounds fairly easy to do. Have you tried writing a short
| Python yourself to get the hours of operation for your
| restaurant list?
|
| Pardon my plugging my own book [1] but I have an example using
| LangChain and LlamaIndex to answer questions from scraped web
| sites. You could probably do this with a 20 line Python script.
|
| [1] read free online: https://leanpub.com/langchain/read
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Hey the initial round of AI was decades ago, FYI.
| erichmond wrote:
| You and me reading books about fuzzy logic in the 80s didn't
| constitute the initial round of AI.
| disqard wrote:
| Lofti Zadeh ftw!
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Oh man... all those genetic algorithms were a waste of time
| then?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You and me reading books about fuzzy logic in the 80s
| didn't constitute the initial round of AI.
|
| Right, that was _at least_ the second round, as it occurred
| after the first "AI Winter".
|
| The _first_ round was a lot earlier than that.
| cameronfraser wrote:
| Most of the plugins are garbage, I just want chatgpt to have up
| to date knowledge and working natively with more media types. I
| don't think I've used a single plugin I thought had good
| results but I love gpt4 for work
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The issue there is that there is a difference between what an
| expert who gets lucky can do with a LLM, and what the average
| person can do with it. People are sold by articles about the
| former, but long term word of mouth depends on the latter, and
| some portion of normal people are going to get frustrated and
| give up using LLMs rather than build their skill set.
| nwienert wrote:
| Not all of us were fooled by it!
| bfeynman wrote:
| 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.
| eduction wrote:
| I believe Google's data is now based largely on restaurants
| updating Google directly with that info. You can see in some
| searches where there is a prompt for the business owner to
| register and update/correct the hours. In my neighborhood
| it's to the point where many won't even post hours on their
| website any more, you have to check Google, which is annoying
| as I try to use other search engines. Sometimes on Google
| I'll see "updated by business owner 12 days ago" or similar.
| I presume Yelp has a similar (but probably smaller) database
| of its own.
|
| In any case the impact for LLMs is the same, it's unavailable
| to them (unless they are being developed inside Google!).
|
| This seems like a specific area where a "Semantic Web"
| solution could work well - some HTML tags that are specific
| to hours of operation, which business owners would embed in
| their website.
|
| UPDATE: It looks like there is some prior art on this idea, I
| am not sure how widely this is supported
| https://schema.org/openingHours
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| getmeinrn wrote:
| >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 doable using a tool I've built. The key is to have that
| data in a RDBMS and to use an LLM to generate the SQL query
| that answers your question. Companies haven't offered this yet
| because there's no safe way to execute these queries on your
| behalf. Which is where my library comes in[1].
|
| 1. https://github.com/amoffat/HeimdaLLM
| saulpw wrote:
| Writing the SQL query is the easy part, collecting the data
| into the DB is the hard part. Can we get an LLM to collect
| the data into the DB? I was told LLMs are good at summarizing
| text like webpages into structured data.
| getmeinrn wrote:
| The hard part is the SQL query, because you need to make
| sure the SQL query is safe to execute. Collecting data is
| far easier by comparison, but you absolutely could use an
| LLM for that too.
| jrpt wrote:
| Can you give an example of how you'd define safe
| operations?
|
| I think a lot of use cases could just be 1) set up a
| database with only public data and 2) use a read-only
| user.
|
| The much tricker use case is those where you want to
| allow inserts and updates but only on specific tables or
| rows.
| getmeinrn wrote:
| That's mostly safe, but even then, a user could execute
| "SELECT SLEEP(100000000)" thousands of times and DoS your
| database. There are other unsafe functions that a
| readonly user can execute as well. I've written
| extensively on some of the attack surface here https://do
| cs.heimdallm.ai/en/latest/attack_surface/sql.html
|
| HeimdaLLM can allowlist functions and constrain queries
| to ensure that required conditions exist. This makes LLM
| + database usage have far more utility, for example, a
| user can be restricted to only data in their account.
| Support for INSERT and UPDATE is coming very soon.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| I'm not saying that the SQL query is at all easy, but
| since you have pretty much accomplished in on a short
| period of time, while Google, Yelp, etc. have still not
| completely solved the problem of store hours after
| decades of working on them, I'm going to lean towards
| that being the hard problem between the two.
| getmeinrn wrote:
| The OP said "This is a pretty low bar request IMO"
| suggesting that the problem they expect an LLM to be able
| to do is not the hard problem you're saying Google and
| Yelp has not solved. It's a different problem.
| justapassenger wrote:
| 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 greater job at overhyping itself.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| "Lying" has a deliberate notion to it which imo is not accurate
| in this case
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's deliberate.
|
| It's not deliberate by the tech itself. But they pack it in
| the product and market it, with a general narrative that it's
| superhuman like experience that is going to replace humans.
| At this level, it's deliberate.
| ben_w wrote:
| The _marketing_ is what you 're complaining about?
|
| Log in:
|
| > This is a free research preview.
|
| > Our goal is to get external feedback in order to improve
| our systems and make them safer.
|
| > While we have safeguards in place, the system may
| occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information
| and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended
| to give advice.
|
| *next page*
|
| > Limitations
|
| > May occasionally generate incorrect information
|
| > May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased
| content
|
| > Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021
|
| That comes up every time you log in, even if you've seen it
| before.
| justapassenger wrote:
| What you describe is not marketing - it's legal-ish
| language.
|
| For marketing - listen to Sam Altman says. Listen to what
| VCs say. Listen to what influencers say.
| ben_w wrote:
| "People are begging to be disappointed and they will be.
| The hype is just like... We don't have an actual AGI and
| that's sort of what's expected of us."
|
| - Sam Altman in an interview about GPT-4 with StrictlyVC
|
| "(GPT4) is a system that will look back and say it was a
| very early AI. It is slow, it is buggy, and it does not
| do a lot of things very well, but neither did the very
| earliest computers, and they still pointed to a path that
| is going to be really important in our lives even if it
| took a few decades,"
|
| - Sam Altman in an interview about GPT-4 with Lex Fridman
|
| The "influencers" may be saying any old rubbish; but that
| was always so, and the subjects of their fantasies should
| not be blamed for nonsense being spouted about them.
| jedberg wrote:
| > 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.
| charonn0 wrote:
| The novelty is wearing off.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Re the summer vacation dip comments, keep in mind that university
| students are done exams in mid April, and the article said that
| the usage peak was June. And in high school, the number of
| assignments is just not very high compared to say the output of a
| 40 hour worker. While likely a factor, I really doubt this can be
| mostly attributed to students.
| DantesKite wrote:
| In a tweet, the account for Similar Web said they don't actually
| measure iOS app traffic. They just measure traffic to the
| specific URL (https://chat.openai.com/).
|
| Tweets in question:
|
| "This chart doesn't measure app usage, only traffic to the
| website on desktop and mobile."
| https://twitter.com/Similarweb/status/1676576445764624385?s=...
|
| "The graph indeed shows traffic only to the specific URL,
| http://chat.openai.com. It should be reviewed in this context."
| https://twitter.com/Similarweb/status/1676573510490046467?s=...
|
| If you notice the app came out in May 2023 and traffic decreases
| for the first time in the following month in June 2023.
|
| Additionally, you may notice the tweets refer to a specific
| chart, which might give the impression if you go on the site,
| they have the actual data, but this is not so.
|
| As of July 7, 2023, Similar Web can't measure iOS app usage. Only
| their relative ranking on the App Store which doesn't tell you
| much about daily traffic usage, although we might be able to
| infer some patterns.
|
| "Usage data is currently available only for apps in Google Play
| Store. We're working hard to support iOS apps soon"
|
| https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-store/6448311069/statisti...
|
| Additionally, the article has this to say, which might also give
| a false impression:
|
| > Downloads of the bot's iPhone app, which launched in May, have
| also steadily fallen since peaking in early June, according to
| data from Sensor Tower.
|
| Downloads isn't the same as traffic. Once you've downloaded an
| app, you don't generally delete it, then download it over and
| over again. You just use it and that isn't being measured.
| Although I would expect traffic usage to slow down or decrease
| somewhat as downloads decrease as well. I just think there are
| other factors playing a role here as well that aren't being
| documented.
|
| Growth can't happen forever and it may be that it's slowed down
| considerably, but it's also possible the decrease is due to users
| switching the platform they use to access ChatGPT. As it stands,
| it's not clear from the data from what I've seen. It may be that
| users switched en masse to the iOS app or something else
| entirely.
|
| Would need more data to clarify and confirm.
|
| Also, what the heck is up with this tagline for their newsletter?
| It sounds so adversarial.
|
| "Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend
| newsletter."
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Who would guess that inflated expectations from mass media are
| not going as expected.
|
| These last years were good. I've been surfing the AI wave well,
| but better go back to more traditional projects now the AI time
| is fading.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Time for another hype train, how about quantum?
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Have you heard of this little thing called the Blockchain?
| pinkcan wrote:
| VR is still not done is it?
| berkle4455 wrote:
| a virtual world where you can buy and sell AI-powered
| cryptocurrencies. also, you don't have legs.
| wg0 wrote:
| Nobody talking about kubernetes so maybe a new JS framework
| that's going to salvage the world.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Oh please no... quantum again? Have you seen the latest on the
| subject?
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/iran-quantum-computer-arm-...
|
| Jokes apart, I hope it won't be quantum.
| Seanambers wrote:
| ChatGPT isn't as useful as it was either. Its getting neutered
| bit by bit.
| Shank wrote:
| It shouldn't be surprising that this happens. People test
| ChatGPT, find the limitations, and then if those limitations are
| blockers, they stop using it. If they aren't, they continue.
|
| It's not as if Browse with Bing was a major feature, but they
| removed that, and then they've tweaked system limitations over
| time such that more and more types of topics are restricted or
| give cursory answers to things.
|
| It's not surprising to me that this happened given the inherent
| limits and the rapidly changing limits that affect how the
| platform can be used.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Major issue for ChatGPT for me is its UI. It enables many things,
| but I feel like there's so much untapped potential. ChatGPT
| should act as autonomous agent, work on a problem, run things to
| test hypotheses, Google for up-to-date documentation, explore
| other code to learn code style and approaches and deliver final
| result. I guess it's not easy to implement those things, but once
| someone do it, they'd get a lot of value.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| I assumed that this was just a clickbait headline and that "a dip
| in ChatGPT usage" must have a huge cofounder effect with "a dip
| in general Internet use".
|
| But I couldn't find any "monthly internet traffic patterns"
| source.
|
| So I asked ChatGPT for pointers/sources, of course.
|
| And it seems indeed that there is a notable Internet traffic dip
| in June and July [0] and increased Internet usage during the
| Northern winter (when ChatGPT was initially launched and grew
| exponentially), so... I think the premise of this article is
| extremely flawed.
|
| [0]
| https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/summer_slump_website_traffic_a...
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Still subscribed but if the model quality declines any further I
| wont be for long.
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| 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", "<blah> <blah>
| 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.
| itissid wrote:
| They could literally draw a direct line from all the tokens in
| those disclaimers/boiler plate to dollars in the forfeited
| energy use.
| everyone wrote:
| I dont think you should use ChatGPT for anything serious,
| especially something health related. It's simply not designed
| for that purpose. Best case scenario is you are getting the
| combined wisdom of reddit, and worst case you are getting
| convincing sounding made-up nonsense.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The problem is that if they didn't give constant disclaimers
| then a lot of people would very happily sue them out of
| existence if possible and at the very least constantly condemn
| them at every opportunity.
|
| This kind of AI capability challenges worldviews. And that
| means that many people are very eager to tear it down and find
| ways to dismiss it. Combine that with the general enthusiasm
| for excessive litigation, the fact that it actually will
| occasionally give advice that could be very misleading, general
| lack of cognitive ability of those consuming it, and it
| explains why there are so many disclaimers.
| [deleted]
| andyp-kw wrote:
| I found a lot of luck by telling ChatGPT that I want direct
| answers only.
|
| But you're right, it's annoying.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| You underestimate how absolutely stupid many people are.
| [deleted]
| johnfn wrote:
| I suspect that if OpenAI didn't have ChatGPT continuously
| output these disclaimers then they could get in a lot of legal
| trouble if, say, someone asked it for medical or legal advice
| and then sued when something bad happened.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I sincerely hope OP is doing this for entertainment purposes
| only or as a very basic aid to shopping around, and not
| actually accepting medical advice from ChatGPT (or the
| Internet in general). The fact that I might be wrong about
| that suggests those disclaimers are absolutely necessary!
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Maybe it was not that revolutionary to begin with.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Could it simply be that almost everyone who is interested has
| tried it out, and those that didn't find it useful have dropped
| off?
|
| That doesn't sound like something horrible. That sounds like a
| normal adoption pattern.
| novaRom wrote:
| I know some friends of mine stopped using it because it
| requires login, and it's quicker to Google or go to Wiki for a
| quick answer. Most people have a laptop at work, home devices,
| phone, etc. So it's just you ve tried it say on your laptop few
| times than you are on a tablet etc so why do you need all that
| mess with entering email, remembering password, for what, for
| just a quick asking and getting answer.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| Good, maybe I'll get to stop cancelling subscriptions because
| they added a LLM to a product I liked.
| pc86 wrote:
| Seems like a silly reason to cancel if you otherwise like the
| product.
| antaviana wrote:
| Possibly related with school summer time in many countries.
| salgorithm wrote:
| 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.
| deltree7 wrote:
| [dead]
| ben_w wrote:
| What odds would you give that said autumn term article will be
| written by ChatGPT? :)
| ca_tech wrote:
| The article only addresses the website and application. I
| expect that what we will see is a shift from individual users
| to enterprise usage. Individuals are not going to subscribe
| indefinitely, but I expect corporate access to the API will
| continue to be healthy.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Not a student, but getting constantly cloudflare-blocked and
| models seeming less capable every update has been giving me
| pause.
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| You need a static custom front end, there are tons around.
| You only have to enter your API key once and no more login-
| cloudflare-auto logout loop
| copperx wrote:
| Here's a collection of front ends:
| https://github.com/billmei/every-chatgpt-gui
| shrimpx wrote:
| As others suggested, this is likely a summer vacation dip, but
| speaking for myself as a non-student, my GPT (4 + 3.5) usage has
| plummeted.
|
| If you use it in a "what should be done" or "what is the right
| thing" sense, you get useless generalities. "It is important to
| remember that ... <there are many sides to the situation>".
| Suppose for example that you talk to it about combating judicial
| bias. It will largely insist that judges are unbiased because
| they're supposed to be unbiased according to their job
| description... You won't walk away with any insights from
| engaging it in ethics/morals topics.
|
| If you dive into depth with some subject, it will invariably make
| errors and contradict itself in the details. I dove into how
| electricity works and it was saying and enthusiastically
| confirming electrical energy is encoded in electrons' kinetic
| energy. Then it started claiming that electrical energy is
| definitely not in the kinetic energy of electrons, that electrons
| don't lose speed when they bump into atoms, and instead the
| energy is "in the field". Ok... YouTube it is.
|
| It's at least less convenient than a search engine at routine
| fact-finding due to its knowledge cutoff, inability to display
| images and links, etc. Ditto with translation. It's good but so
| is Google Translate and Google Translate has in-line suggestions
| for misspellings, a menu of languages, etc.
|
| Ok, it's pretty good at writing hilarious poems, imitate people
| ("in the style of", etc.). Friends and I sometimes text each
| other hilarious things GPT said. But even there the machine is
| sort of laid bare, and you can see its creative limits. Its
| poetry is ultimately pretty lame, basically, and gets
| predictable. It's like an insistent and repetitive 8 year old
| with a lot of knowledge to pull from. It's not something I do
| often.
|
| It's good at writing boilerplate code but honestly I just don't
| reach for that use case often. I like to stay in my own flow
| rather than constantly delegate to a robot and check its work,
| which I find flow-breaking, especially if it doesn't understand
| my APIs and makes mistakes often.
|
| I do, sometimes, engage in architectural discussion about how I
| should design something at a high level. It's full of mistakes
| but bouncing ideas around can be useful. But I only feel the need
| to do that once in a great while.
|
| These issues are exacerbated by being forced to downgrade to 3.5
| after using 4 for a bit. You might feel like you're getting
| somewhere with 4, and then 3.5 starts laying doozies on you. This
| is another UI/product issue, but affects usability.
| IanCal wrote:
| > 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That fastest growing product in the history of humanity has fewer
| users during summer break? Faith shaken.
| moffkalast wrote:
| They are charging $20 + tax without regional pricing for a
| service that is constantly dropping in quality. No surprise there
| I guess.
| prvc wrote:
| Whose "faith" was shaken, and why ought that to matter?
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| This is where using the API is far better than chatGPT, I gave
| my works slack bot with the new functions feature the ability
| to search hacker news, load Wikipedia, search YouTube and even
| load whole URLs.
| bilekas wrote:
| Honestly this was always going to happen anyway. The novelty for
| everyone was never sustainable. When I heard my own mother had
| signed up and tried it i knew there would be a "calming" of the
| usage and maybe more specialized services will be worked on.
|
| So far i see it's not a bad thing, just weeding out the fluff.
| AreYouElite wrote:
| Not touching OpenAI's chatgpt. I will wait for the FOSS
| competitor to come out that can run on my own computer.
| [deleted]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| its making me prove i'm human every time i enter a prompt to
| GPT-4 now
|
| I'm a paying customer!
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36636039
| [deleted]
| ulfw wrote:
| It's honestly not worth $20 unless you use it professionally.
| I've paid it for two months but the novelty wore off and I
| cancelled. Bing (or ChatGPT 3.5) is enough for the occasional
| use.
| DeTheBug wrote:
| What a dramatic title lol
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Actually I used it a lot for weeks but mainly to find out if I'm
| going to become unemployed in the next 2 years (probably not) and
| also learning how use an AI assistant assuming it's here to stay.
| There seem to be other interesting use cases but considering it's
| really not more than autocomplete I kind of lost trust in the
| results.
| avsavani wrote:
| Probably because lot of people are moving to tools that use chat
| GPT API on backend.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| A bit of clickbait seems to me. "9 month old Demo ware service
| sees fluctuation in active users"
|
| I find it weird that folks seem to look at ChatGPT as some sort
| of end product. It's a "holy shit this is cool" demo that became
| viral. It's not a product. It's a POC.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's definitely a product, as the company charges money for the
| service.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| In my construct I would say they're charging for access to
| the POC to cover costs.
| ketralnis wrote:
| I cannot think of a dumber thesis than that ChatGPT's DAU is in
| any way linked to the usefulness of AI as a technology
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Good! More requests for me
| rafael-lua wrote:
| 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?
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm using it to write a browser based game engine.
|
| The world doesn't need another game engine, and especially not
| by someone who has only _technically_ written JavaScript
| professionally before, but there 's some games that I wish
| existed on the browser, and one thing that world _does_ need is
| for all the un-performant websites in the world to be
| embarrassed by the comparison.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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.
|
| For slang and cultural references, urbandictionary.com is
| unmatched.
|
| But for translating jokes or expressions, there is no good
| tool.
|
| Until chatgpt. It also finds typo, suggest alternative, offer
| rhymes and synonymous. It does everything, in a single flexible
| interface.
|
| Just for that it's worth the price.
| nycdatasci wrote:
| While summer seasonality probably is a factor here, the larger
| issue is that the source of this claim (SimilarWeb) is not
| capturing users that switched from browser to the app when it was
| rolled out in mid-May. Some of my other sources suggest that
| traffic has been remained steady since mid-April.
| bbor wrote:
| I would like to nominate this for THE most short-sighted,
| nothing-burger headline of all time.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Well, I mostly disagree. While it is interesting and sometimes
| useful to go to the OpenAI ChatGPT web portal and use an LLM
| interactively, I think the real engine of innovation is using
| LLMs as part of larger applications on our own data.
|
| Having the hype decrease is not a bad thing.
| novaRom wrote:
| Multiple reasons, but most important:
|
| 1. ChatGPT is "play twice and forget" for 90% of users, driven by
| curiosity.
|
| 2. ChatGPT's answers have actually gotten significantly worse
| over time.
|
| 3. No fun. It's too restricted, hesitant to answer, annoying
| moral lessons and disclaimers.
|
| 4. Distrust. How can it improve productivity or save your time if
| you always need to double check it with Google or Wikipedia?
| GaggiX wrote:
| There is one important reason you have missed completely,
| students are going on vacation.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| 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.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| Sometimes it's very good I had a list of strings in this format
| "foo:bar:baz" and needed to convert this into an dict
| {"foo":{"bar":"baz"}
|
| It wrote me the function and I got on with the rest of my work.
|
| Other times it's just completely wrong or doesn't get what I'm
| after is might be a "me" problem with my prompting
| sebastiennight wrote:
| It's 11PM and the unclosed curly bracket here is going to
| prevent me from sleeping.
|
| Did you mean ``` {"foo":{"bar":"baz"}} ```
|
| ?
|
| By the way, have you had success at asking GPT to generate
| unit tests that include edge cases? I've been wondering about
| that.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Didn't realise that "regression to the mean" was the same as
| "shaking faith in AI". That's a pretty amazing claim.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The main issue is that few know about retrieval augmented
| generation and it's variants and even fewer know how to build
| effective versions of it.
|
| Hooking up a real high quality and well configured knowledge
| graph or other information mechanism retrieval alongside
| template/constraint tooling to powerful, long context (with full
| attention, not the BS linear kinds) models is an absolute game
| changer and minimizes risks of hallucination.
|
| But few are doing this, and thus the public believes that LLMs
| are not trustworthy.
| inciampati wrote:
| I think you're right. What are the best systems for doing this
| today?
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I notice my usage goes in waves.
|
| There are days and weeks I use it constantly for things, but then
| I don't touch it for a bit.
|
| Its like I already learned what I needed to and don't have a use
| for it.
|
| Regarding LLMs, we have a usecase but we need local models. The
| local models by itself are not good enough, so we need to
| train/fine-tune. To fine-tune we need a beefy computer. We have
| the beefy computer but its air-gapped... Ugh hahaha. It makes dev
| quite slow.
|
| The other thing is that there is a learning curve on LLMs. You
| get burned by bad information and you might not use it until you
| learn of a usecase that doesnt require the information to be
| great. For instance, I'll describe a meeting/person I'm talking
| to, then ask what are 2 of the best questions I could ask. These
| questions have been great.
|
| That is better than asking about an easily google-able question.
| You need to be exposed or creative enough to come up with the
| prompts.
| standardUser wrote:
| Once ChatGPT 4 is freely available I'll start playing with it
| more regularly like I had been with 3/3.5. But once you spend
| enough time with 3/3.5 and realize how unreliable it can be, it
| takes a lot of the fun away. I'd rather waste my hours the old
| fashioned way, by browsing Wikipedia.
| throwaway920102 wrote:
| I will gladly become a daily user when I stop running into nanny-
| state blocking my queries.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| * agreed on students summer vacation
|
| * My own use has lessened but steadied, eg, writing
|
| * Coming: A dog-fooding goal for our louie.ai team is to
| eliminate most of our internal data scientist and SE/SA use of
| ChatGPT by having more purpose-specific and environment-aware
| experiences (ex: DB schema), and I expect that to be happening in
| most consumer and business apps. So be interesting to compare
| chat GPT the app to open AI the API as genAI continues to happen
| everywhere.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It turns out getting consistently quality results from ChatGPT
| requires some knowledge of prompt engineering approaches. Some
| people won't be willing to write a whole paragraph of information
| in their initial prompt, or go through further iterations, or
| check for errors using alternative sources, and so they end up
| disappointed with their results.
|
| At least ChatGPT isn't constantly trying feed you advertising
| content like Google does, and you don't have to wade through
| pages of SEO garbage, so it's still much better (although if
| OpenAI tries to monetize ChatGPT by inserting ads, that'll be the
| end of it I think).
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