What is revolutionary is that ChatGPT is indistinguishable from a real person's writing and intelligence on a subject - and not just in text, but in coding. Before ChatGPT any similar program's responses were so obvious bots that you would look at and say "oh that's cool" but it was still garbage you would never use. Now, I've heard people using ChatGPT for self (ai) therapy, asking it what to do, and how to do something. It's a planner, a worker, a designer, an idea machine. It's like Google but actually gets you to the answers you want without the incredible about of garbage that came when SEO websites took over Google. Then you've got the symbiosis with humans, it's not "look at this AI art." It's artists using AI tools to 'produce' 1000 versions of art a day and pick the best one they find most personal. AI art was already entered into a human contest by someone cheating in which it won. Before iPhone there was plenty of similar products but none that put all the pieces together the way an iPhone did. There is a tipping point to AI and ChatGPT is the iPhone of AI.

I don’t see ChatGPT as any different from gpt3 really, it still makes all the same category of mistakes.

It’s very distinguishable from a human in that you can trivially make it contradict, say nonsense, and it still makes all sorts of errors especially past a few paragraphs.

Very few people are using it. AI therapy is really a great counterexample - it’s not just not up to the task, also highly dangerous. Last thing anyone needs in therapy is to talk to a computer that has no long term memory and will say whatever you want it to - pure demoralization.

As far as code - also not really compelling. I’ve tried it and don’t use it, because:

1. It’s worse than Google. Google + stack overflow finds 100% of the same answers, but also gives me many alternatives, verifies they are correct, and adds lots of context.

2. It’s incorrect in subtle ways, often.

3. It’s actually actively bad at programming beyond the simplest smallest isolated problems, which are about 1% of the daily tasks of a software dev.

I did say in the loop it has some value, but it’s truly far from an iPhone in terms of value. About 0% rounded of the population is even aware of it, let alone getting value from it. I have no idea what I’d use it for, its proneness to blunders and bullshit is a real dealbreaker for every application besides illustrations and maybe summarization - and the latters been solved forever, and is a marginal industry.

Again there’s a weird need to hype it up it seems, we’re at some peak of the hype curve and people are buying it. I think one reason that happens is because it’s mediocre at a lot of things, so people think it’ll do everything. But it’s got major reasons why it’s mediocre that haven’t changed from gpt3 or earlier.

It’s a cool thing certainly, but Google is like 1000x more valuable and idk if even Google was a revolution or just a somewhat big improvement.

Four fundamental limiting factors: it’s imprecise (can’t rely on it for unsupervised or technical things), it’s average (not very valuable to art or creative innovation), it’s a liar (not great for many things), and it’s a panderer (therapy, etc).

1. You could literally just input stack overflows data and it would be able to answer the same questions. ChatGPT is running on years old data and isn't even connected to the internet right now, the future will be way better. 2. Again Google is also wrong in subtle and even not so subtle ways. I've seen highlighted answers that are just dead wrong thanks to the SEO takeover. In Google clicks = right answer very often. It's essentially a popularity contest and try finding anything obscure on Google. 3. It's not going to write entire programs but it's amazing for simple one module tasks, but sometimes that is all you need to build into something bigger. You can even ask it tell you how to program and continually ask 'and how do I do that' and find the answer (similar to google which you'll be also be lucky to find anything useful on your first search or first link). It's more like an instructor than Google because with Google you don't know what you don't know. Most programmers are actually just good at searching for answers and this is a short cut. You can get 10 ways to program the same thing if you ask the question slightly differently. Just like I was talking about art, you get 100 solutions if you want and just choose the best. It's not replacing programmers but it sure as hell makes the job easier.

I do get that, but to me it all sums up to “much worse than Google in the best case”.

StackOverflow is almost never wrong at the top answer and again has many coherent responses for many use cases with contextual help, where GPT is often subtly incorrect with no real context (precision struggles). The whole iterative thing is maybe good for learning tools. Just not seeing a revolution, yet.

The struggles for SEO are less than those for GPT, both have to deal with spam and weird data, but GPT you’re also out of date, don’t have much explainability, and basically trust one giant black box of bias that requires higher input-foo whereas Google is also a giant black box of bias but at least you land at SO or Reddit or something where things are concrete and easy to understand.

Again, if this was some iPhone level revolution I’d have no comparable. It’d be way better at something clearly. But it’s not even clearly equal to any of the examples, and imo worse than basically all except “draw me a dragon in a tutu”, caricature artists should be worried!

On second thought, caricature artists are pretty safe since much of that experience is the whole human drawing you thing and also the generative models don’t really do caricature well as of now.