Technology

Agreed. I think being between academic years is likely a much bigger factor than we realize. I’m a college professor, and at the end of spring quarter we had a lot of conversations with undergrads, grad students, and faculty about how people are actually using AI.

Literally every undergrad student I spoke with said they use it for every written assignment (for the large part in non-cheating legit educational resource ways). Most students used it for all or most of their programming assignments. Most use it to summarize challenging or long readings. Some absolutely use it to just do all their work for them, though fewer than you might expect.

I’d be pretty surprised if there isn’t a significant bounce-back in September.

Also, ChatGPT 4 came out but is still only available to people who pay (as far as I know). So using ChatGPT 3 feels like only having access to the leftovers. When it first came out, that was exciting because it felt like progress was going to be rapid, but instead it stagnated. (Luckily interesting LLM stuff is still happening, it's just nothing to do with OpenAI.)

I got it to give me a book that was still in copyright status by selectively asking for bigger and bigger quotes. Took a while. Now it seems to have cottoned on to that trick.

I use it for quick dnd ideas. Need an NPC on the fly? Chatgpt will help you out

Yeah, it's boring as shit, if want a conversation partner there's better (if less reliable) options out there, and groups like personal.ai that repackage it for conversation. There's even scripts to break through the "guardrails"

I love the boring. Every other day, I think "man, I really don't want to do this annoying task. I'm not sure if it even saves much time since I have to look over the work, but it's a hell of a lot less mentally exhausting.

Plus, it's fun having it Trumpify speeches. It's tremendous. I've spent hours reading the bigglyest speeches. Historical speeches, speeches about AI, graduation speeches where bears attack midway through... Seriously, it never gets old

It definitely has its uses but it also has massive annoyances as you pointed out. One thing has really bothered me, I asked it a factual question about Mohammed the founder of Islam. This is how I a human not from a Muslim background would answer

"Ok wikipedia says this ____"

It answered in this long winded way that had all these things like "blessed prophet of Allah". Basically the answer I would expect from an Imam.

I lost a lot of trust in it when I saw that. It assumed this authority tone. When I heard about that case of a lawyer citing madeup caselaw from it I looked it as confirmation. I don't know how it happened but for some questions it has this very authoritative tone like it knows this without any doubt.

i find even for really complex stuff it’s pretty good as long as you direct it: it can suggest some things, you can do some searching based on that, maybe give it a few links to summarise for you, etc

it doesn’t do the work for you, but it makes a pretty good assistant that doesn’t quite understand the subject matter

It all depends on the training data. If you pick a topic that it happens to have been well trained on, it will give you accurate, great answers. If not, it just makes things up. It's been somewhat amusing, or perhaps confounding, seeing people use it thinking it's an oracle of knowledge and wisdom that knows everything. Maybe someday.

Orca 13b is coming out and is open source and can be run locally so you’ll get your wish really soon

The annoying text scrolling can't be removed because the AI generates one word at a time, which is what you are seeing.

Lol, Chat has it's pros and cons. For helping me write or refine content, it's extremely helpful.

However I did try to use it to write code for me. I design 3D models using a programming language (OpenSCAD) and the results are hilarious. Literally it knows the syntax (kinda) and if I ask it to do something simple, it will essentially write the code for a general module (declaring key variables for the design), and then it calls a random module that doesn't exist (like it once called a module "lerp()" which is absolutely not a module) - this magical module mysteriously does 99% of the design..... but ChatGPT won't give it to me. When I ask it to write the code for lerp(), it gives me something random like this

module lerp() { splice(); }

Where it simply calls up a new module that absolutely does not exist. The results are hilarious, the code totally does not compile or work as intended. It is completely wrong.

But I think people are working it out of their system - some found novelty in it that wore off fast. Others like myself use it to help embellish product descriptions for ebay listings and such.

I’ve been building a tool that uses ChatGPT behind the scenes and have found that that’s just part of the process of building a prompt and getting the results you want. It also depends on which chat model is being used. If you’re super vague, it’s going to give you rubbish every time. If you go back and forth with it though, you can keep whittling it down to give you better material. If you’re generating content, you can even tell it what format and structure to give the information back in (I learned how to make it give me JSON and markdown only).

Additionally, you can give ChatGPT a description of what it’s role is alongside the prompt, if you’re using the API and have control of that kind of thing. I’ve found that can help shape the responses up nicely right out of the box.

ChatGPT is very, very much a “your mileage may vary” tool. It needs to be setup well at the start, but so many companies have haphazardly jumped on using it and they haven’t put in enough work prepping it.

I recently asked it about Nix Flakes, which were very niche and bew during ChatGPTs Training. It was able to give me a reasonable answer in English, but if I first asked it in German, it couldn't do it. It could reasonably translate the english one though, after it generated that. Depending on what language you use to prompt it, you get very different answers, because it doesn't do the transfer of ideas and concepts between languages or more generally, disconnected bodies of text sources.

It is somewhat obvious if you know about the statistical nature of the models they use, but it's a great example of why these things don't KNOW things, they just regurgitate what they read in context before.

How does it compare with ChatGPT (GPT 3.5), quality and speed wise?