Generally agree with the GP, and am curious what use-cases you've found where AI meaningfully improves your daily work.
I've found two so far: the review summaries on Google Play are generally quite accurate, and much easier than scrolling through dozens of reviews, and the automatic meeting notes from Google Meet are great and mean that I don't have to take notes at a meeting anymore.
It did okay at finding and tabulating a list of local government websites, but had enough of an error rate (~10%) that I would've had to go through the whole list to verify its factualness, which defeats a lot of the time savings of using ChatGPT.
Beyond that: I tried ChatGPT vs. Google Search when I had what turned out to appendicitis, asking about symptoms, and eventually the 5th or so Google result convinced me to go in. If I had followed ChatGPT's "diagnosis", I would be dead. I've tried to have ChatGPT write code for me; it works for toy examples, but anything halfway complicated won't compile half the time, and it's very far from having maintainable structure or optimal performance. Basically works well if your idea of coding is copying StackOverflow posts, but that was never how I coded. I tried getting ChatGPT to write some newspaper articles for me; it created cogent text that didn't say anything. I did some better prompting, telling to incorporate some specific factual data - it did this well, but looking up the factual data is most of the task in the first place, and its accuracy wasn't high enough to automate this task with confidence.
Bard was utter crap at math. ChatGPT is better, but Wolfram Alpha or just a Google Search is better still.
In general, I've found LLMs to be very effective at spewing out crap. To be fair, most of the economy and public discourse involves spewing out crap these days, so to that extent it can automate a lot of people's jobs. But I've already found myself just withdrawing from public discourse as a result - I invest my time in my family and local community, and let the ad bots duke it out (while collecting a fat salary from one of the major beneficiaries of the ad fraud economy).
I recognize your username so I know you've been around for awhile (and are you a xoogler who for a time banged the drum on the benefits of iframes, or am I confusing you with a similar username?), and so I'm kind of surprised at your lukewarm take on LLMs.
I agree they hallucinate and write bad code and whatever, but the fact that they work at all is just magical to me. GPT-4 is just an incredibly good, infinitely flexible, natural language interface. I feel like it's so good people don't even realize what it's doing. Like, it never makes a grammatical mistake! You can have totally natural conversations with it. It doesn't use hardcoded algorithms or English grammar references, it just speaks at a native level.
I don't think it needs to be concretely useful yet to be incredible. For anyone who's used Eliza, or talked to NPCs, or programmed a spellchecker or grammar checker, I think it should be obviously incredible already.
I'm not sold on it being a queryable knowledge store of all human information yet, but certainly it's laying the inevitable future of interacting with technology through natural language, as a translation layer.
> GPT-4 is just an incredibly good, infinitely flexible, natural language interface.
An interface that's incredibly difficult to produce consistent output. As far as I know, we have not found a way to even make it do basic tasks parsed from natural language without a prohibitive-to-most-use-cases error rate. It's amazing that it can produce pretty believable looking text, but it's abundantly clear that there's no reasoning behind that text at all.
The other day I planned out a cloud to on-prem migration of an entire environment. From cost analysis to step by step checklists. In about 2 hours I had a ~50 page run book that would have taken me at least a week to do coming from my own brain and fingertips.
Here is my initial draft chat session. From here I feed it parts of this initial thing. It gets something down on the page immediately and I revise myself and by feeding portions into new chat sessions etc.
I've found two so far: the review summaries on Google Play are generally quite accurate, and much easier than scrolling through dozens of reviews, and the automatic meeting notes from Google Meet are great and mean that I don't have to take notes at a meeting anymore.
It did okay at finding and tabulating a list of local government websites, but had enough of an error rate (~10%) that I would've had to go through the whole list to verify its factualness, which defeats a lot of the time savings of using ChatGPT.
Beyond that: I tried ChatGPT vs. Google Search when I had what turned out to appendicitis, asking about symptoms, and eventually the 5th or so Google result convinced me to go in. If I had followed ChatGPT's "diagnosis", I would be dead. I've tried to have ChatGPT write code for me; it works for toy examples, but anything halfway complicated won't compile half the time, and it's very far from having maintainable structure or optimal performance. Basically works well if your idea of coding is copying StackOverflow posts, but that was never how I coded. I tried getting ChatGPT to write some newspaper articles for me; it created cogent text that didn't say anything. I did some better prompting, telling to incorporate some specific factual data - it did this well, but looking up the factual data is most of the task in the first place, and its accuracy wasn't high enough to automate this task with confidence.
Bard was utter crap at math. ChatGPT is better, but Wolfram Alpha or just a Google Search is better still.
In general, I've found LLMs to be very effective at spewing out crap. To be fair, most of the economy and public discourse involves spewing out crap these days, so to that extent it can automate a lot of people's jobs. But I've already found myself just withdrawing from public discourse as a result - I invest my time in my family and local community, and let the ad bots duke it out (while collecting a fat salary from one of the major beneficiaries of the ad fraud economy).