Now that you've all tried it ... ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%

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.

I think you're being a bit self-centered, i's always going to be summer somewhere. This is a tool used globally.

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.

It's definitely this. Except the kids taking summer classes, which statistically probably have higher instances of cheating.

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

I use (free) ChatGPT only as tech support (with a large dose of scepticism of the results) so none of the 'conversational' limitations bother me

I didn't find the image generation AIs as sticky for me, there's not really anything I do day-to-day that would require a novel image

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

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.

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

Give phind.com a try. It can be set as your default search provider (manually or with a plugin), so you can just type in the search bar.

In discrete mathematics right now and overheard way too many students hitting a brick wall with the current state of AI chatbots. as if thats what they used almost exclusively up to this point

If it wasn't for the fact that not everyone is on vacations at the same time then yeah, sure.

What exact ones are you using and how can I use them?

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

How do I get started with the models you are mentioning?

I looked into this too and it’s pretty resource heavy. I actually had a really good conversation with Chatgpt about making a separate instance of itself locallly. It’s worth talking to it about that and some of the price options

Look into llama.cpp - it's a single C++ program that run quantified models (basically models with some less precision - don't need a full 64 bits for a double, really). As for models to run on it, there's so many but I think WizardLM is pretty good.

I'm finding the opposite actually. Tried it months ago for basic python scripts and it was garbage. Recently started a project where I needed some c++ scripts to flash into an avr microcontroller and it's been killing it. To be fair I did a decent amount of code myself and also knew exactly what I wanted the program to do. But it has been really good about cleaning up my code, keeping the code consistent through multiple iterations, and understanding my explanations. It teaches me new functions that I didn't know existed which make the code better and faster. Also, when I was designing the circuit, I could describe what I needed a component to do and it would give me whole lists of, for example, possible types of 5volt voltage regulators and the differences between them.

I equate it to having a coworker rather than an employee. I can't really just tell it to do stuff and it'll spit out a perfect script. I need to work with it to make sure it understands my requirements and realizes it's errors. The biggest advantage is this coworker has encyclopedic knowledge of electrical components and c++.

GPT-4 is quite a bit better, but the subscription is expensive. I subscribe because I think it saves me quite a bit of time. I use it almost every day for things like refactoring (shorter) blocks of code, "translating" code into different languages or frameworks, or just for generating examples for completing tasks using frameworks or libraries I'm unfamiliar with.

What has changed? I still use it for small things and find it quite helpful. I avoid using it for serious things though, as that'd require giving it the company's data.

Sydney-Bing was awesome when it was new, and they made it lamer and lamer. I can only imagine how much more fun it is to talk to the ones that aren't nerfed.

You can still use the free browser version with a free account - is not the latest and greatest version 4, but it's the same one everyone was mega excited about just several months ago

I use it for tech support- just the other day I wanted to run a python script on my android phone. From zero to working script in an hour is a huge benefit to me, it would literally have taken me days to find out what to install, how to install it, how to generate the script, how to write out the results etc.

Not sure about other countries but you should just be able to log in and use it without issues

Did you use it to write this comment? And if so, is that why random words are capitalized?

What kind of prompts have you created? I'm interested in where you managed to save time.