[simonw]

Your experience absolutely shouldn't be similar to generic web search. The idea that they are an effective replacement for that is one of the most widespread misunderstandings.

They're good at SO MUCH OTHER STUFF. The challenge is figuring out what that other stuff is.

(I have a few examples here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-... )

[unsui]

> The challenge is figuring out what that other stuff is.

Unfortunately, the major problem is something you pointed out in your blog post:

> We must resist the temptation to anthropomorphize them.

The reality is that, we in meatspace simply cannot help but anthropomorphize them.

These language models regularly pass the Turing Test (admittedly for low bars).

They are surprisingly good at bypassing the Uncanny Valley to hit the sweet spot of persuading without legitimate justification, simply because they are so convincing in formulating sentences in a manner that a confident human would.

Yes, these tools have legitimate use cases (as you outlined in your blog).

But the vast majority of use cases will be those of confidante, of discourse partner, of golem brought to life without understanding what exactly has been brought to life.

That's really dangerous.

[isthiseasymode]

That explanation makes me think of blockchain.

I do think AI is already more useful that block chain has ever been, however.

[roflc0ptic]

Blockchain is good for one narrow thing most people don’t care about: reconciliation in multiparty transactions.

LLMs appear to have myriad uses, today, no Twitter .eth con men required.

[shagie]

I find it very useful for doing zero shot and few shot classifications of natural language input.

The "use it as a chat companion" is an interesting technology demo that demonstrates some emergent processes that make me wish I was back in college on the philosophy / linguistics / computer science intersection (though I suspect the hype would make grad school there rather unpleasant).

[quantiq]

> They're good at SO MUCH OTHER STUFF. The challenge is figuring out what that other stuff is.

I’m getting Déjà vu

[simonw]

The difference this time is that we've figured out all kinds of stuff that this is useful for.

The challenge genuinely is helping people learn how to use it, not finding those applications in the first place.

[Xelynega]

I don't think we've figured out stuff it's useful for, we've just created tech-demos that are much more digestible.

For blockchain/crypto companies their tech demos have required you having a wallet, downloading an app to interact with the chain, or just having lackluster visuals for the users involved in the tech-demo.

On the other hand, LLMs can be interfaced via strings in APIs, so it's braindead to spin up a text-interface for those APIs and no wallet setup or learning about new chains, the English that works on one model will work on another and produce results that are better than most cryptocurrency/blockchain tech-demos.

Notice that none of this relies on us having "figured out all kinds of stuff that this is useful for". We've made cool looking tech demos that make it easy for anyone to generate content.

Much like blockchains I feel it's the underlying technology that's actually useful(distributed PKI for blockchains and deep learning networks for GPT), and GPT itself is only 'useful' insofar as it's an easy-to-interface with implementation of a much more powerful idea.

[simonw]

I'm talking about directly useful things you can do just using ChatGPT, without even writing code against the API. I have a few examples here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-...

[travisjungroth]

> I don't think we've figured out stuff it's useful for, we've just created tech-demos that are much more digestible.

This is out of date. Many people are using ChatGPT frequently for real things. It’s totally different from blockchain.

[saurik]

I mean, the usual argument about why blockchains aren't useful implies they have to be useful for every person in all situations and that tradeoffs are unacceptable, so if there is some marginal extra cost or complexity then no matter how many benefits I might claim to be getting from using blockchain technology every single day as a replacement for random banking institutions I'd previously been having to deal with for decades that I'm somehow just wrong and there are no actual use cases...

..and that's the same deal for GPT as far as I can tell: you might think you are getting value out of it, but people such as maybe-literally-me are going to whine that the error rate is high and that people are not paying enough attention to how they are using it and that at the end of the day it is probably worse for you than learning how to do things yourself and that the whole thing is overrated because many of the things people try to use it for can be done by a person and maybe we should regulate it or even ban it because all of this misuse and misunderstanding of it are dangerous to the status quo and might be the downfall of western civilization as we know it.

To be clear: I'm using it (ChatGPT) occasionally for some stuff, but it hasn't replaced Google for me anymore than crypto has fully replaced banks... and yet the fact that I am using either technology as often as I am on a daily basis would probably have been surprising to someone 10-15 years ago. And yet, in practice, most of the stuff people are excited about in both fields is, in fact, a tech demo more than a truly useful product concept, and one that only is exciting momentarily until you get bored.

[travisjungroth]

I think you’ve got some combination of a utopia fallacy and a straw man going on here.

I just want to contrast two things. First, blockchain had a lot of hype around utility that never materialized. It is really quite a minority that ever used it for anything besides buying it on a platform and hoping it would go up. The big adoption was always about to happen.

Second, ChatGPT is totally different from this. Its usage is not future tense. It is present tense and past tense. I can’t get across how different “someone will use this tomorrow” is from “someone used this yesterday”.

People are wildly excited about the future and things that haven’t been built. This does not change the fact that millions of people are using this every day to solve their problems. Saying “we haven’t figured out stuff it’s useful for” is just wrong.

Lately I feel like I’m at a park with people who are saying there probably isn’t going to be any wind today while I’m already flying a kite.