[VeninVidiaVicii]

Again, frustrating. I’m an antibiotics researcher with oodles of data and I need ChatGPT plugins/API to make any real progress. (I’m kind of in this intellectual space on my own, so other people can’t really help that much) I’m not sure why I’ve been on the waiting list for so long now.

[sashank_1509]

I got access to ChatGPT plugins and they’re really bad, completely deserving of “alpha”. I’d be pissed if I paid 25$ for this fyi.

It’s very slow, almost 10X slower than ChatGPT

It’s integration is bad. For most plugins it doesn’t do anything smart with its API call. For example if I ask “Nearest cheap International flight”, it literally goes to Kayak and searches Nearest Cheap International Flight, if Kayak can’t handle that query, GPT can’t either.

The only plug-in with good integration is Wolfram and it makes so many syntax errors calling Wolfram that it’s thrash. Often it just syntax errors out for half my queries

I wouldn’t have minded if they spent a few more months internally testing plug-ins before rolling it out to me, seeing it’s current state. The annoying thing is the chat website automatically starts at plugins mode which is borderline unusable. So every time I have to click on the drop-down and then choose ChatGPT or GPT4.

[VeninVidiaVicii]

Thanks for assuaging my FOMO a bit. I think one of the most frustrating parts is that everyone in my lab looks to me when they see this stuff on Twitter and all I can really do is shrug.

[JieJie]

I use the API for anything I can't do with Bing Chat, but I've found Bing Chat to be quite useful.

For code, I use phind.com.

https://www.phind.com/tutorial

[ZephyrBlu]

Dude, chill. Plugins are insanely new. Barely anyone has access to them. It just seems like they are widespread because they've been going viral.

The initial blog post was only just over a month ago, and it was announcing alpha access for a few users and developers:

> Today, we will begin extending plugin alpha access to users and developers from our waitlist. While we will initially prioritize a small number of developers and ChatGPT Plus users, we plan to roll out larger-scale access over time.

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins

We are literally 1 month into the alpha of plugins.

[mptest]

I think part of the anxiety, at least for me, is how fast progress is being made too. Can begin to feel like the "LET ME IN" meme, when you're watching all day the cool things those inside the magic shop can do lol. Layman btw just looking to use it to automate some volunteer work I do. Thanks for this perspective on how new this stuff is.

[ZephyrBlu]

I completely agree, I feel the same way as a dev. GPT-4 is not even 2 months old.

The developer livestream was on March 14th: https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share.

The time since GPT-4 already feels something like 6 months. So far I'm perpetually feeling behind.

[mptest]

Can't imagine trying to keep up as a dev. Any of these tools useful for you in practice yet?

I struggle to keep up and all I need to do is understand developments well enough to simplify them in to palatable morsels for my tech skeptic colleagues in politics and non profits.

Challenging because they have a form of technology PTSD. when they hear "new technology" nft's of monkeys with 6 digit prices and peter thiel's yacht flash before their eyes and they see red.

And I can't really blame them, the rhetoric around crypto was enough to sour most non techies (in my little corner of lefty politics anyway) against the idea that any tech advancement is noteworthy. One of the first more serious individuals in politics to hear me out did so because "i sounded like one of the early linux proselytizers" lol.

Completely agree how time has slowed. I rotate between absolute giddy anticipation at our future thanks to the tech and nihilistic doomerism. Even as a hobbyist though I knew to take this seriously since I saw robert miles talk about gpt 2 in 2017(?) and note there's zero sign of these things plateauing in ability simply by ramping up parameter count.

I've gone on long enough but that live stream felt like the intro to a sci fi movie at points. Can't wait to have multi modal and plugins rolled out.

[ZephyrBlu]

Yes! ChatGPT is very useful at answering a lot of syntax related programming questions and GPT-4 can do decent codegen for simple things.

I expect that in the next 5yrs developer workflows will completely change based on all the LLM stuff.

I think it's always difficult to tell if new tech is just hype or will have real impact, but it really feels to me like LLMs will have real impact. Maybe not as much as they are being hyped, but definitely legit impact. There's a possibility of even greater impact than the hype as well.

[VeninVidiaVicii]

I can’t believe it’s only been 1 month. It feels like 3-4 somehow.