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by sacred_numbers 992 days ago
GPT-4 is not the same product. I know it seems like it due to the way they position 3.5 and 4 on the same page, but they are really quite separate things. When I signed up for ChatGPT plus I didn't even bother using 3.5 because I knew it would be inferior. I still have only used it a handful of times. GPT-4 is just so much farther ahead that using 3.5 is just a waste of time.
1 comments

Would you mind sharing some threads where you thought ChatGPT was useful? These discussions always feel like I’m living on a different planet with a different implementation of large language models than others who claim they’re great. The problems I run into seem to stem from the fundamental nature of this class of products.
The usefulness of ChatGPT is a bit situational, in my experience. But in the right situations it can be pretty powerful.

Take a look at https://chat.openai.com/share/41bdb053-facd-448b-b446-1ba1f1... for example.

A great example. Here's a similar one from me: https://cloud.typingmind.com/share/d2000ffc-a1bf-4b71-b59d-c....

Context: had a bunch of photos and videos I wanted to share with a colleague, without uploading them to any cloud. I asked GPT-4 to write me a trivial single-page gallery that doesn't look like crap, feeding it the output of `ls -l` on the media directory, got it on first shot, copy-pasted and uploaded the whole bundle to a personal server - all in few minutes. It took maybe 15 minutes from the idea of doing it first occurring to me, to a private link I could share.

I have plenty more of those touching C++, Emacs Lisp, Python, generating vCARD and iCalendar files out of blobs of hastily-retyped or copy-pasted text, etc. The common thread here is: one-off, ad-hoc requests, usually underspecified. GPT-4 is quite good at being a fully generic tool for one-off jobs. This is something that never existed before, except in form of delegating a task to another human.

Here's a convo I had yesterday when thinking about how to print a Binary Search Tree.

https://chat.openai.com/share/338e7397-0201-44f4-a2c3-75b733...

I use ChatGPT for all sorts of things - looking into visas for countries, coding, reverse engineering companies from job descriptions, brainstorming etc etc.

It saves a lot of time and gives way more value than what you pay for it.

I agree that none of the problems people have mentioned above happen with GPT4.

It used to be more reliable when web browsing worked, but it's still pretty reliable.