8 ms·

Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

I see plenty of hot takes on Twitter about GPT-4 and how its going to kill jobs and give us super powers. What I am not seeing are practical and specific applications outside of "Write code" or "Summarize articles". What examples do you have where someone used GPT-4/AI tech that had a high degree of utility for a specific job to be done? The guy who found his pets illness after the vet gave up is a good specific example applied to a very narrow use case.

montjoy 4y ago
Look up what is code for plumbing. It can be difficult to find what is code unless if you are a member of IAPMO.
achenatx 4y ago
my daughter uses it to explain homework problems. Google search routinely fails for this. Chatgpt gives her the answer, but explains in detail how it got the answer. marketing team is using it to create baselines for articles/blog posts. you can do a search for "product manager chatgpt prompts" my controller is using it to look up finance stuff including answers to questions about tax law. They will then follow up by looking up the first source articles to verify, but chat gpt can give correct answers. HR is doing the same thing when I run into problems trying to figure out how to do something in an application chatgpt works better than web searches, watching stupid videos, and especially the built in help for the application etc.
kleer001 4y ago
Sorting by personality. Every search engine I tried was useless. I guess nobody's written that exhaustive article yet. Sort by personality? Yep. I asked it to pretend to be a clinical psychiatrist and then asked it to tell me about celebrities personalities that closely matched "calm, thoughtful, and introverted". I've been running similar experiments with creating groups of actors' responses that conform to groups of personality types: the four humours, blood type, etc...
thret 4y ago
Neuromancer was published in 1984 and I think we are finally on the verge of creating constructs. The future of GPT could be like a construct, or an AI embryo. Something you can purchase that will consume every piece of data you have ever produced - every text, comment, journal or blog. Then it will consume every piece of data you have consumed - every book, movie, song or headline. An AI that can be taught to respond as if it believes what you believe and loves what you love. Something that can be a convincing copy of you to represent you to the outside world. People who only interacted with you online might never know the difference.
- api 4y ago
  William Gibson was the most prophetic sci-fi writer. When I first saw GPT stuff I thought it was basically Gibson’s ROM constructs, like exactly.
yosito 4y ago
I've got a thread going with ChatGPT about an app I'm building. It knows all of the libraries I'm using, and has seen the main App component, the Router and many of the key components. I'm asking it about every task I need to do, feature I need to implement, bug I need to fix. Basically rubber ducking with it and talking through everything I'm doing as if it were my coworker. It's reducing my time to solve problems by about 80%. I'm able to do 4-6 times as much in a day as I could without ChatGPT when I was stuck figuring out everything tediously on my own. For context, I'm a full stack developer with about 15 years of experience, so I know what I'm doing. ChatGPT is just taking care of a lot of the trial and error and figuring out how to use different libraries or implement certain algorithms.
- Terretta 4y ago
  The catch with this is when there's been a fundamental shift in best practice within the past year or two. For example, anything with MacOS predates Ventura, so it will think the Mac is on Python 2 and has no awareness of a host of new APIs/SDKs for hardening. On the other hand, if you're doing it regularly, you are also learning how to frame your interaction to keep it on point rather than hallucinating positivity. Once you hit that stride, it's indeed a handy little rubber duck!
- cjdoc29 4y ago
  So I have yet to use ChatGPT (I know, I know), but are you able to keep long running threads with it? How does it know context about your app? Are you simply copying and pasting code? This is really cool to hear about.
  - yosito 4y ago
    Yep, the threads are permanent. I've got approximately 200 separate threads going with it right now. I gave it a summary when I started using it: "I am building an app using Expo, React Native, React Navigation, React Query, Nativebase, Google Maps and lodash. Expo exports the app for web, iOS and Android. The purpose of the app is to view data related to <specific domain> on a map. The data comes from an internal API." Then I started copying and pasting code or asking questions about using the libraries I had mentioned.
juvvel 4y ago
It can explain stuff to you in exactly the way you need to, and walk you through problems. You can ask it to create quizzes / guided questions for you which helps in organizing your own thoughts. Another application I find quite remarkable is asking it for good prompts for image generation models. The biggest benefit is that you're not starting from zero when entering a new problem space / domain.
- Zealotux 4y ago
  But how do you assert the information is correct? It could be dangerous to blindly trust an imperfect tool as a teacher.
  - tete 4y ago
    I am not even in an environment where ChatGPT is very present and yet I've seen that happening sitting right next to a person with exactly that thing happening.
  - nevon 4y ago
    On the other hand, that exact line of thinking could be applied when taking about pair programming or getting advice from a more senior peer. In either case the answer is to critically think about the answers and seek confirmation elsewhere when needed.
  - ftxbro 4y ago
    If I'm taught by any teacher, even a human one, I will blindly trust them. Also I require these human teachers to be perfect (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) so that I avoid danger. This is how I assert the information is correct. EDIT: guys the point of this comment was to show how ridiculous the requirements of the parent comment would be if applied to human teacher as well as to AI teacher
  - lwhi 4y ago
    We need to interrogate and test all information we receive.
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
cloudking 4y ago
I'm using it to write WordPress plugins that can be used in place of expensive yearly subscription plugins.
- deleted 4y ago
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- yosito 4y ago
  Why not use it to write expensive yearly subscription WordPress plugins? Make some money with it.
  - cloudking 4y ago
    Definitely thinking about it, and open sourcing some too.
lapama 4y ago
Write my PhD thesis, even incorporating the written and oral feedback of my advisor, which I record and use as input. Yes it was a bad joke, one I did not think I could make just 1 year earlier.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  don't forget about the made up data
Galxeagle 4y ago
Finding lots of value in drafting emails, especially for topics or asks I'm not as used to dealing with, like asking for extensions or blaming other teams for blockers. Obviously takes a few iterations ('be less verbose!') but I get a lot of value in seeing a couple different ways to word the request and how to frame the background facts to come to the conclusion I want. Started using it as a coaching tool for new hires who aren't used to the world of corporate memos yet.
deleted 4y ago
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qeternity 4y ago
There are a lot of use-cases that aren't possible at current pricing and model access. For instance, we're working on a number of text classification features, but the inability to fine-tune makes it very difficult and expensive.
chrisacky 4y ago
I asked it to help explain the Birthday Paradox to a colleague who was struggling to understand the math behind it. I gave it the requirements and just copied and pasted. https://jsfiddle.net/k8L9eyf7/5 https://jsfiddle.net/k8L9eyf7/5
awb 4y ago
Two things I find remarkable: 1) I’m ~50% faster at coding 2) Jailbreaks. It’s exposing in a reproducible way how people are persuaded / tricked into bending or breaking rules via persistence, role play, and confident instruction. Presumably from a corpus of text where these techniques have worked in real life.
woeirua 4y ago
Call center employees are pretty much as good as gone once the price comes down on GPT4. You can pretty easily give it a good prompt that allows it to answer very specific questions about your company, or interact with external APIs to schedule services, make changes based on the customer's requests, etc. Throw some Speech to Text and Text to Speech services in front and behind it, and voila you have an AI receptionist that blows literally every automated answering service out of the water today. IMO, 90% of call center employees will be out of work in the next 10 years.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dandelany 4y ago
  I am dreading the inevitable future day when I have to argue about a denied health insurance claim on the phone with a fucking robot prompted to make it as difficult as possible for me to win.
  - lwansbrough 4y ago
    Why would you do that when you can dispatch your own AI to argue for you?
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - Hedepig 4y ago
      We'll probably have tiered AI systems. Upgrade to the Argue Bot 10 series and save big! With a 3x higher success rate in securing cheaper deals compared to the 1000 series, it's the smart choice for cost-savvy individuals. For an additional $999 per month, you'll have access to cutting-edge negotiation technology that will work tirelessly on your behalf. Don't miss out on potential savings - make the switch to the Argue Bot 10 series today! Edit, changed it to an improved promo using ChatGPT from my original which is here: "Argue bot 10 series, 3x more likely to get you a cheaper deal than the 1000 series, for only an additional $999 per month"
jackbrookes 4y ago
Give it access to a Python repl, show it how to send HTTP requests, how to take look at images of webpages if it needs to, and how to spawn new instances of itself - give it a budget and tell it to make money for you.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  I don't want to underplay how much you've hit the nail on the head here, but... Commenters in AI safety discussions: "Just keep the AI in a box, don't give it internet access, unplug it if you don't like what it says, and it really can't hurt you!" Commenters in AI product discussions: "How quickly can we give it unrestricted access to the web, $50k to freely play with, and a highly underspecified objective?"
Filligree 4y ago
Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet, but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's working; now I just need API access, to fully automate it.
- yosito 4y ago
  > GPT-4 is competent at translation That really depends on the language. It's still kinda awkward at Hungarian. Personally, I think DeepL is still way better at translation.
  - numeri 4y ago
    In what ways would you say its awkward? I'm really curious about its performance in languages that might not have shown up in its training data much. I will say, I've tried using it with a dialect, and it's good when it chooses to use the dialect, but slips into formal/prestige language extremely often.
- realusername 4y ago
  Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language. This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.
    - realusername 4y ago
arc_of_descent 4y ago
Write unit tests, document code, optimize code, explain code. I've tried Python functions and React code. It even converted a class based React component to a functional style component!
- shusaku 4y ago
  Can it really optimize code? And what granularity have you seen it succeed?
  - arc_of_descent 4y ago
    Sorry, I really meant refactor here. I did ask it to optimize code, and it came with a suggestion of trimming down my function into a smaller chunk and creating a new function. So it actually refactored it TBH, but I am going to try how I can check if it can optimize code too.
cyrialize 4y ago
I've been using it as a discussion machine and a way to cut down search. My usual loop used to be: 1. Search for X 2. Review documentation and other websites that come up 3. Learn from my review and further refine my search 4. Continue steps over and over until I get what I want --- My new loop is: 1. Ask ChatGPT about X 2. Use the words that ChatGPT returns to me as search terms 3. Review documentation and other websites that come up 4. Learn from my review, further refine my search, and talk to ChatGPT about it 5. Continue steps over and over until I get what I want I initially thought that using ChatGPT in such a fashion would lead to a longer amount of time - especially since I'm adding a new tool to my "loop". Instead, finding and learning what I need is much faster. My old loop I would do 3+ times. The new loop with ChatGPT takes 1-2 times. When you aren't familiar with X it becomes difficult to know what to search for. Even if you have the docs in front of you, you need to know key terms to search through the docs for. ChatGPT makes finding key terms to search for much, MUCH easier. Fact checking ChatGPT (for the most part) doesn't take me that many cycles.
- Casteil 4y ago
  One thing you can do for quick research -> summary is ask it to produce a detailed mind-map of the topic at hand, along with related/relevant long-tail keywords. The latter is effectively a SEO strategy in a nutshell, but having those keywords in front of you can really jog your memory.
- SpaceL10n 4y ago
  A lot of folks can relate to that I bet. To typing in something in Google, clicking on a few results, learning some new keywords you didn't know before, putting those back into Google, and rinsing and repeating until you get the results you are looking for. It's search, but supercharged! Are people still going to say, "Just google it."? Or, is there a new verb already?
saklani 4y ago
1. Quick code reviews. 2. Generating tests. 3. Good for dumb questions, that I'd hate asking a person. I'm generally just faster coding.
- cyrialize 4y ago
  How are you using it for code reviews? Are you copy-pasting code that you are working on or code others are working on from you company into ChatGPT?
rglover 4y ago
I've been using it for long-term memory supplementation. Had a faint memory of driving around in a friend's truck back in high school and was trying to remember a Marilyn Manson song we always played. Asked it this the other day: > Are there any other marilyn manson songs with a crowd shouting? And it spit out: === Yes, Marilyn Manson has used the sound of a crowd shouting in several other songs besides "The Beautiful People." Here are a few examples: "Irresponsible Hate Anthem" - This song, which appears on the album "Antichrist Superstar," opens with the sound of a crowd chanting "Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate!" before launching into a heavy industrial metal riff. "The Fight Song" - Another track from the "Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)" album, "The Fight Song" features a crowd chanting "Marilyn Manson" before the song begins. "This Is the New Shit" - This song, from the album "The Golden Age of Grotesque," features a chorus that includes the sound of a crowd shouting "Are you motherfuckers ready for the new shit?" These are just a few examples, as Marilyn Manson has used the technique of incorporating crowd shouting in several of his songs throughout his career. === I'm highly skeptical of GPT/LLM as a replacement for humans at the task-level, but for search, this can't be beat. It replied almost instantaneously. Even more shocking: I think this will seriously destroy Google and the concept of SEO. That's extraordinary considering how pivotal Google is to the internet of today. This is the beginning of the OS in the movie Her.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  90% of searches are trying to find websites not teach concepts. If they want to learn something it's usually current.. who won the game.. fire locally. If you want to learn how to lift weights simple instructions are not going to replace videos of fit influencers you follow. I think google is safe
- drummojg 4y ago
  Similarly, I used it to answer the question, "Who was the Black female author whose works were saved from an estate bonfire?" Neither DDG nor Goog could answer for me (kept coming up Maya Angelou which is totally wrong--it was, of course, Zora Neale Hurston as I should have remembered in the first place.
- neilv 4y ago
finder83 4y ago
Mostly code here, but I've found a few uses, mostly around brainstorming that I use as a starting point to further thought: Brainstorming ideas such as around a party theme for my kids. Games we can play, decorations, etc. Generating exercise ideas, particularly since I don't much like gyms or common methods Helped me to understand some medical side effects of thyroid issues and the medicine I'm taking. Actually I learned from it that Iron interferes with my medicine, and I was taking vitamins at the same time as I was taking it. Seems minor, but my brain's definitely more active after changing things. We just started a business, so ideas around sales tactics, what to include in a business plan, etc Getting my mind going with questions to ask for a Bible lesson I teach around a specific passage. Apparently it can pretty much quote an interpret any passage I've given to it and generate questions, in different styles or levels of depth. Having it explain or find interesting tidbits around the ancient Greek in a bible passage. This one surprised me. Apparently it understands to some degree declensions, parts of speech, verb tenses, etc. It's not 100% correct here, but maybe as correct as it is with code. I'm not an expert either, just graduated seminary, so it's a nice support
folex 4y ago
Retrieve information from public technical chats to provide Q&A on programming languages, technologies, engineering approaches and so on.
- jasondigitized 4y ago
  Can you describe how you are doing this, e.g. What is the series of prompts you are using to feed it the chats?
  - folex 4y ago
    I'm yet not doing this, unfortunately. API limits wouldn't allow me to load in some IRC chat there.
johnfn 4y ago
I think GPT4 isn't amazing (that is, better than excellent humans) at any specific task, so I doubt that many things it does, in isolation, are remarkable. Where they shine is that GPT4 and ChatGPT are really good at doing lots of menial tasks really quickly. e.g. I can ask it to refactor my code, rewrite it in a different style, add a new function etc and it'll happily do that all day. Probably the best use case was for learning about things I didn't understand. I asked GPT4 questions about CSS Grid yesterday. With GPT4 I could drill directly into areas I was curious about and get a pretty uniformly good explanation, e.g. "explain to me more about the layout algorithm". Doing that with google is possible, but it's annoying to have to continually bounce between various shoddy articles on different websites in order to get a patchwork of understanding.
vyrotek 4y ago
The fact that you can put in garbage unstructured data, ask it questions, and then "convert" it to JSON is kind of magical. It's like computers have a new analog/organic input system. [0] Also, been recently playing with ways to generate API code plumbing without any schema layers. (Swagger/OpenAPI/Proto) [1] [0] https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640417769303977984 https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640417769303977984 [1] https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640142385282949121 https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640142385282949121
- sxv 4y ago
  Impressive, but it seems to have hallucinated Lilly's location.
- realaleris149 4y ago
  Also, was M from Male or the initial of another name?
- realusername 4y ago
  Maybe we can finally code a 100% functional CSV importer which deal with all the broken stuff people invented haha
Giorgi 4y ago
I have using it as my copyrighting assistant, especially when I have to write long copy
folex 4y ago
I can't really wait for tooling to visualise complex technical concepts into nice animations and static images. Imagine describing how some system works, what it consists of, and get architecture images + process animations.
- DEDLINE 4y ago
  This is what I am missing as well. I'm a pre-sales technical architect that keeps looking for use-cases where I am able to leverage this technology. 75% of my work is in draw.io and PowerPoint.
mattvlr 4y ago
I used to build my own little wiki / knowledge graph as a fun project to see what it was capable of. You feed it a topic and ask it to return a list of topics that are related to the parent topic. Repeat for each child topic, set a max depth and you can generate a topic tree about anything. Always asking for it to use JSON as the output. I then had GPT-4 write an encyclopedia style entry for each child topic with nice formatting and links to actual wikipedia when possible.
LouisSayers 4y ago
I've been using it to refactor my code. I paste in all the code that it needs context for, tell it how I'd like to refactor it (e.g. there are two concerns, split them into their own structures). It then gives me a high level of what it'd do, I review and then tell it to implement what it said. I tried this yesterday in golang with some gRPC calls and while it seemed to hallucinate a couple details, overall it did a pretty good job. I think part of getting it right will be to guide it a little more. I'm building my own product so don't have to worry about getting company approval etc for this. Also, language learning - I'm learning German atm and plan on asking it to list the x most common nouns in each gender (der die das) and then generate example sentences that use each of the nouns and so on.
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ben30 4y ago
I cut and pasted my child’s school’s multi page complaints policy without reading it myself, then asked it to show me the stages I need to follow as a sequence diagram and it can up with this: @startuml actor Parent participant "Class Teacher" as CT participant "Head of School" as H participant Clerk == Level 1 == Parent -> CT: Informal Complaint CT -> H: Meeting Request H -> CT: Meeting Scheduled CT -> Parent: Meeting Scheduled Parent -> CT: Attend Meeting CT -> H: Meeting Summary H -> Clerk: Meeting Summary Received == Level 2 == Parent -> Clerk: Formal Complaint Clerk -> H: Formal Complaint Received H -> Clerk: Response Preparation Clerk -> Parent: Formal Complaint Response Parent -> Clerk: Request for Level 2 Meeting Clerk -> H: Request for Level 2 Meeting Received H -> Parent: Level 2 Meeting Scheduled @enduml
Belituio 4y ago
1.: It's the first time I'm seeing a chatbot who could easily replace the human layer. Chatgpt understands tons of languages. So I highly prefer to write things up like "you can change a username by going to this ui and click this and than that". Or anything in-between. Even if chatgpt only takes care of translating and creating a proper support ticket. 2.: Text understanding. I have plenty of tasks were a human would need to do things for me like "pull out all features of this building and make a list out of it" before I can verify it. 3.: I can already see the use case of fine-tuning my own agent with my own data. Now it's actually worth it to write proper documentation or architecture decision records. Basically doing brain dump because after I can just ask it things like "why do we use angular?" "Because you tried out react and didn't like it"
antibasilisk 4y ago
On the occasion I do editing for certain documents on behalf of non-native English speakers. This can take up to two hours per document ordinarily. ChatGPT reduced this to 15 minutes, and almost all of that is just proofreading the output, waiting for it to respond and copying and pasting.
PeterisP 4y ago
Rewriting text to be more fluent or readable. For all the (many!) people who need to create documents in English but aren't native speakers, GPT-4 is quite effective at rephrasing a technically correct but un-idiomatic text into something that's much better.
_boffin_ 4y ago
Truthfully... what's most remarkable to me is it not saying, "just stfu, you idiot" after me asking it question after question about stuff i want to know more about. There has been countless times where I'll read it's response of, "sure, here's..." and it just blows my mind that i have the ability to barrage something with questions and it won't get tired of me doing so. it puts a smile on my face.
- deleted 4y ago
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Jamesbeam 4y ago
I want to share a personal experience with GPT-4 and other AI tools that has helped me a lot, given my recently acquired physical disability. My creative and critical thinking are still in great shape, but I've been struggling to execute my ideas because of my physical limitations. For example, I used to paint as a way to deal with traumatic experiences, but that's no longer possible for me. I got depressed and frustrated, being no longer able to transfer traumatic memories out of my head. I found a workaround using Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT. By doing this, I can recreate my paintings in my own style without having to physically paint them. It's now part of my weekly routine and has been a real support for my therapy and PTSD. Another thing GPT-4 has helped me with is managing anxiety attacks. I'm not good at coding, it's simply a skill I'm not good at, but with some assistance from GPT-4, I made a simple browser game using HTML, CSS, and JS. This game is now my go-to distraction when I feel anxious and is easily accessible on my phone. GPT-4 has also made everyday tasks, like writing letters or emails, a bit easier for me. I can shave off a few minutes here and there that way each day, which is a lot of time I can do stuff I enjoy if you add them up over a year or longer. While these benefits may not seem groundbreaking to everyone, especially if you're healthy, they've made a significant difference in my life and for me personally, and I think that is remarkable. I'm also not good at asking other people for help, especially for stuff I managed to do on my own for all my life. So if I can ask AI Tools to do stuff for me instead of taking up a friend's lifetime, it helps me to keep a sense of independence and being able to take care of myself.
iKlsR 4y ago
I did a medical lab test the other day and I've been trying for several days to reach my original doctor who for some reason I still can't get. I don't know what to make of the abbreviations and scales on the document and I sure as hell wasn't going to visit another doctor and pay a fee to grok it without a need to or google each line to find out I have "cancer or some other random ailment". By chance I was using cgpt for something else and I just copied and pasted the unformatted data from the pdf and voila. https://i.imgur.com/tCy1dWU.png https://i.imgur.com/tCy1dWU.png, there is a more personal page that I didn't share that gave me a eli5 explanation for the exact problem I got checked for that I couldn't tell and it pretty much worked the same using the terms and even gave me recommendations as to what I could do next.
- adamquek 4y ago
  I am surprised at how good ChatGPT is at with abbreviation. I'm working with a lot of discharge summaries at the moment, and ChatGPT is a god-send in interpreting all the shorthand used. It will take me forever otherwise to find out that the shortform CR2 means second complete remission.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
Populate open world videogames with real living characters that evolve to your way of gaming. Apparently somebody tested chatgpt 4 as a d&d DM and worked really well, so this coupled with AI voice acting could lead to exceptional results in the game industry.

montjoy 4y ago

Look up what is code for plumbing. It can be difficult to find what is code unless if you are a member of IAPMO.

achenatx 4y ago

my daughter uses it to explain homework problems. Google search routinely fails for this. Chatgpt gives her the answer, but explains in detail how it got the answer. marketing team is using it to create baselines for articles/blog posts. you can do a search for "product manager chatgpt prompts" my controller is using it to look up finance stuff including answers to questions about tax law. They will then follow up by looking up the first source articles to verify, but chat gpt can give correct answers. HR is doing the same thing when I run into problems trying to figure out how to do something in an application chatgpt works better than web searches, watching stupid videos, and especially the built in help for the application etc.

kleer001 4y ago

Sorting by personality. Every search engine I tried was useless. I guess nobody's written that exhaustive article yet. Sort by personality? Yep. I asked it to pretend to be a clinical psychiatrist and then asked it to tell me about celebrities personalities that closely matched "calm, thoughtful, and introverted". I've been running similar experiments with creating groups of actors' responses that conform to groups of personality types: the four humours, blood type, etc...

thret 4y ago

Neuromancer was published in 1984 and I think we are finally on the verge of creating constructs. The future of GPT could be like a construct, or an AI embryo. Something you can purchase that will consume every piece of data you have ever produced - every text, comment, journal or blog. Then it will consume every piece of data you have consumed - every book, movie, song or headline. An AI that can be taught to respond as if it believes what you believe and loves what you love. Something that can be a convincing copy of you to represent you to the outside world. People who only interacted with you online might never know the difference.

api 4y ago
William Gibson was the most prophetic sci-fi writer. When I first saw GPT stuff I thought it was basically Gibson’s ROM constructs, like exactly.

yosito 4y ago

I've got a thread going with ChatGPT about an app I'm building. It knows all of the libraries I'm using, and has seen the main App component, the Router and many of the key components. I'm asking it about every task I need to do, feature I need to implement, bug I need to fix. Basically rubber ducking with it and talking through everything I'm doing as if it were my coworker. It's reducing my time to solve problems by about 80%. I'm able to do 4-6 times as much in a day as I could without ChatGPT when I was stuck figuring out everything tediously on my own. For context, I'm a full stack developer with about 15 years of experience, so I know what I'm doing. ChatGPT is just taking care of a lot of the trial and error and figuring out how to use different libraries or implement certain algorithms.

Terretta 4y ago
The catch with this is when there's been a fundamental shift in best practice within the past year or two. For example, anything with MacOS predates Ventura, so it will think the Mac is on Python 2 and has no awareness of a host of new APIs/SDKs for hardening. On the other hand, if you're doing it regularly, you are also learning how to frame your interaction to keep it on point rather than hallucinating positivity. Once you hit that stride, it's indeed a handy little rubber duck!
cjdoc29 4y ago
So I have yet to use ChatGPT (I know, I know), but are you able to keep long running threads with it? How does it know context about your app? Are you simply copying and pasting code? This is really cool to hear about.
- yosito 4y ago
  Yep, the threads are permanent. I've got approximately 200 separate threads going with it right now. I gave it a summary when I started using it: "I am building an app using Expo, React Native, React Navigation, React Query, Nativebase, Google Maps and lodash. Expo exports the app for web, iOS and Android. The purpose of the app is to view data related to <specific domain> on a map. The data comes from an internal API." Then I started copying and pasting code or asking questions about using the libraries I had mentioned.

juvvel 4y ago

It can explain stuff to you in exactly the way you need to, and walk you through problems. You can ask it to create quizzes / guided questions for you which helps in organizing your own thoughts. Another application I find quite remarkable is asking it for good prompts for image generation models. The biggest benefit is that you're not starting from zero when entering a new problem space / domain.

Zealotux 4y ago
But how do you assert the information is correct? It could be dangerous to blindly trust an imperfect tool as a teacher.
- tete 4y ago
  I am not even in an environment where ChatGPT is very present and yet I've seen that happening sitting right next to a person with exactly that thing happening.
- nevon 4y ago
  On the other hand, that exact line of thinking could be applied when taking about pair programming or getting advice from a more senior peer. In either case the answer is to critically think about the answers and seek confirmation elsewhere when needed.
- ftxbro 4y ago
  If I'm taught by any teacher, even a human one, I will blindly trust them. Also I require these human teachers to be perfect (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) so that I avoid danger. This is how I assert the information is correct. EDIT: guys the point of this comment was to show how ridiculous the requirements of the parent comment would be if applied to human teacher as well as to AI teacher
- lwhi 4y ago
  We need to interrogate and test all information we receive.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago

cloudking 4y ago

I'm using it to write WordPress plugins that can be used in place of expensive yearly subscription plugins.

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yosito 4y ago
Why not use it to write expensive yearly subscription WordPress plugins? Make some money with it.
- cloudking 4y ago
  Definitely thinking about it, and open sourcing some too.

lapama 4y ago

Write my PhD thesis, even incorporating the written and oral feedback of my advisor, which I record and use as input. Yes it was a bad joke, one I did not think I could make just 1 year earlier.

sharemywin 4y ago
don't forget about the made up data

Galxeagle 4y ago

Finding lots of value in drafting emails, especially for topics or asks I'm not as used to dealing with, like asking for extensions or blaming other teams for blockers. Obviously takes a few iterations ('be less verbose!') but I get a lot of value in seeing a couple different ways to word the request and how to frame the background facts to come to the conclusion I want. Started using it as a coaching tool for new hires who aren't used to the world of corporate memos yet.

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qeternity 4y ago

There are a lot of use-cases that aren't possible at current pricing and model access. For instance, we're working on a number of text classification features, but the inability to fine-tune makes it very difficult and expensive.

chrisacky 4y ago

I asked it to help explain the Birthday Paradox to a colleague who was struggling to understand the math behind it. I gave it the requirements and just copied and pasted. https://jsfiddle.net/k8L9eyf7/5 https://jsfiddle.net/k8L9eyf7/5

awb 4y ago

Two things I find remarkable: 1) I’m ~50% faster at coding 2) Jailbreaks. It’s exposing in a reproducible way how people are persuaded / tricked into bending or breaking rules via persistence, role play, and confident instruction. Presumably from a corpus of text where these techniques have worked in real life.

woeirua 4y ago

Call center employees are pretty much as good as gone once the price comes down on GPT4. You can pretty easily give it a good prompt that allows it to answer very specific questions about your company, or interact with external APIs to schedule services, make changes based on the customer's requests, etc. Throw some Speech to Text and Text to Speech services in front and behind it, and voila you have an AI receptionist that blows literally every automated answering service out of the water today. IMO, 90% of call center employees will be out of work in the next 10 years.

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dandelany 4y ago
I am dreading the inevitable future day when I have to argue about a denied health insurance claim on the phone with a fucking robot prompted to make it as difficult as possible for me to win.
- lwansbrough 4y ago
  Why would you do that when you can dispatch your own AI to argue for you?
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  - Hedepig 4y ago
    We'll probably have tiered AI systems. Upgrade to the Argue Bot 10 series and save big! With a 3x higher success rate in securing cheaper deals compared to the 1000 series, it's the smart choice for cost-savvy individuals. For an additional $999 per month, you'll have access to cutting-edge negotiation technology that will work tirelessly on your behalf. Don't miss out on potential savings - make the switch to the Argue Bot 10 series today! Edit, changed it to an improved promo using ChatGPT from my original which is here: "Argue bot 10 series, 3x more likely to get you a cheaper deal than the 1000 series, for only an additional $999 per month"

jackbrookes 4y ago

Give it access to a Python repl, show it how to send HTTP requests, how to take look at images of webpages if it needs to, and how to spawn new instances of itself - give it a budget and tell it to make money for you.

mitthrowaway2 4y ago
I don't want to underplay how much you've hit the nail on the head here, but... Commenters in AI safety discussions: "Just keep the AI in a box, don't give it internet access, unplug it if you don't like what it says, and it really can't hurt you!" Commenters in AI product discussions: "How quickly can we give it unrestricted access to the web, $50k to freely play with, and a highly underspecified objective?"

Filligree 4y ago

Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet, but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's working; now I just need API access, to fully automate it.

yosito 4y ago
> GPT-4 is competent at translation That really depends on the language. It's still kinda awkward at Hungarian. Personally, I think DeepL is still way better at translation.
- numeri 4y ago
  In what ways would you say its awkward? I'm really curious about its performance in languages that might not have shown up in its training data much. I will say, I've tried using it with a dialect, and it's good when it chooses to use the dialect, but slips into formal/prestige language extremely often.
realusername 4y ago
Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language. This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.
  - realusername 4y ago

arc_of_descent 4y ago

Write unit tests, document code, optimize code, explain code. I've tried Python functions and React code. It even converted a class based React component to a functional style component!

shusaku 4y ago
Can it really optimize code? And what granularity have you seen it succeed?
- arc_of_descent 4y ago
  Sorry, I really meant refactor here. I did ask it to optimize code, and it came with a suggestion of trimming down my function into a smaller chunk and creating a new function. So it actually refactored it TBH, but I am going to try how I can check if it can optimize code too.

cyrialize 4y ago

I've been using it as a discussion machine and a way to cut down search. My usual loop used to be: 1. Search for X 2. Review documentation and other websites that come up 3. Learn from my review and further refine my search 4. Continue steps over and over until I get what I want --- My new loop is: 1. Ask ChatGPT about X 2. Use the words that ChatGPT returns to me as search terms 3. Review documentation and other websites that come up 4. Learn from my review, further refine my search, and talk to ChatGPT about it 5. Continue steps over and over until I get what I want I initially thought that using ChatGPT in such a fashion would lead to a longer amount of time - especially since I'm adding a new tool to my "loop". Instead, finding and learning what I need is much faster. My old loop I would do 3+ times. The new loop with ChatGPT takes 1-2 times. When you aren't familiar with X it becomes difficult to know what to search for. Even if you have the docs in front of you, you need to know key terms to search through the docs for. ChatGPT makes finding key terms to search for much, MUCH easier. Fact checking ChatGPT (for the most part) doesn't take me that many cycles.

Casteil 4y ago
One thing you can do for quick research -> summary is ask it to produce a detailed mind-map of the topic at hand, along with related/relevant long-tail keywords. The latter is effectively a SEO strategy in a nutshell, but having those keywords in front of you can really jog your memory.
SpaceL10n 4y ago
A lot of folks can relate to that I bet. To typing in something in Google, clicking on a few results, learning some new keywords you didn't know before, putting those back into Google, and rinsing and repeating until you get the results you are looking for. It's search, but supercharged! Are people still going to say, "Just google it."? Or, is there a new verb already?

saklani 4y ago

1. Quick code reviews. 2. Generating tests. 3. Good for dumb questions, that I'd hate asking a person. I'm generally just faster coding.

cyrialize 4y ago
How are you using it for code reviews? Are you copy-pasting code that you are working on or code others are working on from you company into ChatGPT?

rglover 4y ago

I've been using it for long-term memory supplementation. Had a faint memory of driving around in a friend's truck back in high school and was trying to remember a Marilyn Manson song we always played. Asked it this the other day: > Are there any other marilyn manson songs with a crowd shouting? And it spit out: === Yes, Marilyn Manson has used the sound of a crowd shouting in several other songs besides "The Beautiful People." Here are a few examples: "Irresponsible Hate Anthem" - This song, which appears on the album "Antichrist Superstar," opens with the sound of a crowd chanting "Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate!" before launching into a heavy industrial metal riff. "The Fight Song" - Another track from the "Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)" album, "The Fight Song" features a crowd chanting "Marilyn Manson" before the song begins. "This Is the New Shit" - This song, from the album "The Golden Age of Grotesque," features a chorus that includes the sound of a crowd shouting "Are you motherfuckers ready for the new shit?" These are just a few examples, as Marilyn Manson has used the technique of incorporating crowd shouting in several of his songs throughout his career. === I'm highly skeptical of GPT/LLM as a replacement for humans at the task-level, but for search, this can't be beat. It replied almost instantaneously. Even more shocking: I think this will seriously destroy Google and the concept of SEO. That's extraordinary considering how pivotal Google is to the internet of today. This is the beginning of the OS in the movie Her.

ipaddr 4y ago
90% of searches are trying to find websites not teach concepts. If they want to learn something it's usually current.. who won the game.. fire locally. If you want to learn how to lift weights simple instructions are not going to replace videos of fit influencers you follow. I think google is safe
drummojg 4y ago
Similarly, I used it to answer the question, "Who was the Black female author whose works were saved from an estate bonfire?" Neither DDG nor Goog could answer for me (kept coming up Maya Angelou which is totally wrong--it was, of course, Zora Neale Hurston as I should have remembered in the first place.
neilv 4y ago

finder83 4y ago

Mostly code here, but I've found a few uses, mostly around brainstorming that I use as a starting point to further thought: Brainstorming ideas such as around a party theme for my kids. Games we can play, decorations, etc. Generating exercise ideas, particularly since I don't much like gyms or common methods Helped me to understand some medical side effects of thyroid issues and the medicine I'm taking. Actually I learned from it that Iron interferes with my medicine, and I was taking vitamins at the same time as I was taking it. Seems minor, but my brain's definitely more active after changing things. We just started a business, so ideas around sales tactics, what to include in a business plan, etc Getting my mind going with questions to ask for a Bible lesson I teach around a specific passage. Apparently it can pretty much quote an interpret any passage I've given to it and generate questions, in different styles or levels of depth. Having it explain or find interesting tidbits around the ancient Greek in a bible passage. This one surprised me. Apparently it understands to some degree declensions, parts of speech, verb tenses, etc. It's not 100% correct here, but maybe as correct as it is with code. I'm not an expert either, just graduated seminary, so it's a nice support

folex 4y ago

Retrieve information from public technical chats to provide Q&A on programming languages, technologies, engineering approaches and so on.

jasondigitized 4y ago
Can you describe how you are doing this, e.g. What is the series of prompts you are using to feed it the chats?
- folex 4y ago
  I'm yet not doing this, unfortunately. API limits wouldn't allow me to load in some IRC chat there.

johnfn 4y ago

I think GPT4 isn't amazing (that is, better than excellent humans) at any specific task, so I doubt that many things it does, in isolation, are remarkable. Where they shine is that GPT4 and ChatGPT are really good at doing lots of menial tasks really quickly. e.g. I can ask it to refactor my code, rewrite it in a different style, add a new function etc and it'll happily do that all day. Probably the best use case was for learning about things I didn't understand. I asked GPT4 questions about CSS Grid yesterday. With GPT4 I could drill directly into areas I was curious about and get a pretty uniformly good explanation, e.g. "explain to me more about the layout algorithm". Doing that with google is possible, but it's annoying to have to continually bounce between various shoddy articles on different websites in order to get a patchwork of understanding.

vyrotek 4y ago

The fact that you can put in garbage unstructured data, ask it questions, and then "convert" it to JSON is kind of magical. It's like computers have a new analog/organic input system. [0] Also, been recently playing with ways to generate API code plumbing without any schema layers. (Swagger/OpenAPI/Proto) [1] [0] https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640417769303977984 https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640417769303977984 [1] https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640142385282949121 https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1640142385282949121

sxv 4y ago
Impressive, but it seems to have hallucinated Lilly's location.
realaleris149 4y ago
Also, was M from Male or the initial of another name?
realusername 4y ago
Maybe we can finally code a 100% functional CSV importer which deal with all the broken stuff people invented haha

Giorgi 4y ago

I have using it as my copyrighting assistant, especially when I have to write long copy

folex 4y ago

I can't really wait for tooling to visualise complex technical concepts into nice animations and static images. Imagine describing how some system works, what it consists of, and get architecture images + process animations.

DEDLINE 4y ago
This is what I am missing as well. I'm a pre-sales technical architect that keeps looking for use-cases where I am able to leverage this technology. 75% of my work is in draw.io and PowerPoint.

mattvlr 4y ago

I used to build my own little wiki / knowledge graph as a fun project to see what it was capable of. You feed it a topic and ask it to return a list of topics that are related to the parent topic. Repeat for each child topic, set a max depth and you can generate a topic tree about anything. Always asking for it to use JSON as the output. I then had GPT-4 write an encyclopedia style entry for each child topic with nice formatting and links to actual wikipedia when possible.

LouisSayers 4y ago

I've been using it to refactor my code. I paste in all the code that it needs context for, tell it how I'd like to refactor it (e.g. there are two concerns, split them into their own structures). It then gives me a high level of what it'd do, I review and then tell it to implement what it said. I tried this yesterday in golang with some gRPC calls and while it seemed to hallucinate a couple details, overall it did a pretty good job. I think part of getting it right will be to guide it a little more. I'm building my own product so don't have to worry about getting company approval etc for this. Also, language learning - I'm learning German atm and plan on asking it to list the x most common nouns in each gender (der die das) and then generate example sentences that use each of the nouns and so on.

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ben30 4y ago

I cut and pasted my child’s school’s multi page complaints policy without reading it myself, then asked it to show me the stages I need to follow as a sequence diagram and it can up with this: @startuml actor Parent participant "Class Teacher" as CT participant "Head of School" as H participant Clerk == Level 1 == Parent -> CT: Informal Complaint CT -> H: Meeting Request H -> CT: Meeting Scheduled CT -> Parent: Meeting Scheduled Parent -> CT: Attend Meeting CT -> H: Meeting Summary H -> Clerk: Meeting Summary Received == Level 2 == Parent -> Clerk: Formal Complaint Clerk -> H: Formal Complaint Received H -> Clerk: Response Preparation Clerk -> Parent: Formal Complaint Response Parent -> Clerk: Request for Level 2 Meeting Clerk -> H: Request for Level 2 Meeting Received H -> Parent: Level 2 Meeting Scheduled @enduml

Belituio 4y ago

1.: It's the first time I'm seeing a chatbot who could easily replace the human layer. Chatgpt understands tons of languages. So I highly prefer to write things up like "you can change a username by going to this ui and click this and than that". Or anything in-between. Even if chatgpt only takes care of translating and creating a proper support ticket. 2.: Text understanding. I have plenty of tasks were a human would need to do things for me like "pull out all features of this building and make a list out of it" before I can verify it. 3.: I can already see the use case of fine-tuning my own agent with my own data. Now it's actually worth it to write proper documentation or architecture decision records. Basically doing brain dump because after I can just ask it things like "why do we use angular?" "Because you tried out react and didn't like it"

antibasilisk 4y ago

On the occasion I do editing for certain documents on behalf of non-native English speakers. This can take up to two hours per document ordinarily. ChatGPT reduced this to 15 minutes, and almost all of that is just proofreading the output, waiting for it to respond and copying and pasting.

PeterisP 4y ago

Rewriting text to be more fluent or readable. For all the (many!) people who need to create documents in English but aren't native speakers, GPT-4 is quite effective at rephrasing a technically correct but un-idiomatic text into something that's much better.

_boffin_ 4y ago

Truthfully... what's most remarkable to me is it not saying, "just stfu, you idiot" after me asking it question after question about stuff i want to know more about. There has been countless times where I'll read it's response of, "sure, here's..." and it just blows my mind that i have the ability to barrage something with questions and it won't get tired of me doing so. it puts a smile on my face.

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Jamesbeam 4y ago

I want to share a personal experience with GPT-4 and other AI tools that has helped me a lot, given my recently acquired physical disability. My creative and critical thinking are still in great shape, but I've been struggling to execute my ideas because of my physical limitations. For example, I used to paint as a way to deal with traumatic experiences, but that's no longer possible for me. I got depressed and frustrated, being no longer able to transfer traumatic memories out of my head. I found a workaround using Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT. By doing this, I can recreate my paintings in my own style without having to physically paint them. It's now part of my weekly routine and has been a real support for my therapy and PTSD. Another thing GPT-4 has helped me with is managing anxiety attacks. I'm not good at coding, it's simply a skill I'm not good at, but with some assistance from GPT-4, I made a simple browser game using HTML, CSS, and JS. This game is now my go-to distraction when I feel anxious and is easily accessible on my phone. GPT-4 has also made everyday tasks, like writing letters or emails, a bit easier for me. I can shave off a few minutes here and there that way each day, which is a lot of time I can do stuff I enjoy if you add them up over a year or longer. While these benefits may not seem groundbreaking to everyone, especially if you're healthy, they've made a significant difference in my life and for me personally, and I think that is remarkable. I'm also not good at asking other people for help, especially for stuff I managed to do on my own for all my life. So if I can ask AI Tools to do stuff for me instead of taking up a friend's lifetime, it helps me to keep a sense of independence and being able to take care of myself.

iKlsR 4y ago

I did a medical lab test the other day and I've been trying for several days to reach my original doctor who for some reason I still can't get. I don't know what to make of the abbreviations and scales on the document and I sure as hell wasn't going to visit another doctor and pay a fee to grok it without a need to or google each line to find out I have "cancer or some other random ailment". By chance I was using cgpt for something else and I just copied and pasted the unformatted data from the pdf and voila. https://i.imgur.com/tCy1dWU.png https://i.imgur.com/tCy1dWU.png, there is a more personal page that I didn't share that gave me a eli5 explanation for the exact problem I got checked for that I couldn't tell and it pretty much worked the same using the terms and even gave me recommendations as to what I could do next.

adamquek 4y ago
I am surprised at how good ChatGPT is at with abbreviation. I'm working with a lot of discharge summaries at the moment, and ChatGPT is a god-send in interpreting all the shorthand used. It will take me forever otherwise to find out that the shortform CR2 means second complete remission.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

Populate open world videogames with real living characters that evolve to your way of gaming. Apparently somebody tested chatgpt 4 as a d&d DM and worked really well, so this coupled with AI voice acting could lead to exceptional results in the game industry.