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I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would.

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to get there.

shaunkoh 3y ago
It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible.
- horeszko 3y ago
  >"It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible" Nice slogan... is this an ad?
  - shaunkoh 3y ago
    Lol just an attempt at being pithy. It’s true though. Something about ease of functionality curves making whole classes of new use cases / customers possible.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwaway1777 3y ago
    It’s probably better than most tutorials or docs
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    They might not need it, but it might reduce the friction dramatically. I use GPT to learn things occasionally, but it’s almost always something where I don’t have the language on hand to navigate the problem space. GPT is great at opening windows and giving you the tools you need to figure something out. In my case, I usually get to a point where I think I get the topic well enough to leave ChatGPT and go out on my own. Something interesting here is that you can ask GPT to tell you where good resources might be found on the internet. Sometimes it’ll actually come through, providing you some decent places to investigate the topic even further. Whether it’s blog posts, long form articles, or research papers. It’s mostly a matter of eliminating friction and connecting dots faster. It’s definitely not making something possible that wasn’t possible before.
    - nucleative 3y ago
      This applies to me. GPT4 increases the speed of simple tasks significantly. I needed a WordPress plugin but I'm not a WordPress developer and it's been a while since I spent much time in PHP. Ultimately I don't have time to come up to speed on this and I just want the plugin now. I wrote a ChatGPT prompt explaining the plugin in great detail, and it responded with the entire plugin. I installed it and it worked on the first try. I went back and forth for a few iterations to adjust things like css and button titles and now it's running on a live site. Had I assigned the project to someone else, I'd still have needed to write the "prompt" and I'm not sure it would have saved me any time.
  - pinkcan 3y ago
    anything before a "but" is bullshit someone just offered feedback on their development experience for free, and all you can say is, "...are you so dumb you need an AI to help you with Docker?"
- keyle 3y ago
  This is true. Particularly if you're a polgyglot working with many different stacks. You know how to do something in X and you've never done it in Y. Explain it to ChatGPT and it gets you 95% there. It's a huge time saver. Sure you could do it by browsing the web and sticking together a bunch of pieces, rewrite it twice etc.
  - shaunkoh 3y ago
    100%. I do know it might come bite me in the ass at some point. Already I didn’t realise my docker container was saving data to the NON-PERSISTENT data volume. But that was a greater reflection of Chatgpt taking me beyond my knowledge limits, and me being in a place where my ignorance of my ignorance can lead to not-great consequences.
    - revelio 3y ago
      Don't feel too bad about that one. I've seen Docker's default of non-persistent storage cause disaster even for professionals with years of experience. It's just a really bad bit of design.
- vnorilo 3y ago
  The strange thing is, search engines used to be able to do this. But they have gotten progressively more terrible at finding a very specific result based on a very specific query. My ChatGPT experience is not that different from the "good old days" of searching the internet. This time the search is in latent space which has up- and downsides.
- Shorel 3y ago
  I don't disagree with the usefulness for you particularly. But all these things were possible before ChatGPT.
- synxos 3y ago
  Same for me. The benefits are obviously not going to be uniformly distributed because intelligence is not uniformly distributed. If I was more intelligent I would be less impressed with it because I would probably already know what it has taught me. I understand the thermodynamics of that submarine implosion now but if I had taken any kind of physics I would have already known all that. I didn't take physics though. This pretty much extends to all subjects. I will have to have it teach me to setup docker containers. The exercise I really need to get on is to try make something in a language that I have no clue about. Like Rust or Go I know nothing other than they are programming languages. Then it is an exercise in the skill of going from zero to not zero with the help of AI and that not zero will hopefully keep scaling up and up over time.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.
- rushingcreek 3y ago
  Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    The Pair Programmer feature is absolutely fantastic and a massive gamechanger. It helped me figure out the architecture for a new app I'm planning. I showed it to a senior developer in my coworking space and he said - in his own words - "yep, that's how I would approach it too".
    - rushingcreek 3y ago
      Wow, that's amazing! We'd love to talk to you about your experience and hear your feedback -- my email is michael@phind.com.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    How on earth are you affording the OpenAI API fees?
    - philipwhiuk 3y ago
      Starts with V and rhymes with sea.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Please write a blog post about your journey!
- 3y ago
keiferski 3y ago
Yes, my experience is that most hype comes from people that don't actually work in the jobs they claim will be replaced. Writers, for example. While generative AI does make writing some things more efficient, it almost always has a bland, generic style that is immediately recognizable. The only jobs it will be replacing are ones that didn't require much effort in the first place.
- spi 3y ago
  Isn't that almost always the case, and in truth the beauty of automation? Replacing simple, repetitive tasks that, if you have to do that, you say "I wish I had a machine doing this for me"? Of course, that might impact the number of available jobs and it's something that need to be taken under control. But, if talking about writers, while AI won't realistically replace imaginative authors and investigative journalists (at least, certainly not in the short term), it will likely replace (some) copy editors and dollar-per-thousand-words "journalists" that have to fill tabloids and free subway "newspapers". While it might be a financial loss for the people involved, the society will hardly sink due to that. In fact, if I feel optimist, in theory it might reduce costs for publishing houses and newspapers, to invest more into quality (human-made) content.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    ChatGPT will definitely be used for rote tasks that are currently fulfilled by low-end writers, but realistically could already be automated by a competent programmer. Stuff like generic product descriptions or content farm product reviews. But I don't see it actually replacing flesh-and-blood writers that have a viewpoint anytime soon.
starbugs 3y ago
I agree. It may be helpful under certain circumstances, but under different ones it might actually slow you down, thereby yielding a net productivity gain of zero. At least, that's what it did for me personally. What I worry about is human greed in relation to AI, be it GPT or anything else. The incentives are lined up to produce something akin to AGI and the tools are becoming more tangible. The goal is to tap the honey pot of automating current knowledge labor first and foremost. Later, other areas of labor.
sanderjd 3y ago
This is the main thing I'm curious about, as with any technology: fad or paradigm? I can't see anything on Twitter anymore, but before that happened I think I hadn't seen many of the entertaining ChatGPT conversation screenshots anymore. That entertainment use case had the hallmarks of faddishness. It seems far more useful as a productivity aid though, but as the OP discussed, I doubt the chat prompt UI is going to be the paradigm for that. Copilot is already mostly a more useful UI for me, and I suspect that's where this is headed, with a bunch of different specializations (and even more failed attempts).

shaunkoh 3y ago

It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible.

horeszko 3y ago
>"It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible" Nice slogan... is this an ad?
- shaunkoh 3y ago
  Lol just an attempt at being pithy. It’s true though. Something about ease of functionality curves making whole classes of new use cases / customers possible.
ChatGTP 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwaway1777 3y ago
  It’s probably better than most tutorials or docs
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  They might not need it, but it might reduce the friction dramatically. I use GPT to learn things occasionally, but it’s almost always something where I don’t have the language on hand to navigate the problem space. GPT is great at opening windows and giving you the tools you need to figure something out. In my case, I usually get to a point where I think I get the topic well enough to leave ChatGPT and go out on my own. Something interesting here is that you can ask GPT to tell you where good resources might be found on the internet. Sometimes it’ll actually come through, providing you some decent places to investigate the topic even further. Whether it’s blog posts, long form articles, or research papers. It’s mostly a matter of eliminating friction and connecting dots faster. It’s definitely not making something possible that wasn’t possible before.
  - nucleative 3y ago
    This applies to me. GPT4 increases the speed of simple tasks significantly. I needed a WordPress plugin but I'm not a WordPress developer and it's been a while since I spent much time in PHP. Ultimately I don't have time to come up to speed on this and I just want the plugin now. I wrote a ChatGPT prompt explaining the plugin in great detail, and it responded with the entire plugin. I installed it and it worked on the first try. I went back and forth for a few iterations to adjust things like css and button titles and now it's running on a live site. Had I assigned the project to someone else, I'd still have needed to write the "prompt" and I'm not sure it would have saved me any time.
- pinkcan 3y ago
  anything before a "but" is bullshit someone just offered feedback on their development experience for free, and all you can say is, "...are you so dumb you need an AI to help you with Docker?"
keyle 3y ago
This is true. Particularly if you're a polgyglot working with many different stacks. You know how to do something in X and you've never done it in Y. Explain it to ChatGPT and it gets you 95% there. It's a huge time saver. Sure you could do it by browsing the web and sticking together a bunch of pieces, rewrite it twice etc.
- shaunkoh 3y ago
  100%. I do know it might come bite me in the ass at some point. Already I didn’t realise my docker container was saving data to the NON-PERSISTENT data volume. But that was a greater reflection of Chatgpt taking me beyond my knowledge limits, and me being in a place where my ignorance of my ignorance can lead to not-great consequences.
  - revelio 3y ago
    Don't feel too bad about that one. I've seen Docker's default of non-persistent storage cause disaster even for professionals with years of experience. It's just a really bad bit of design.
vnorilo 3y ago
The strange thing is, search engines used to be able to do this. But they have gotten progressively more terrible at finding a very specific result based on a very specific query. My ChatGPT experience is not that different from the "good old days" of searching the internet. This time the search is in latent space which has up- and downsides.
Shorel 3y ago
I don't disagree with the usefulness for you particularly. But all these things were possible before ChatGPT.
synxos 3y ago
Same for me. The benefits are obviously not going to be uniformly distributed because intelligence is not uniformly distributed. If I was more intelligent I would be less impressed with it because I would probably already know what it has taught me. I understand the thermodynamics of that submarine implosion now but if I had taken any kind of physics I would have already known all that. I didn't take physics though. This pretty much extends to all subjects. I will have to have it teach me to setup docker containers. The exercise I really need to get on is to try make something in a language that I have no clue about. Like Rust or Go I know nothing other than they are programming languages. Then it is an exercise in the skill of going from zero to not zero with the help of AI and that not zero will hopefully keep scaling up and up over time.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

rushingcreek 3y ago
Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  The Pair Programmer feature is absolutely fantastic and a massive gamechanger. It helped me figure out the architecture for a new app I'm planning. I showed it to a senior developer in my coworking space and he said - in his own words - "yep, that's how I would approach it too".
  - rushingcreek 3y ago
    Wow, that's amazing! We'd love to talk to you about your experience and hear your feedback -- my email is michael@phind.com.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  How on earth are you affording the OpenAI API fees?
  - philipwhiuk 3y ago
    Starts with V and rhymes with sea.
rahimnathwani 3y ago
Please write a blog post about your journey!
3y ago

keiferski 3y ago

Yes, my experience is that most hype comes from people that don't actually work in the jobs they claim will be replaced. Writers, for example. While generative AI does make writing some things more efficient, it almost always has a bland, generic style that is immediately recognizable. The only jobs it will be replacing are ones that didn't require much effort in the first place.

spi 3y ago
Isn't that almost always the case, and in truth the beauty of automation? Replacing simple, repetitive tasks that, if you have to do that, you say "I wish I had a machine doing this for me"? Of course, that might impact the number of available jobs and it's something that need to be taken under control. But, if talking about writers, while AI won't realistically replace imaginative authors and investigative journalists (at least, certainly not in the short term), it will likely replace (some) copy editors and dollar-per-thousand-words "journalists" that have to fill tabloids and free subway "newspapers". While it might be a financial loss for the people involved, the society will hardly sink due to that. In fact, if I feel optimist, in theory it might reduce costs for publishing houses and newspapers, to invest more into quality (human-made) content.
- keiferski 3y ago
  ChatGPT will definitely be used for rote tasks that are currently fulfilled by low-end writers, but realistically could already be automated by a competent programmer. Stuff like generic product descriptions or content farm product reviews. But I don't see it actually replacing flesh-and-blood writers that have a viewpoint anytime soon.

starbugs 3y ago

I agree. It may be helpful under certain circumstances, but under different ones it might actually slow you down, thereby yielding a net productivity gain of zero. At least, that's what it did for me personally. What I worry about is human greed in relation to AI, be it GPT or anything else. The incentives are lined up to produce something akin to AGI and the tools are becoming more tangible. The goal is to tap the honey pot of automating current knowledge labor first and foremost. Later, other areas of labor.

sanderjd 3y ago

This is the main thing I'm curious about, as with any technology: fad or paradigm? I can't see anything on Twitter anymore, but before that happened I think I hadn't seen many of the entertaining ChatGPT conversation screenshots anymore. That entertainment use case had the hallmarks of faddishness. It seems far more useful as a productivity aid though, but as the OP discussed, I doubt the chat prompt UI is going to be the paradigm for that. Copilot is already mostly a more useful UI for me, and I suspect that's where this is headed, with a bunch of different specializations (and even more failed attempts).