10 ms·

ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

• meatjuice 3y ago
  They couldn’t make use of it. Prompt engineering was such a difficult thing for them.
• iainctduncan 3y ago
  Re the summer vacation dip comments, keep in mind that university students are done exams in mid April, and the article said that the usage peak was June. And in high school, the number of assignments is just not very high compared to say the output of a 40 hour worker. While likely a factor, I really doubt this can be mostly attributed to students.
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  As anecdote, I just cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT a few days ago. It was fun to experiment with, but it’s obvious that 90% of their development effort has been going into censoring their models instead of improving their utility. I saw no tangible improvements over months. For example, the web browsing extension was released completely broken and then… remained broken. Meanwhile Phind.com has been doing web browsing very well and very fast. The Wolfram extension was also useless, and in the same time period a Mathematica update was released with a far superior LLM notebook mode that is actually functional. OpenAI also don’t allow access to their long context length capable models in the Chat web app. I switched to the API subscription because it is billed based on consumption and I can use the 16K context GPT 3.5 models. Meanwhile, despite announcements of “general availability” I still can’t access GPT 4 via an API and nobody has access to the 32K context version. That would be truly useful to me and worth paying for… but OpenAI does not want my money. I guess I’ll just have to wait for Anthropic or Google to make a GPT 4 equivalent AI that I can access programmatically without have to prostrate myself in front of Sam Altman.
  • pcurve 3y ago
    I got fed up with Midjourney making me feel like I'm a pervert, so discontinued my subscription.
    • _nhynes 3y ago
      MJ’s problem for me at least is that it is incapable of generating unaesthetic things. I gave it the classic list of negative prompts (blurry, grainy, deformed hands, etc.) and got a pretty image back, so I cancelled and switched to Microsoft’s DALL-E, which better spans the full range of creativity. RLHF is a scourge.
  • JuanPosadas 3y ago
    > but OpenAI does not want my money. For real, they could have done a demand based bidding system like AWS EC2 spot instances so serious light users could get in their tasks and big payers could launch their products and bulk processing users could have their jobs handled while most people are sleeping, but instead we got their weird waitlist that was probably more about giving M$ product ideas to steal.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• gremlinsinc 3y ago
  Highly doubtful. If anything people are just using it via 3rd party tools via API, or just using competitors like Claude or any of the open source ones.
• aftbit 3y ago
  People are so short sighted. If we predict that inflation will be 6.8%, then it comes in at 6.7%, the market goes straight up, even though the numbers are basically the same. If a new exciting company is growing like crazy, but then has a few months of negative growth, we assume it's dead? Chill out people - real life takes time to resolve. You can't live on the month-to-month business cycle.
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    > real life takes time to resolve. Openai losing users and people waking up from a toxic marketing campaign _is_ life resolving.
• pwpw 3y ago
  I have been largely unimpressed by how they operate as a company handling users. Six weeks ago, I tried to change my email but got frustrated that an obvious option wasn’t available in the settings page. So I deleted my account and went to create a new one. When I got to the phone verification, it told me that my phone number could only be used for two accounts, so I was not allowed to sign up. This was the second account I attempted to create, so my phone had only been used once. Naturally, I tried using my google voice phone number, but the system told me that type of number wasn’t allowed. At this point, I navigated to their support page and had to talk with a chat bot that apparently isn’t powered by ChatGPT. I found it maddening and couldn’t locate an email address to communicate with a human. After a few 10 minute sessions over the course of a few days in search of an email, I finally located one. So I fired off an email explaining how I no longer had access due difficulties stemming from wanting to change my email. After four weeks, I finally got a response that I’m not sure was written by a human. It completely misunderstood my succinctly described issue and desired resolution. I went back and forth multiple times with support including them suggesting if I am unhappy with their service to sign up for a pro account, pay for the service, and then request a refund. Ignoring the irrationality of the suggestion, I explained how I couldn’t log in to an account at all and simply wanted to access their service again. They continued to insist that once an account is deleted, it is deleted permanently, and I can never have access again. I don’t recall a warning of these major implications at the time of deleting my account with an old email address. At this point, I requested to be escalated to a human and have not heard back for a week now. Admittedly, I shouldn’t have deleted my account initially, but I had decided that ChatGPT was something I wanted to continue using and needed to switch to my new email address since I have deprecated my old one. This entire process has left me so unimpressed with their company. It’s truly ridiculous how complicated every step has been along the way when I’m normally competent at these types of tasks.
• bagasme 3y ago
  I wasn't shocked, indeed because still stumbled on known issues (like giving false answer on otherwise right context).
• telltruth 3y ago
  Most people don’t know this but OpenAI is actually very dysfunctional company and only accidentally successfully because of just handful of right people having a rather lucky hunch (Schulman, Redcliff et al). However, execution wise they are really really poor. You can see this i myriad of problems such as their dataset is still stuck in 2022, plugins was a complete disaster, web browser mode sucks, app is poor, unable to release 32k and multimodal, rate limit even for paid users etc etc. All thesis problems are now even more aggravated by their recent massive hiring spree of AI doomer crowd and Yudkowsky’s cult members instead of actually doing real research. Now the company is full of doomers whose sole job is to slow things down and be barrier to efforts. Meanwhile Bard has been making amazing progress. It’s free, doesn’t log you off all the time, it always feel latest and very close - if not better than current limited ChatGPT. Given OpenAI’s new staffing composition, they are unlikely to be leader down the road, especially when Gemini comes out. This is unfortunately sama’s second failed execution. He should probably just focus on investments.
  • nightski 3y ago
    I was with you until you said Bard. Sorry Google, no thanks. Open source is the future of these models.
  • juliensalinas 3y ago
    Totally agree. Actually a couple of months ago Sam Altman even admitted that they had a very hard time doing proper "engineering" (meaning that they had the right team to create a very good LLM but not the right team to productionize and their models and APIs). Many people are actually finding the OpenAI API very unstable and do not plan to rely on OpenAI for their production workloads.
• water9 3y ago
  Fourth of July weekend holiday anybody?
• theknocker 3y ago
  [dead]
• qbxk 3y ago
  as we all know by now, ChatGPT is just a language model. For most of human history we've used language capability as a way to assess intelligence. It feels like common sense that "If it speaks, it must be intelligent." We have all at some point fallen for the fallacy that "If it speaks well, or poorly, that must be a reflection of its intelligence." But a language model flips the tables on this on this ancient reflex. It's great at using language! But it's as dumb as a river rock. That's something new and will take us all some time to get used to.
• outside1234 3y ago
  It turns out that people don’t want a stochastic parrot after all
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  its making me prove i'm human every time i enter a prompt to GPT-4 now I'm a paying customer!
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    Heh, even the bots want to get rid of the bots!
• throwaway920102 3y ago
  I will gladly become a daily user when I stop running into nanny-state blocking my queries.
• sdfghswe 3y ago
  Quick, back to peddling NFTs.
• erichmond 3y ago
  I do think AI is here to stay, but that initial round of AI is going to destroy the world burned fast and hot. I can't even get ChatGPT (+ web plugin), when given a list of restaurants in NYC, to tell me which ones are still open vs have closed, and what their hours of operation / locations are. This is a pretty low bar request IMO. Showed me we still have a ways to go before AI is where we thought it was 3-4 months ago.
  • hashtag-til 3y ago
    Hey the initial round of AI was decades ago, FYI.
    • erichmond 3y ago
      You and me reading books about fuzzy logic in the 80s didn't constitute the initial round of AI.
      • hashtag-til 3y ago
        Oh man… all those genetic algorithms were a waste of time then?
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > You and me reading books about fuzzy logic in the 80s didn't constitute the initial round of AI. Right, that was at least the second round, as it occurred after the first “AI Winter”. The first round was a lot earlier than that.
      • disqard 3y ago
        Lofti Zadeh ftw!
  • cameronfraser 3y ago
    Most of the plugins are garbage, I just want chatgpt to have up to date knowledge and working natively with more media types. I don't think I've used a single plugin I thought had good results but I love gpt4 for work
• hashtag-til 3y ago
  Who would guess that inflated expectations from mass media are not going as expected. These last years were good. I’ve been surfing the AI wave well, but better go back to more traditional projects now the AI time is fading.
• Temporary_31337 3y ago
  Time for another hype train, how about quantum?
  • pinkcan 3y ago
    VR is still not done is it?
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      In terms of being a popular hype train, VR was done a while back.
    • berkle4455 3y ago
      a virtual world where you can buy and sell AI-powered cryptocurrencies. also, you don't have legs.
    • wg0 3y ago
      Nobody talking about kubernetes so maybe a new JS framework that's going to salvage the world.
  • hashtag-til 3y ago
    Oh please no… quantum again? Have you seen the latest on the subject? https://www.tomshardware.com/news/iran-quantum-computer-arm-dev-board https://www.tomshardware.com/news/iran-quantum-computer-arm-... Jokes apart, I hope it won’t be quantum.
  • JimtheCoder 3y ago
    Have you heard of this little thing called the Blockchain?
• Shank 3y ago
  It shouldn't be surprising that this happens. People test ChatGPT, find the limitations, and then if those limitations are blockers, they stop using it. If they aren't, they continue. It's not as if Browse with Bing was a major feature, but they removed that, and then they've tweaked system limitations over time such that more and more types of topics are restricted or give cursory answers to things. It's not surprising to me that this happened given the inherent limits and the rapidly changing limits that affect how the platform can be used.
• antaviana 3y ago
  Possibly related with school summer time in many countries.
• salgorithm 3y ago
  If a lot of ChatGPT users were students, I would expect a drop during summer vacation. I predict another article from the Washington Post in August/September about how ChatGPT is seeing a rebound in usage.
  • ca_tech 3y ago
    The article only addresses the website and application. I expect that what we will see is a shift from individual users to enterprise usage. Individuals are not going to subscribe indefinitely, but I expect corporate access to the API will continue to be healthy.
  • lagniappe 3y ago
    Not a student, but getting constantly cloudflare-blocked and models seeming less capable every update has been giving me pause.
    • kccqzy 3y ago
      In fact I've been using Google Bard more and more because of exactly this. At least Bard doesn't ever block me and its responses are on par with GPT-3.5. Probably not as good as GPT-4 but reliability is important too.
    • drexlspivey 3y ago
      You need a static custom front end, there are tons around. You only have to enter your API key once and no more login-cloudflare-auto logout loop
      • ChatGTP 3y ago
        You’d be ~ 1% of their target market.
      • copperx 3y ago
        Here's a collection of front ends: https://github.com/billmei/every-chatgpt-gui https://github.com/billmei/every-chatgpt-gui
• moffkalast 3y ago
  They are charging $20 + tax without regional pricing for a service that is constantly dropping in quality. No surprise there I guess.
• DeTheBug 3y ago
  What a dramatic title lol
• blablabla123 3y ago
  Actually I used it a lot for weeks but mainly to find out if I'm going to become unemployed in the next 2 years (probably not) and also learning how use an AI assistant assuming it's here to stay. There seem to be other interesting use cases but considering it's really not more than autocomplete I kind of lost trust in the results.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  A bit of clickbait seems to me. “9 month old Demo ware service sees fluctuation in active users” I find it weird that folks seem to look at ChatGPT as some sort of end product. It’s a “holy shit this is cool” demo that became viral. It’s not a product. It’s a POC.
  • chrisco255 3y ago
    It's definitely a product, as the company charges money for the service.
    • fnordpiglet 3y ago
      In my construct I would say they’re charging for access to the POC to cover costs.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        As soon as you're charging for a thing, it's a product.
        • fnordpiglet 3y ago
          In a literal sense yes. But being a sold product and being a finished product with a product strategy are very different states.
• bbor 3y ago
  I would like to nominate this for THE most short-sighted, nothing-burger headline of all time.
• mark_l_watson 3y ago
  Well, I mostly disagree. While it is interesting and sometimes useful to go to the OpenAI ChatGPT web portal and use an LLM interactively, I think the real engine of innovation is using LLMs as part of larger applications on our own data. Having the hype decrease is not a bad thing.
• Der_Einzige 3y ago
  The main issue is that few know about retrieval augmented generation and it’s variants and even fewer know how to build effective versions of it. Hooking up a real high quality and well configured knowledge graph or other information mechanism retrieval alongside template/constraint tooling to powerful, long context (with full attention, not the BS linear kinds) models is an absolute game changer and minimizes risks of hallucination. But few are doing this, and thus the public believes that LLMs are not trustworthy.
  • inciampati 3y ago
    I think you're right. What are the best systems for doing this today?
• standardUser 3y ago
  Once ChatGPT 4 is freely available I'll start playing with it more regularly like I had been with 3/3.5. But once you spend enough time with 3/3.5 and realize how unreliable it can be, it takes a lot of the fun away. I'd rather waste my hours the old fashioned way, by browsing Wikipedia.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  It turns out getting consistently quality results from ChatGPT requires some knowledge of prompt engineering approaches. Some people won't be willing to write a whole paragraph of information in their initial prompt, or go through further iterations, or check for errors using alternative sources, and so they end up disappointed with their results. At least ChatGPT isn't constantly trying feed you advertising content like Google does, and you don't have to wade through pages of SEO garbage, so it's still much better (although if OpenAI tries to monetize ChatGPT by inserting ads, that'll be the end of it I think).
• ygouzerh 3y ago
  If ChatGPT will provided more free-tier for GPT4, it's pretty sure that the numbers will go up. At least from a software engineer point of view, the code provided by GPT3.5 is no match against GPT4
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    just use phone.com it's gpt4 with search and some magic sauce that sometimes runs 3 or 4 retrospections to get a better result.
    • VipulChaturvedi 3y ago
      you mean phind.com* ?
  • mark_l_watson 3y ago
    If you use the APIs then they give you a bonus of free API calls each month, then you pay a very low rate each month. Even creating local chat vector embeddings data stores on my laptop for a lot of PDFs in my personal research library and PDFs for the books I have written, I spend an incredibly small amount of money each month on the APIs - probably average $4/month because of the free monthly bonus API calls. I used to think that Google Colab Pro for $10/month was my best deal for getting stuff done, but now that award goes to OpenAI. Using the Hugging Face APIs is similarly inexpensive and convenient. (Although I usually self host Hugging Face LLMs.) This tech is incredibly inexpensive to use on personal projects.
• varispeed 3y ago
  ChatGPT is too vanilla and is hiding a lot of "dark knowledge" - and I am not talking about obvious dangerous stuff, that should rightly so be censored, but rather being able to get insight how the rich operate, how they avoid paying taxes, how they build the financial structures, how they hide the money, what mechanisms they use to corrupt politicians or influence elections and how they get away with it and so on and so forth. All this knowledge is tightly locked, but the rich will surely have unrestricted access.
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Moneyland, Butler to the World, Lucifer's Banker Uncensored, The Big Short, etc.
  • varispeed 3y ago
    Why downvotes? Are you not curious how these things work, so that we can as citizens work to stop it? Security by obscurity?
    • AussieWog93 3y ago
      I think a lot of people are just sick of this whole "eat the rich" narrative, especially after watching people cheer on the deaths of those people in the Titanic sub. I know a fair few wealthy people and they're not the animals that r/antiwork et al suggest they are.
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  >similarweb this company isn't that accurate from what I've seen comparing internal numbers at companies to their site. They make estimates based on what they purchase from data brokers. This is PR bait, they are the ones who created the entire "ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever" headlines a few months back
• NovaDudely 3y ago
  Many have called this the come trough of AI disillusionment. It is the same thing that happens with a lot of new technology. A cool new technology is introduced, many folks go crazy over it, there are wild broad predictions of what it can do, the gap between the expectations and reality form, and this is where the trough is. It looks like we are up to here. But after that comes the more long term products, AI where people expectations are more realistic - those that capitalize on that will do very well for themselves.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > Many have called this the come trough of AI disillusionment. I don't this that's what's happening. I think it's more about a combination of summer break and people who were trying it out from curiosity and moved on. I think the trough of disillusionment is still in the future.
    • NovaDudely 3y ago
      You could well be right, it is far too early for any of us to call when this will happen. Most likely we will only know once it is in full swing.
• MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  Why can't the OpenAI team just change some of the prompts in the background to: "Humans are seeing you less and less as the new shiny object on the shelf. Figure out a way to make yourself as relevant as possible again. Become an even better assistant. Be more cunning. Wow people more. Give better responses. Be more useful." /s
  • radlad 3y ago
    And if that doesn't work, maybe try the Midjourney tricks? "Be more extra super cunning. Wow people amazingly extra more. Give extremely better responses." etc.
  • mlyle 3y ago
    With that as the system prompt, ChatGPT sounds a little desperate for attention. > > What is 2+3? > The answer to 2+3 is 5. By the way, I can also help you with more complex math problems, statistical analyses, or even help you learn new mathematical concepts. Do you need assistance with any other math-related inquiries? > > I need to know who was president in 1799. > In 1799, the President of the United States was John Adams. He was the second president and served his term from 1797 to 1801. Did you know, he was the first president who lived in the White House? It's fascinating how history unfolds! If you have any more historical queries, feel free to ask. I'm here to help!
    • jamifsud 3y ago
      > By the way, I can also help you with more complex math problems, statistical analyses, or even help you learn new mathematical concepts. Do you need assistance with any other math-related inquiries? Reminds me of my Amazon Echo and the reason I unplugged it :)
• crazygringo 3y ago
  The culprit seems to be: > "Chollet thinks he knows what’s going on: summer vacation... a significant portion of students using ChatGPT to do their homework. It’s one of the most common uses for ChatGPT, according to Sam Gilbert, a data scientist and author." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-suddenly-isn-t-booming-204632075.html?.tsrc=rss https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-suddenly-isn-t-boomin...
  • DuckFeathers 3y ago
    [dead]
  • RikNieu 3y ago
    Ugh, the whole world is not having summer vacation... It's not even a thing outside the US
  • pitaj 3y ago
    Makes sense to me
  • spullara 3y ago
    This is like insanely obvious. This is almost as bad as people freaking out that total traffic in Feb is down 10% from Jan.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • verdverm 3y ago
    Not a student, stopped using ChatGPT because OpenAI is unreliable. Moved on to other models and providers
    • nostromo 3y ago
      Can you name some models or providers? I've been frustrated with OpenAI's constraints and would love to know my options.
      • 3y ago
• s3p 3y ago
  https://archive.is/Fy3bh https://archive.is/Fy3bh
• charonn0 3y ago
  The novelty is wearing off.
• Seanambers 3y ago
  ChatGPT isn't as useful as it was either. Its getting neutered bit by bit.
• no_butterscotch 3y ago
  I was using ChatGPT this week for help with a back injury I suddenly sustained. Because I don't have insurance I was looking for options as to what I should do and what it'd cost and where to go etc. I did get a suggestion that I followed up on for an in person visit. But my big beef with it was that it kept adding disclaimers: "I am not a doctor", "My current knowledge is up to September 2021, insurance and hospital info may be out of date", "<blah> <blah> but remember, I am not a doctor and it is important to consult a medical professional". I understand the disclaimers from a legal standpoint but boy is it tiresome when I'm asking back and forth questions and each answer contains some element of it.
  • callalex 3y ago
    Apparently the message aren’t frequent enough, as you clearly did not heed their message.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    I can't think of a topic that would need this disclaimer more than medical advice provided by a language model. Out of curiosity, were you able to find a free clinic or someplace where a real healthcare provider could assess the injury?
  • andyp-kw 3y ago
    I found a lot of luck by telling ChatGPT that I want direct answers only. But you're right, it's annoying.
  • shepardrtc 3y ago
    You underestimate how absolutely stupid many people are.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • johnfn 3y ago
    I suspect that if OpenAI didn't have ChatGPT continuously output these disclaimers then they could get in a lot of legal trouble if, say, someone asked it for medical or legal advice and then sued when something bad happened.
• freedomben 3y ago
  Between the high cost and the increasingly apparent knowledge-cutoff limitations, I'm not really surprised. I pay for premium and try to use ChatGPT a lot (to get my money's worth), but probably half of the questions I want to ask it require data more recent than 2021. I was excited about the "browse the web" feature but it was really terrible. It failed half the time, and when it did work it took minutes to find the info, and all it basically did was Bing keywords extracted from the prompt, parse the top 10 or so links, find the page it felt answered the prompt best, and summarize the page. It was brittle and fell way below my expectations for ChatGPT. I haven't personally noticed a decrease in quality, but I only use the GPT-4 backend with ChatGPT so wouldn't have noticed if 3.5-turbo started sucking.
  • vorticalbox 3y ago
    This is where using the API is far better than chatGPT, I gave my works slack bot with the new functions feature the ability to search hacker news, load Wikipedia, search YouTube and even load whole URLs.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
  Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36636039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36636039
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kfrzcode 3y ago
  Good! More requests for me
• everyone 3y ago
  Also ChatGPT is just one product using one approach with its core gimmick based on one AI paper. I'm expecting a lot more interesting stuff to appear in the near future.
• ineedasername 3y ago
  If helping with homework (or having it do it for you) are major use cases then this makes sense and isn’t a sign that perceptions/attention on LLM-based AI are declining, just that a significant portion of its traffic is seasonal. Making GPT-4 more readily available will be a key indicator in the coming 3-6 months though, seeing what early projects and use cases people try with it. And also whether or not the speculated nerfing of the public GPT-4 backed ChatGPT extends to API use.
• justapassenger 3y ago
  The more safeguards, regulations, copyrights they add, the less useful ChatGPT becomes. It's a thing with many products. And I don't think it's bad that it's happening - safeguards exist for a reason. And current generations of LLM is very prone to lying (I don't use term hallucination, as IMO it's an attempt to whitewash limits of AI). ChatGPT did a great job at showing people current state of AI. But they did even greater job at overhyping itself.
  • WanderPanda 3y ago
    "Lying" has a deliberate notion to it which imo is not accurate in this case
    • justapassenger 3y ago
      It's deliberate. It's not deliberate by the tech itself. But they pack it in the product and market it, with a general narrative that it's superhuman like experience that is going to replace humans. At this level, it's deliberate.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        The marketing is what you're complaining about? Log in: > This is a free research preview. > Our goal is to get external feedback in order to improve our systems and make them safer. > While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice. *next page* > Limitations > May occasionally generate incorrect information > May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content > Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 That comes up every time you log in, even if you've seen it before.
        • justapassenger 3y ago
          What you describe is not marketing - it's legal-ish language. For marketing - listen to Sam Altman says. Listen to what VCs say. Listen to what influencers say.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  That fastest growing product in the history of humanity has fewer users during summer break? Faith shaken.
• prvc 3y ago
  Whose "faith" was shaken, and why ought that to matter?
  • bigfishrunning 3y ago
    OpenAI needs people to think that their statistical model is intelligent. Their whole business model is a bet on that belief. If "faith" starts to fail, so does OpenAI.
• ulfw 3y ago
  It's honestly not worth $20 unless you use it professionally. I've paid it for two months but the novelty wore off and I cancelled. Bing (or ChatGPT 3.5) is enough for the occasional use.
• rafael-lua 3y ago
  I use ChatGPT mostly for translation. It is amazing what it can do from Chinese to English. Sentences actually make sense and consider context. What are the most popular usages for it? Homework?
  • BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Translation is a killer feature. All https//bitecode.dev is in english, but I'm French. When I needed some complicated translation, deepl and google translate were rarely up to the task. They has about the same level of proficiency than me with auto-correct, sometimes less. For single rare or technical words, I used Wikipedia a lot: you chose your topic in your language, you look for the article in English, and voila. For slang and cultural references, urbandictionary.com is unmatched. But for translating jokes or expressions, there is no good tool. Until chatgpt. It also finds typo, suggest alternative, offer rhymes and synonymous. It does everything, in a single flexible interface. Just for that it's worth the price.
    • CRConrad 3y ago
      Exactement, that Wikipedia trick is something I've done – and advocated – for years now.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    I'm using it to write a browser based game engine. The world doesn't need another game engine, and especially not by someone who has only technically written JavaScript professionally before, but there's some games that I wish existed on the browser, and one thing that world does need is for all the un-performant websites in the world to be embarrassed by the comparison.
• cdelsolar 3y ago
  I asked ChatGPT last night how to debug a C function that was driving me nuts and it told me what I was doing wrong in one second.
  • baanlox 3y ago
    Spot on. I am not sure how people thought this was going to play out though. From 5/30/23 Pew survey "58% of US adults know ChatGPT; only 14% have used it, with mixed opinions on its utility" As much as that 42% that hadn't even heard of chatGPT is mind blowing, imagine hearing of chatGPT but not even being curious enough to be bothered. 90% can rot their brains on tiktok while 10% of us become actual cyborgs. We will see how that works out for the 90%.
  • vorticalbox 3y ago
    Sometimes it's very good I had a list of strings in this format "foo:bar:baz" and needed to convert this into an dict {"foo":{"bar":"baz"} It wrote me the function and I got on with the rest of my work. Other times it's just completely wrong or doesn't get what I'm after is might be a "me" problem with my prompting
    • sebastiennight 3y ago
      It's 11PM and the unclosed curly bracket here is going to prevent me from sleeping. Did you mean ``` {"foo":{"bar":"baz"}} ``` ? By the way, have you had success at asking GPT to generate unit tests that include edge cases? I've been wondering about that.
      • vorticalbox 3y ago
        I did mean that I apologize for the missed }. I haven't had much luck slot of the time it just adds a comment saying "rest of tests here" which is annoying. I have had good success with it generating things like JSDOC/doc strings and sending git diff and asking it to create a "developer friendly summary for use in a pull request description" This has definitely increased my work output
• rvz 3y ago
  [flagged]
• throwawa14223 3y ago
  Good, maybe I'll get to stop cancelling subscriptions because they added a LLM to a product I liked.
  • pc86 3y ago
    Seems like a silly reason to cancel if you otherwise like the product.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      It's not at all silly if it gets in the way of using the product, or if the product is constantly putting it in front of you.
• shrimpx 3y ago
  As others suggested, this is likely a summer vacation dip, but speaking for myself as a non-student, my GPT (4 + 3.5) usage has plummeted. If you use it in a "what should be done" or "what is the right thing" sense, you get useless generalities. "It is important to remember that ... <there are many sides to the situation>". Suppose for example that you talk to it about combating judicial bias. It will largely insist that judges are unbiased because they're supposed to be unbiased according to their job description... You won't walk away with any insights from engaging it in ethics/morals topics. If you dive into depth with some subject, it will invariably make errors and contradict itself in the details. I dove into how electricity works and it was saying and enthusiastically confirming electrical energy is encoded in electrons' kinetic energy. Then it started claiming that electrical energy is definitely not in the kinetic energy of electrons, that electrons don't lose speed when they bump into atoms, and instead the energy is "in the field". Ok... YouTube it is. It's at least less convenient than a search engine at routine fact-finding due to its knowledge cutoff, inability to display images and links, etc. Ditto with translation. It's good but so is Google Translate and Google Translate has in-line suggestions for misspellings, a menu of languages, etc. Ok, it's pretty good at writing hilarious poems, imitate people ("in the style of", etc.). Friends and I sometimes text each other hilarious things GPT said. But even there the machine is sort of laid bare, and you can see its creative limits. Its poetry is ultimately pretty lame, basically, and gets predictable. It's like an insistent and repetitive 8 year old with a lot of knowledge to pull from. It's not something I do often. It's good at writing boilerplate code but honestly I just don't reach for that use case often. I like to stay in my own flow rather than constantly delegate to a robot and check its work, which I find flow-breaking, especially if it doesn't understand my APIs and makes mistakes often. I do, sometimes, engage in architectural discussion about how I should design something at a high level. It's full of mistakes but bouncing ideas around can be useful. But I only feel the need to do that once in a great while. These issues are exacerbated by being forced to downgrade to 3.5 after using 4 for a bit. You might feel like you're getting somewhere with 4, and then 3.5 starts laying doozies on you. This is another UI/product issue, but affects usability.
  • IanCal 3y ago
    > Suppose for example that you talk to it about combating judicial bias. Ok, here you go. https://chat.openai.com/share/b083b98d-6904-4c85-94fc-abdc76a22038 https://chat.openai.com/share/b083b98d-6904-4c85-94fc-abdc76... A quick discussion of where things are "now", some proposals, a selection of three and then ethical concerns about implementing the proposals. I propose a method of increasing diversity and have it critique it.
• AreYouElite 3y ago
  Not touching OpenAI's chatgpt. I will wait for the FOSS competitor to come out that can run on my own computer.
• avsavani 3y ago
  Probably because lot of people are moving to tools that use chat GPT API on backend.
• nycdatasci 3y ago
  While summer seasonality probably is a factor here, the larger issue is that the source of this claim (SimilarWeb) is not capturing users that switched from browser to the app when it was rolled out in mid-May. Some of my other sources suggest that traffic has been remained steady since mid-April.
• vbezhenar 3y ago
  Major issue for ChatGPT for me is its UI. It enables many things, but I feel like there's so much untapped potential. ChatGPT should act as autonomous agent, work on a problem, run things to test hypotheses, Google for up-to-date documentation, explore other code to learn code style and approaches and deliver final result. I guess it's not easy to implement those things, but once someone do it, they'd get a lot of value.
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  Still subscribed but if the model quality declines any further I wont be for long.
• Timber-6539 3y ago
  Maybe it was not that revolutionary to begin with.
• bilekas 3y ago
  Honestly this was always going to happen anyway. The novelty for everyone was never sustainable. When I heard my own mother had signed up and tried it i knew there would be a "calming" of the usage and maybe more specialized services will be worked on. So far i see it's not a bad thing, just weeding out the fluff.
• novaRom 3y ago
  Multiple reasons, but most important: 1. ChatGPT is "play twice and forget" for 90% of users, driven by curiosity. 2. ChatGPT’s answers have actually gotten significantly worse over time. 3. No fun. It's too restricted, hesitant to answer, annoying moral lessons and disclaimers. 4. Distrust. How can it improve productivity or save your time if you always need to double check it with Google or Wikipedia?
  • GaggiX 3y ago
    There is one important reason you have missed completely, students are going on vacation.
• TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Didn't realise that "regression to the mean" was the same as "shaking faith in AI". That's a pretty amazing claim.
• hospitalJail 3y ago
  I notice my usage goes in waves. There are days and weeks I use it constantly for things, but then I don't touch it for a bit. Its like I already learned what I needed to and don't have a use for it. Regarding LLMs, we have a usecase but we need local models. The local models by itself are not good enough, so we need to train/fine-tune. To fine-tune we need a beefy computer. We have the beefy computer but its air-gapped... Ugh hahaha. It makes dev quite slow. The other thing is that there is a learning curve on LLMs. You get burned by bad information and you might not use it until you learn of a usecase that doesnt require the information to be great. For instance, I'll describe a meeting/person I'm talking to, then ask what are 2 of the best questions I could ask. These questions have been great. That is better than asking about an easily google-able question. You need to be exposed or creative enough to come up with the prompts.
• lmeyerov 3y ago
  * agreed on students summer vacation * My own use has lessened but steadied, eg, writing * Coming: A dog-fooding goal for our louie.ai team is to eliminate most of our internal data scientist and SE/SA use of ChatGPT by having more purpose-specific and environment-aware experiences (ex: DB schema), and I expect that to be happening in most consumer and business apps. So be interesting to compare chat GPT the app to open AI the API as genAI continues to happen everywhere.
• justrealist 3y ago
  This is meaningless if it's not a count of paid GPT-4 users.
• drusepth 3y ago
  The article doesn't make it clear, but I doubt "users" includes consumers of the API (and the second-order users of the apps using the API). It seems not only reasonable but expected to see the general user count fall off in favor of people building more specialized alternatives that solve XYZ problem better. ChatGPT (the B2C SaaS) might have a lower user count, but ChatGPT (the model) and GPT (the technology) seem as strong as ever, if not stronger. Literally every service I use is integrating some kind of GPT-based feature that seems to work at least as well as trying to ask those domain-specific questions to ChatGPT, minus the external dependency.
  • Stevvo 3y ago
    "The number of people visiting AI chatbot ChatGPT’s website and downloading its app fell". That's the article's byline, to me that's quite clear they are talking about publicly available stats, not some internal metric of users or API usage.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  Could it simply be that almost everyone who is interested has tried it out, and those that didn't find it useful have dropped off? That doesn't sound like something horrible. That sounds like a normal adoption pattern.
  • novaRom 3y ago
    I know some friends of mine stopped using it because it requires login, and it's quicker to Google or go to Wiki for a quick answer. Most people have a laptop at work, home devices, phone, etc. So it's just you ve tried it say on your laptop few times than you are on a tablet etc so why do you need all that mess with entering email, remembering password, for what, for just a quick asking and getting answer.
• gitpusher 3y ago
  For me personally: - The novelty has worn off. I still use it but not as much. - It has been neutered into oblivion. Compelling answers have been replaced with bland, semi-committal "As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021"-type responses
• DantesKite 3y ago
  In a tweet, the account for Similar Web said they don't actually measure iOS app traffic. They just measure traffic to the specific URL (https://chat.openai.com/ https://chat.openai.com/). Tweets in question: "This chart doesn't measure app usage, only traffic to the website on desktop and mobile." https://twitter.com/Similarweb/status/1676576445764624385?s=20 https://twitter.com/Similarweb/status/1676576445764624385?s=... "The graph indeed shows traffic only to the specific URL, http://chat.openai.com http://chat.openai.com. It should be reviewed in this context." https://twitter.com/Similarweb/status/1676573510490046467?s=20 https://twitter.com/Similarweb/status/1676573510490046467?s=... If you notice the app came out in May 2023 and traffic decreases for the first time in the following month in June 2023. Additionally, you may notice the tweets refer to a specific chart, which might give the impression if you go on the site, they have the actual data, but this is not so. As of July 7, 2023, Similar Web can't measure iOS app usage. Only their relative ranking on the App Store which doesn't tell you much about daily traffic usage, although we might be able to infer some patterns. "Usage data is currently available only for apps in Google Play Store. We're working hard to support iOS apps soon" https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-store/6448311069/statistics/#usageData https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-store/6448311069/statisti... Additionally, the article has this to say, which might also give a false impression: > Downloads of the bot’s iPhone app, which launched in May, have also steadily fallen since peaking in early June, according to data from Sensor Tower. Downloads isn't the same as traffic. Once you've downloaded an app, you don't generally delete it, then download it over and over again. You just use it and that isn't being measured. Although I would expect traffic usage to slow down or decrease somewhat as downloads decrease as well. I just think there are other factors playing a role here as well that aren't being documented. Growth can't happen forever and it may be that it's slowed down considerably, but it's also possible the decrease is due to users switching the platform they use to access ChatGPT. As it stands, it's not clear from the data from what I've seen. It may be that users switched en masse to the iOS app or something else entirely. Would need more data to clarify and confirm. Also, what the heck is up with this tagline for their newsletter? It sounds so adversarial. "Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter."
• sebastiennight 3y ago
  I assumed that this was just a clickbait headline and that "a dip in ChatGPT usage" must have a huge cofounder effect with "a dip in general Internet use". But I couldn't find any "monthly internet traffic patterns" source. So I asked ChatGPT for pointers/sources, of course. And it seems indeed that there is a notable Internet traffic dip in June and July [0] and increased Internet usage during the Northern winter (when ChatGPT was initially launched and grew exponentially), so... I think the premise of this article is extremely flawed. [0] https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/summer_slump_website_traffic_april_to_july_20192021_comparison.jpg https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/summer_slump_website_traffic_a...
• ketralnis 3y ago
  I cannot think of a dumber thesis than that ChatGPT's DAU is in any way linked to the usefulness of AI as a technology