5 ms·

For me the main thing I've gained from ChatGPT (3.5) is I no longer dread that wall of lack of knowledge. Where you know so little you don't even know where to

For me the main thing I've gained from ChatGPT (3.5) is I no longer dread that wall of lack of knowledge. Where you know so little you don't even know where to start and the task seems dreadful and insurmountable. Just a couple questions later you've got an intro, some jargon, some sample code. It makes it much easier to put the pieces together and ask followup questions.

neatze 3y ago
Same, I just use in many places instead of first google searches, it is so easy to narrow search to a highly specific topic.
etrautmann 3y ago
Yes, and across a virtually infinite range of disciplines. I love diving into esoteric topics like grades of tool steel, where asking follow up questions and following a thread is so much easier than looking up info from disparate sources.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  After seeing these LLMs produce a mix of correct, half-correct, and incorrect answers on subjects I'm familiar with, I am very hesitant to trust them with subjects I'm not familiar with. Let's not subject ourselves to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect here. Credit to the creators of these systems for getting it even close, but until they can actually correctly cite their sources and provide followup references to real content instead of hallucinating titles and emitting hyperlinks to unrelated medical research papers, I'll stick to using it as a very rough overview of a subject, just to get the right collection of search terms for following up in traditional sources.
d-lisp 3y ago
I kind of enjoy it as a sort of interactive "learn x in y" to fast start some hobby project into some programming language I don't know yet. Its integration in emacs makes anything I may want to build (unprofessionally) trivial.
Frummy 3y ago
For sure! Now I got the courage to go back to studying, after dropping out. That was my achilles heel, I would freeze and waste two weeks on a single problem that was too abstract for me. This time, after reading a lot of mathematical philosophy, as well as having a private tutor so to speak, I don’t have that fear. Well worth it to spend some money on GPT4, like an extra textbook per period in terms of money, to crush through those abstraction walls.
- bergon 3y ago
  Do you double check everything? The hallucinations is what keeps holding me back from using it more as a private tutor.
  - Frummy 3y ago
    I dont rely on it to do the work for me but to answer theoretical questions such as explaining theorems or what theorems could be applicable
Cannabat 3y ago
It's seriously empowering. I've found it to provide excellent broad strokes for topics where there are well-established best practices. In these cases, where the training data would have had numerous data that all said the same thing, you can be pretty darn sure it is not leading you astray.
- dleeftink 3y ago
  It would be nice, though, if we could actually observe the training data distributions, alternatively exploring it through the use of the chat interface itself. Right now, without even being allowed that extra digging, it is darn difficult to be sure about its high-dimensional musings.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Yeah this is why for the times when I know I'm going to want to double-check the sources, I use Bing's AI chat bot since that one will do a web search to find pages to summarize and then stick in the source URLs in to check
    - dleeftink 3y ago
      No doubt double checking is good practice, but this still introduces some ranking artefacts, at least in my experience with Phind. What I would like to see most is the actual word/phrase/source distributions for a given prompt, in order to judge the sparsity of the underlying training data and subsequently, 'crowd source' the remaining gaps.
- simias 3y ago
  I haven't tried ChatGPT for coding yet but I have used it to study human languages (I've been studying Japanese for a little while) and it's so easy to get it to spew complete nonsense with perfect aplomb that it makes me super wary of using it for any "serious" things. In particular anything you're not super familiar with where you can't easily evaluate if the output is correct or not. The other day I was struggling to parse a Japanese sentence, a particular grammatical construction made no sense to me. I wrote the sentence in ChatGPT, asked it to break it down for me, and it came up with a plausible-sounding explanation. Problem was, I couldn't find any hit on google when I searched for the thing it was talking about. So I asked ChatGPT to give me more details, tell me what I could search for, and it would insist that its explanation was correct and then gaslight me by telling me that the reason I couldn't find anything on Google was because it was a niche subject not usually taught in grammar books. After some more searching around and double-checking it turns out that I had misread a kanji and the sentence I typed into ChatGPT was complete gibberish as a result. ChatGPT's explanation, while sounding very plausible, was complete fabrication. The idea that some inexperienced people are shipping software using this tool is insane to me.
andrei_says_ 3y ago
How can you tell the difference between the parts of the hallucinated answer which coincide with reality and the parts of the hallucinated answer which do not - when you are entering an area you don’t have expertise in?
- matsemann 3y ago
  You can't, which is why I'm not too worried (at the moment at least) for my job. It's currently a boost to people already knowledgeable in the area, but people with a lack of understanding of the underlying principles quickly become stuck.
- konschubert 3y ago
  You’ll notice when the api call breaks or the google search comes up empty.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    In the simplest case sure. It’s just as likely to add subtle bugs that don’t immediately show up.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  You can’t. I know this because I’ve used it a lot, and it’s like a newspaper article. Anytime it’s the talking about something I’m an expert in, I spot tons of errors. I don’t notice nearly as many errors when I’m asking it about things I’m not already an expert in. The most likely explanation is that it’s fooling me. I pay for gpt4. People using chatgpt to “learn” are absolutely slurping up incorrect information without knowing it. Imagine trying to teach yourself physics with textbook where 10% of it is completely but convincingly wrong.
  - q87b 3y ago
    How is gpt4 different?
  - capableweb 3y ago
yard2010 3y ago
Just make sure you cross validate the facts it gives! It might hallucinate
- noman-land 3y ago
  Definitely. I'm not really talking about facts here, as much as code snippets or questions about technologies or solutions. It's not something I would blindly copy and paste. Moreso use as a stepping stone to build understanding and solve the problem "myself" since I understand the context.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

neatze 3y ago

Same, I just use in many places instead of first google searches, it is so easy to narrow search to a highly specific topic.

etrautmann 3y ago

Yes, and across a virtually infinite range of disciplines. I love diving into esoteric topics like grades of tool steel, where asking follow up questions and following a thread is so much easier than looking up info from disparate sources.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 3y ago
After seeing these LLMs produce a mix of correct, half-correct, and incorrect answers on subjects I'm familiar with, I am very hesitant to trust them with subjects I'm not familiar with. Let's not subject ourselves to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect here. Credit to the creators of these systems for getting it even close, but until they can actually correctly cite their sources and provide followup references to real content instead of hallucinating titles and emitting hyperlinks to unrelated medical research papers, I'll stick to using it as a very rough overview of a subject, just to get the right collection of search terms for following up in traditional sources.

d-lisp 3y ago

I kind of enjoy it as a sort of interactive "learn x in y" to fast start some hobby project into some programming language I don't know yet. Its integration in emacs makes anything I may want to build (unprofessionally) trivial.

Frummy 3y ago

For sure! Now I got the courage to go back to studying, after dropping out. That was my achilles heel, I would freeze and waste two weeks on a single problem that was too abstract for me. This time, after reading a lot of mathematical philosophy, as well as having a private tutor so to speak, I don’t have that fear. Well worth it to spend some money on GPT4, like an extra textbook per period in terms of money, to crush through those abstraction walls.

bergon 3y ago
Do you double check everything? The hallucinations is what keeps holding me back from using it more as a private tutor.
- Frummy 3y ago
  I dont rely on it to do the work for me but to answer theoretical questions such as explaining theorems or what theorems could be applicable

Cannabat 3y ago

It's seriously empowering. I've found it to provide excellent broad strokes for topics where there are well-established best practices. In these cases, where the training data would have had numerous data that all said the same thing, you can be pretty darn sure it is not leading you astray.

dleeftink 3y ago
It would be nice, though, if we could actually observe the training data distributions, alternatively exploring it through the use of the chat interface itself. Right now, without even being allowed that extra digging, it is darn difficult to be sure about its high-dimensional musings.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Yeah this is why for the times when I know I'm going to want to double-check the sources, I use Bing's AI chat bot since that one will do a web search to find pages to summarize and then stick in the source URLs in to check
  - dleeftink 3y ago
    No doubt double checking is good practice, but this still introduces some ranking artefacts, at least in my experience with Phind. What I would like to see most is the actual word/phrase/source distributions for a given prompt, in order to judge the sparsity of the underlying training data and subsequently, 'crowd source' the remaining gaps.
simias 3y ago
I haven't tried ChatGPT for coding yet but I have used it to study human languages (I've been studying Japanese for a little while) and it's so easy to get it to spew complete nonsense with perfect aplomb that it makes me super wary of using it for any "serious" things. In particular anything you're not super familiar with where you can't easily evaluate if the output is correct or not. The other day I was struggling to parse a Japanese sentence, a particular grammatical construction made no sense to me. I wrote the sentence in ChatGPT, asked it to break it down for me, and it came up with a plausible-sounding explanation. Problem was, I couldn't find any hit on google when I searched for the thing it was talking about. So I asked ChatGPT to give me more details, tell me what I could search for, and it would insist that its explanation was correct and then gaslight me by telling me that the reason I couldn't find anything on Google was because it was a niche subject not usually taught in grammar books. After some more searching around and double-checking it turns out that I had misread a kanji and the sentence I typed into ChatGPT was complete gibberish as a result. ChatGPT's explanation, while sounding very plausible, was complete fabrication. The idea that some inexperienced people are shipping software using this tool is insane to me.

andrei_says_ 3y ago

How can you tell the difference between the parts of the hallucinated answer which coincide with reality and the parts of the hallucinated answer which do not - when you are entering an area you don’t have expertise in?

matsemann 3y ago
You can't, which is why I'm not too worried (at the moment at least) for my job. It's currently a boost to people already knowledgeable in the area, but people with a lack of understanding of the underlying principles quickly become stuck.
konschubert 3y ago
You’ll notice when the api call breaks or the google search comes up empty.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  In the simplest case sure. It’s just as likely to add subtle bugs that don’t immediately show up.
sarchertech 3y ago
You can’t. I know this because I’ve used it a lot, and it’s like a newspaper article. Anytime it’s the talking about something I’m an expert in, I spot tons of errors. I don’t notice nearly as many errors when I’m asking it about things I’m not already an expert in. The most likely explanation is that it’s fooling me. I pay for gpt4. People using chatgpt to “learn” are absolutely slurping up incorrect information without knowing it. Imagine trying to teach yourself physics with textbook where 10% of it is completely but convincingly wrong.
- q87b 3y ago
  How is gpt4 different?
- capableweb 3y ago

yard2010 3y ago

Just make sure you cross validate the facts it gives! It might hallucinate

noman-land 3y ago
Definitely. I'm not really talking about facts here, as much as code snippets or questions about technologies or solutions. It's not something I would blindly copy and paste. Moreso use as a stepping stone to build understanding and solve the problem "myself" since I understand the context.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]