3 ms·

You are an extreme outlier. Most of us on HN are. As of the end of august only 18% of US adults had tried ChatGPT at all (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-rea

You are an extreme outlier. Most of us on HN are. As of the end of august only 18% of US adults had tried ChatGPT at all (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-americans-havent-used-chatgpt-few-think-it-will-have-a-major-impact-on-their-job/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-amer...). For me, the biggest obstacle to get over is trust. I have seen ChatGPT make up facts far too often for it to be useful for a lot of what I ask of google. I also would be VERY leery of integrating it into customer support, etc. At some point I expect some company to have its chat bot enter into a contract with a customer and end up having to deliver.

josephg 3y ago
That makes sense. I suppose my answer is that for most questions I ask chatgpt, I'm ok with the answer being a bit wrong. For example, I asked it how long & hot to heat my oven when I baked cauliflower. It would have been a pity if we burned the cauliflower, but the answer was spot on. Likewise it gave a great answer when I asked for a simple crepe recipe. (The crepes were delicious!). Another time I asked this: > C minor and G major sound good together. What key are they in? And it answered that incorrectly, saying there wasn't a key which contained both chords. But thats not quite right - they're both contained in C harmonic minor. When you ask it to write code, the code often contains small bugs. But that can still be very helpful a lot of the time, to a lot of people. And its also utterly fantastic as a tool for creative writing, where you don't care about facts at all. For example, the output of prompts like this are utterly fantastic: > I'm writing the character of a grumpy innkeeper in a D&D campaign and I want the character to have some quirks to make them interesting for the players. List 20 different weird quirks the innkeeper could have. I just put it in and got things like this: 4. Height Requirement: Refuses to serve anyone taller or shorter than him, with a height chart at the door for reference. 9. Historical Enthusiast: Dresses and talks like he's from a different era, insists patrons do the same to get service.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Uh.... C minor and G major are keys/scales, not chords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_chord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_chord (I am not a musician, but I know the circle of fifths, keys, and chords).
  - josephg 3y ago
    Maybe I would have gotten a better answer if I specified the C minor and G major triads. I assumed chatgpt would figure that out from context. (And it sort of did, but it said they didn’t have any shared key).
    - dekhn 3y ago
      Can you try and report back (I don't want to try to reproduce your exact experiment).
      - josephg 3y ago
        https://chat.openai.com/share/c904d3a0-9564-4d6f-8b62-406d3fff7435 https://chat.openai.com/share/c904d3a0-9564-4d6f-8b62-406d3f... I’d like it to say “C harmonic minor” but honestly my knowledge of music theory might not be good enough to properly evaluate its response. What do you think?
        dekhn 3y ago
        both chords are in the notes of the key/scale, but I don't know that they would sound good if played together or sequentially.
jacquesm 3y ago
Think about that for a second though: 18% of US adults used a product that didn't exist five years ago. That's an immense success and proves that the OP isn't an extreme outlier but in fact is just one of very many. If anything what should amaze us is that ChatGPT managed to command that kind of market share in such a very short time. That's approximately 46 million individuals.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  I wish there was more data on how much it is getting used. To say that 18% of people used something is one thing. The question for me is, what percentage of people used the free version once or twice for novelty purposes and then never touched it again. A different poll from the same org found that the number of people who had used it was 14% back in May. If I'm remembering the timeline right, it really hit the zeitgeist hard in February, so it seems as if the growth is leveling off. In any case, getting 18% of people in the US to use your product in less than a year is still nothing to sneeze at.
- emporas 3y ago
  I would argue that trying to estimate the value of statistical engines by taking into account only GPT, text is a narrow domain. How about visuals like SD, text like GPT, and music like Audiocraft? Music is still not very advanced but it's coming. Human voice audio as well should get into the mix, for audiobooks n stuff. How about word transcripts from videos etc? I use that all the time. If 18% of adults have used GPT at least once, that sounds accurate, but how about every other tool?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Probably many more, but this one statistic was the one mentioned. And if that's the size of it then it is already very impressive. Phonograph, Radio, TV, Computers and Mobile telephony for instance took much, much longer to reach similar numbers.
    - checkyoursudo 3y ago

josephg 3y ago

That makes sense. I suppose my answer is that for most questions I ask chatgpt, I'm ok with the answer being a bit wrong. For example, I asked it how long & hot to heat my oven when I baked cauliflower. It would have been a pity if we burned the cauliflower, but the answer was spot on. Likewise it gave a great answer when I asked for a simple crepe recipe. (The crepes were delicious!). Another time I asked this: > C minor and G major sound good together. What key are they in? And it answered that incorrectly, saying there wasn't a key which contained both chords. But thats not quite right - they're both contained in C harmonic minor. When you ask it to write code, the code often contains small bugs. But that can still be very helpful a lot of the time, to a lot of people. And its also utterly fantastic as a tool for creative writing, where you don't care about facts at all. For example, the output of prompts like this are utterly fantastic: > I'm writing the character of a grumpy innkeeper in a D&D campaign and I want the character to have some quirks to make them interesting for the players. List 20 different weird quirks the innkeeper could have. I just put it in and got things like this: 4. Height Requirement: Refuses to serve anyone taller or shorter than him, with a height chart at the door for reference. 9. Historical Enthusiast: Dresses and talks like he's from a different era, insists patrons do the same to get service.

dekhn 3y ago
Uh.... C minor and G major are keys/scales, not chords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_chord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_chord (I am not a musician, but I know the circle of fifths, keys, and chords).
- josephg 3y ago
  Maybe I would have gotten a better answer if I specified the C minor and G major triads. I assumed chatgpt would figure that out from context. (And it sort of did, but it said they didn’t have any shared key).
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Can you try and report back (I don't want to try to reproduce your exact experiment).
    - josephg 3y ago
      https://chat.openai.com/share/c904d3a0-9564-4d6f-8b62-406d3fff7435 https://chat.openai.com/share/c904d3a0-9564-4d6f-8b62-406d3f... I’d like it to say “C harmonic minor” but honestly my knowledge of music theory might not be good enough to properly evaluate its response. What do you think?
      - dekhn 3y ago
        both chords are in the notes of the key/scale, but I don't know that they would sound good if played together or sequentially.

jacquesm 3y ago

Think about that for a second though: 18% of US adults used a product that didn't exist five years ago. That's an immense success and proves that the OP isn't an extreme outlier but in fact is just one of very many. If anything what should amaze us is that ChatGPT managed to command that kind of market share in such a very short time. That's approximately 46 million individuals.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
I wish there was more data on how much it is getting used. To say that 18% of people used something is one thing. The question for me is, what percentage of people used the free version once or twice for novelty purposes and then never touched it again. A different poll from the same org found that the number of people who had used it was 14% back in May. If I'm remembering the timeline right, it really hit the zeitgeist hard in February, so it seems as if the growth is leveling off. In any case, getting 18% of people in the US to use your product in less than a year is still nothing to sneeze at.
emporas 3y ago
I would argue that trying to estimate the value of statistical engines by taking into account only GPT, text is a narrow domain. How about visuals like SD, text like GPT, and music like Audiocraft? Music is still not very advanced but it's coming. Human voice audio as well should get into the mix, for audiobooks n stuff. How about word transcripts from videos etc? I use that all the time. If 18% of adults have used GPT at least once, that sounds accurate, but how about every other tool?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Probably many more, but this one statistic was the one mentioned. And if that's the size of it then it is already very impressive. Phonograph, Radio, TV, Computers and Mobile telephony for instance took much, much longer to reach similar numbers.
  - checkyoursudo 3y ago