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Could you tell me some typical uses beyond just asking for code snippets? I'm an NLP researcher, and currently I still find myself using Google for other types

Could you tell me some typical uses beyond just asking for code snippets? I'm an NLP researcher, and currently I still find myself using Google for other types of information seeking. I'm working on NLG decoding algorithms currently. I see a lot of people saying it's replaced some large fraction of their search usage, but they generally don't explain what type of queries they're making.

yodsanklai 3y ago
Asking for code snippets has replaced most of my Stack Overflow usage. I'd say 90% of the cases, it answers something usable. Maybe it's not relevant for an NLP researchers, but for a regular SWE like me, it's handy several times per day.
- thatguysaguy 3y ago
  Completely agreed on this one, although it's maybe more like 70% for me. I did leave an exception for that specifically in my original comment.
ttul 3y ago
I’ll often ask GPT to explain a concept to me, but giving it a hint as to my existing level of knowledge in the subject area. With Google, you’re likely to get the most popular page on a topic; not the page that is appropriate for people with your expertise. For instance, if I want to know about extreme ultraviolet lithography and I tell GPT-4 that I have a degree in engineering and that I studied advanced optics, the explanation is much richer in useful detail, going way beyond what any of the pages I could find on Google would reveal.
- kaba0 3y ago
  That’s an area where they genuinely suck, unless there is an exact wikipedia article on the topic, readily within its training data set. If you wander off of that knowledge sphere, and you are not sufficiently knowledgeable yourself about the topic, it can tell you some really stupid stuff. Nonetheless, I do use it quite regularly in everyday life, as it is basically the best reverse dictionary (that works for any language) there is. For work (programming), I didn’t find a better use case than sometimes passing it a list of stuff, giving it an example on the first element on what I want, and using it to generate it for the rest of the elements. But that is <1% of what I do each day.
  - thatguysaguy 3y ago
    Reverse dictionary is a great one yeah. I think I've used it for resolving a tip-of-my tongue thing several times. For language learning I'm a bit more wary. A few times I've asked it for help with Chinese, and when I ask one of my native speaker friends they'll tell me it wasn't quite right.
- thatguysaguy 3y ago
  Hmm, I tried some questions which would have been relevant to me in the recent past, and it flubbed pretty hard on all of them. Even worse, instead of just saying it doesn't know it generates semi-plausible babbling or adjacent but not actually helpful knowledge. I decided to give it another go and ask GPT-4 three questions which I needed to get answers to within the last few months. Asking conceptually about DPO: https://chat.openai.com/share/6611454c-60de-4317-811b-2b7f31cbaaf8 https://chat.openai.com/share/6611454c-60de-4317-811b-2b7f31... - In this one it completely leaves out the actual trick which enables DPO, so I would say it has almost no information content. Someone who didn't know what DPO is and read this would incorrectly think that they had learned something. - To learn about this, the right place was to read the original DPO paper, and some follow-up work Asking about FSDP compatibility with LoRA: https://chat.openai.com/share/5f8892ea-61e6-496f-abda-d5a8adfbff60 https://chat.openai.com/share/5f8892ea-61e6-496f-abda-d5a8ad... - In this one it just says a bunch of generic vague things without answering the question. - The right place to learn the answer to this is diving through Github issue comments Asking for details the MegaBlocks mixture-of-experts setup: https://chat.openai.com/share/c010e630-ba08-407e-afb3-03df9936a329 https://chat.openai.com/share/c010e630-ba08-407e-afb3-03df99... - Again it's just saying generic stuff which is relevant to mixture-of-experts in general, but it leaves out everything that actually makes the MegaBlocks MoE different from a generic MoE idea - For this one I had to do a combination of reading the paper and the MegaBlocks repo So 0/3 and pretty dramatically. I was actually expecting it to get at least one of those. As far as I can tell, it didn't really do anything different based on me specifying my background either. I'd love to see any links to productive conversations that people can share.
throwaway920102 3y ago
Imagine you had a coworker who was like Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein and someone with the power to access the hive mind of Reddit wrapped up in one but had dementia and sometimes spoke believably while completely hallucinating and lying, so you still needed to verify their work or take their answer and double check it. Now imagine they have zero problem with you interrupting them to ask the stupidest question or the most profound, difficult question, as long as you want, and if you don't like their answer you can tell them to try again. And they don't care how often you do either. What kinds of questions might you ask that coworker in the course of your work? It's highly individual.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein Then it would be able to logically reason, which it absolutely can’t do. It’s a next generation search engine, which is very good at language-related tasks (and translating a python code it has in its training set to your language is a language task, that’s why it can be applicable to certain programming tasks).
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    It can say "let's think this through step by step", which is good enough for most cases.
- thatguysaguy 3y ago
  I posted a few example questions (which are definitely way below Einstein level) in another comment. It's not doing too well! Do you have any links to conversations where it was particularly helpful? I do wonder if my GPT usage is bad in the same way my parents' Google usage is.
  - kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago
    Maybe try asking your questions on phind.com. It does RAG on top of GPT4 so it might be able to base its answers on the paper or github issue you mentioned.
  - 3y ago
Salgat 3y ago
Just today, I took a picture of some medication my wife got because I wanted to know more about it, I also used it to lookup what Tesla probably did wrong with their CyberTruck that was causing the rusting (they likely didn't use passivated stainless), I also looked up the recommended age to give popcorn to kids since my toddlers received a small sealed bag of it for valentines. I pretty much use it all the time as a faster google. Whenever I wonder about something and want to know more, bam ChatGPT.
hackerlight 3y ago
Miscellaneous stuff from yesterday: - Copy pasted terms & conditions of a website into GPT-4 context and asked it to find the answer to a question I had. - Copy pasted a law into GPT-4 context to check if some activity was not illegal. Hallucinations can be avoided by asking it to recite the relevant lines, then you can CTRL+F for it to double check. - Research medical condition to point me in a vague direction - Create shell script and desktop shortcut with custom png, to launch an application with certain parameters - Ask perplexity.ai for the best github library for a thing I wanted to do - Upload github library to https://app.getonboardai.com/chat https://app.getonboardai.com/chat and ask it questions. - A handful of smaller things. Any error message or blocker goes straight into GPT-4.
throwaway14356 3y ago
try asking it, reword it a few times.

yodsanklai 3y ago

Asking for code snippets has replaced most of my Stack Overflow usage. I'd say 90% of the cases, it answers something usable. Maybe it's not relevant for an NLP researchers, but for a regular SWE like me, it's handy several times per day.

thatguysaguy 3y ago
Completely agreed on this one, although it's maybe more like 70% for me. I did leave an exception for that specifically in my original comment.

ttul 3y ago

I’ll often ask GPT to explain a concept to me, but giving it a hint as to my existing level of knowledge in the subject area. With Google, you’re likely to get the most popular page on a topic; not the page that is appropriate for people with your expertise. For instance, if I want to know about extreme ultraviolet lithography and I tell GPT-4 that I have a degree in engineering and that I studied advanced optics, the explanation is much richer in useful detail, going way beyond what any of the pages I could find on Google would reveal.

kaba0 3y ago
That’s an area where they genuinely suck, unless there is an exact wikipedia article on the topic, readily within its training data set. If you wander off of that knowledge sphere, and you are not sufficiently knowledgeable yourself about the topic, it can tell you some really stupid stuff. Nonetheless, I do use it quite regularly in everyday life, as it is basically the best reverse dictionary (that works for any language) there is. For work (programming), I didn’t find a better use case than sometimes passing it a list of stuff, giving it an example on the first element on what I want, and using it to generate it for the rest of the elements. But that is <1% of what I do each day.
- thatguysaguy 3y ago
  Reverse dictionary is a great one yeah. I think I've used it for resolving a tip-of-my tongue thing several times. For language learning I'm a bit more wary. A few times I've asked it for help with Chinese, and when I ask one of my native speaker friends they'll tell me it wasn't quite right.
thatguysaguy 3y ago
Hmm, I tried some questions which would have been relevant to me in the recent past, and it flubbed pretty hard on all of them. Even worse, instead of just saying it doesn't know it generates semi-plausible babbling or adjacent but not actually helpful knowledge. I decided to give it another go and ask GPT-4 three questions which I needed to get answers to within the last few months. Asking conceptually about DPO: https://chat.openai.com/share/6611454c-60de-4317-811b-2b7f31cbaaf8 https://chat.openai.com/share/6611454c-60de-4317-811b-2b7f31... - In this one it completely leaves out the actual trick which enables DPO, so I would say it has almost no information content. Someone who didn't know what DPO is and read this would incorrectly think that they had learned something. - To learn about this, the right place was to read the original DPO paper, and some follow-up work Asking about FSDP compatibility with LoRA: https://chat.openai.com/share/5f8892ea-61e6-496f-abda-d5a8adfbff60 https://chat.openai.com/share/5f8892ea-61e6-496f-abda-d5a8ad... - In this one it just says a bunch of generic vague things without answering the question. - The right place to learn the answer to this is diving through Github issue comments Asking for details the MegaBlocks mixture-of-experts setup: https://chat.openai.com/share/c010e630-ba08-407e-afb3-03df9936a329 https://chat.openai.com/share/c010e630-ba08-407e-afb3-03df99... - Again it's just saying generic stuff which is relevant to mixture-of-experts in general, but it leaves out everything that actually makes the MegaBlocks MoE different from a generic MoE idea - For this one I had to do a combination of reading the paper and the MegaBlocks repo So 0/3 and pretty dramatically. I was actually expecting it to get at least one of those. As far as I can tell, it didn't really do anything different based on me specifying my background either. I'd love to see any links to productive conversations that people can share.

throwaway920102 3y ago

Imagine you had a coworker who was like Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein and someone with the power to access the hive mind of Reddit wrapped up in one but had dementia and sometimes spoke believably while completely hallucinating and lying, so you still needed to verify their work or take their answer and double check it. Now imagine they have zero problem with you interrupting them to ask the stupidest question or the most profound, difficult question, as long as you want, and if you don't like their answer you can tell them to try again. And they don't care how often you do either. What kinds of questions might you ask that coworker in the course of your work? It's highly individual.

kaba0 3y ago
> Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein Then it would be able to logically reason, which it absolutely can’t do. It’s a next generation search engine, which is very good at language-related tasks (and translating a python code it has in its training set to your language is a language task, that’s why it can be applicable to certain programming tasks).
- zozbot234 3y ago
  It can say "let's think this through step by step", which is good enough for most cases.
thatguysaguy 3y ago
I posted a few example questions (which are definitely way below Einstein level) in another comment. It's not doing too well! Do you have any links to conversations where it was particularly helpful? I do wonder if my GPT usage is bad in the same way my parents' Google usage is.
- kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago
  Maybe try asking your questions on phind.com. It does RAG on top of GPT4 so it might be able to base its answers on the paper or github issue you mentioned.
- 3y ago

Salgat 3y ago

Just today, I took a picture of some medication my wife got because I wanted to know more about it, I also used it to lookup what Tesla probably did wrong with their CyberTruck that was causing the rusting (they likely didn't use passivated stainless), I also looked up the recommended age to give popcorn to kids since my toddlers received a small sealed bag of it for valentines. I pretty much use it all the time as a faster google. Whenever I wonder about something and want to know more, bam ChatGPT.

hackerlight 3y ago

Miscellaneous stuff from yesterday: - Copy pasted terms & conditions of a website into GPT-4 context and asked it to find the answer to a question I had. - Copy pasted a law into GPT-4 context to check if some activity was not illegal. Hallucinations can be avoided by asking it to recite the relevant lines, then you can CTRL+F for it to double check. - Research medical condition to point me in a vague direction - Create shell script and desktop shortcut with custom png, to launch an application with certain parameters - Ask perplexity.ai for the best github library for a thing I wanted to do - Upload github library to https://app.getonboardai.com/chat https://app.getonboardai.com/chat and ask it questions. - A handful of smaller things. Any error message or blocker goes straight into GPT-4.

throwaway14356 3y ago

try asking it, reword it a few times.