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My pulse today is just a mediocre rehash of prior conversations I’ve had on the platform. I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious proj

My pulse today is just a mediocre rehash of prior conversations I’ve had on the platform. I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on, and I’d carry out whatever physical world tasks it needed me to, and all it did was just come up with project plans which were rehashes of my prior projects framed as its own. I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. Both will stick around, but fall well short of the tulip mania VCs and tech leaders have pushed. I’ve long contended that tech has lost any soulful vision of the future, it’s just tactical money making all the way down.

dingnuts 1y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I want to be excited about new tech but I have found these tools extremely underwhelming and I feel a mixture of gaslit and sinking dread when I visit this site and read some of the comments here. Why don't I see the amazing things these people do? Am I stupid? Is this the first computer thing in my whole life that I didn't immediately master? No, they're oversold. My experience is normal. It's nice to know my feelings are shared; I remain relatively convinced that there are financial incentives driving most of the rabid support of this technology
- fragmede 1y ago
  How does that... work? Disclaimer: I work for a large tech company as an IC software-dev type person, and own stock in the stock market. I'm waiting on CI to finish running, but I'm salaried, so it's not accurate to say I'm being paid to make this comment. I could just as easily be scrolling Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or any number of other distractions to be had. But I mean, sure. But again, how does this work? After twirling my moustache that I wax with Evil Villian brand moustache wax, I just go on HN and make up shit to post about companies that aren't even public but are in the same industry, and that'll drive the stock price up... somehow? Someone's going to read a comment from me saying "I use plan mode in Claude Code to make a Todo.md, and then have it generate code", and based on that, that's the straw that breaks the camels back, and they rush out to buy stock in AI companies because they'd never heard of the stock market before I mentioned Claude Code. Then, based on randos reading a comment from me about Claude Code, the share price goes up by a couple of cents, but I can't sell the handful of shares I have because of blackout windows anyway, but okay so eventually those shares do sell, and I go on a lavishly expensive vacation in Europe all because I made a couple of positive comments on HN about AI that were total lies. Yeah, that's totally how that works. I also get paid to go out and protest on weekends to supplement the European vacation money. Just three more shitposts about Tesla and I get to go to South East Asia as well!
Dilettante_ 1y ago
>pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on The LLM does not have wants. It does not have preferences, and as such cannot "pick". Expecting it to have wants and preferences is "holding it wrong".
- password54321 1y ago
  So are we near AGI or is it 'just' an LLM? Seems like no one is clear on what these things can and cannot do anymore because everyone is being gaslighted to keep the investment going.
  - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    It will always just be a series of models that have specific training for specific input classes. The architectural limits will always be there, regardless of training.
    - beering 1y ago
      That’s an interesting point. It’s not hard to imagine that LLMs are much more intelligent in areas where humans hit architectural limitations. Processing tokens seems to be a struggle for humans (look at how few animals do it overall, too), but since so much of the human brain is dedicated to movement planning, it makes sense that we still have an edge there.
  - monsieurbanana 1y ago
    The vast majority of people I've interacted with is clear on that, we are not near AGI. And people saying otherwise are more often than not trying to sell you something, so I just ignore them. CEO's are gonna CEO, it seems their job has morphed into creative writing to maximize funding.
    - sebastiennight 1y ago
      As a CEO, I endorse this message
mythrwy 1y ago
It's a little dangerous because it generally just agrees with whatever you are saying or suggesting, and it's easy to conclude what it says has some thought behind it. Until the next day when you suggest the opposite and it agrees with that.
- swader999 1y ago
  This. I've seen a couple people now use GPT to 'get all legal' with others and it's been disastrous for them and the groups they are interacting with. It'll encourage you to act aggressive, vigorously defending your points and so on.
  - wussboy 1y ago
    Oof. Like our world needed more of that...
qsort 1y ago
I wouldn't read too much into this particular launch. There's very good stuff and there are the most inane consumery "who even asked" things like these.
jasonsb 1y ago
> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point.
- antihero 1y ago
  It sounds like you are lacking inspiration. AI is a tool for making your ideas happen not giving you ideas.
  - throw101010 1y ago
    I find your comment funny considering the OP, it's literally OpenAI claiming ChatGPT can start conversations now (in extenso give you inspiration/ideas).
- jsheard 1y ago
  > My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.
  - jasonsb 1y ago
    Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.
dakiol 1y ago
> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools Same. It reminds me the 1984 event in which the computer itself famously “spoke” to the audience using its text-to-speech feature. Pretty amazing at that time, but nevertheless quite useless since then
- ElFitz 1y ago
  It has proven very useful to a great number of people who, although they are a minority, have vastly benefited from TTS and other accessibility features.
  - MountDoom 1y ago
    I think it's easy to pick apart arguments out of context, but since the parent is comparing it to AI, I assume what they meant is that it hasn't turned out to be nearly as revolutionary for general-purpose computing as we thought. Talking computers became an ubiquitous sci-fi trope. And in reality... even now, when we have nearly-flawless natural language processing, most people prefer to text LLMs than to talk to them. Heck, we usually prefer texting to calling when interacting with other people.
    - jama211 1y ago
      I don’t think anyone watched that demo back in 1984 and thought “oh this tech means we can talk to computers!” - it was clearly a demonstration of… well text to speech. It demonstrated successfully exactly what it could do, and didn’t imply what they’re implying it implied.
- jama211 1y ago
  Text to speech has been an incredible breakthrough for many with vision, visual processing, or speech disabilities. You take that back. Stephen Hawking without text to speech would’ve been mute.
- tracerbulletx 1y ago
  Its not useless, you're just taking it for granted. The whole national emergency system works off text to speech.
simianwords 1y ago
> It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. Every time I keep seeing this brought up I wonder if people truly mean this or its just something people say but don't mean. AI is obviously different and extremely useful.. I mean it has convinced a butt load of people to pay for the subscription. Every one I know including the non technical ones use it and some of them pay for it, and it didn't even require advertising! People just use it because they like it.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Obviously a lot of grifters and influencers shifted from NFTs to AI, but the comparison ends there. AI is being used by normal people and professionals every day. In comparison, the number of people who ever interacted with blockchain is basically zero. (And that's a lifetime vs daily comparison) It's a lazy comparison, and most likely fueled by a generic aversion to "techbros".
  - bigfishrunning 1y ago
    That aversion to "techbros" comes from people who constantly oversell whatever the current thing is for personal benefit, and these technologies come up short time and time again. The "techbros" as a consort have proven themselves not to be trusted. Say what you want about AI, it's hard to argue that it isn't oversold constantly. I sincerely doubt it would continue to exist without a stream of VC money to sustain it (All of those paying customers still don't cover the bills...)
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      Everything is oversold, even the useful things. Nuclear, space, genetic engineering, x rays, vaccines, the internet itself, personal computers, phones and apps, etc. etc. If something is of value X, the hype will be X+Y. That's why this is too shallow an analyis. It's just vibes, based on cultural feelings and emotional annoyance. AI is nothing like blockchain. It's fine to be anti-AI, but the smart anti-AI people recognize that the real danger is it will have too large an impact (but in the negative). Not that it will evaporate some investment dollars.
jedbrooke 1y ago
> I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on, and I’d carry out whatever physical world tasks it needed me to, and all it did was just come up with project plans which were rehashes of my prior projects framed as its own. Mate, I think you’ve got the roles of human and AI reversed. Humans are supposed to come up with creative ideas and let machines do the tedious work of implementation. That’s a bit like asking a calculator what equations you should do or a DB what queries you should make. These tools exist to serve us, not the other way around GPT et al. can’t “want” anything, they have no volition
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- venusenvy47 1y ago
  The posted article starts off by claiming that the AI can take the lead. I don't believe their hype, but I think that it the basis for the above comment. "Since ChatGPT launched, that's always meant coming to ask a question .... However that's limited by what you know to ask for and always puts the burden on you for the next step."
carabiner 1y ago
Yeah I've tried some of the therapy prompts, "Ask me 7 questions to help me fix my life, then provide insights." And it just gives me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something.
- ip26 1y ago
  Argue with it. Criticize it. Nitpick the questions it asked. Tell it what you just said: you just gave me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something When you open the prompt the first time it has zero context on you. I'm not an LLM-utopist, but just like with a human therapist you need to give it more context. Even arguing with it is context.
  - input_sh 1y ago
    I do, frequently, and ChatGPT in particular gets stuck in a loop where it specifically ignores whatever I write and repeats the same thing over and over again. To give a basic example, ask it to list some things and then ask it to provide more examples. It's gonna be immediately stuck in a loop and repeat the same thing over and over again. Maybe one of the 10 examples it gives you is different, but that's gonna be a false match for what I'm looking for. This alone makes it as useful as clicking on the first few results myself. It doesn't refine its search, it doesn't "click further down the page", it just wastes my time. It's only as useful as the first result it gives, this idea of arguing your way to better answers has never happened to me in practice.
    - jackphilson 1y ago
      I would recommend talking out loud to it with speech to text software, it has been pretty helpful for me. Like around 60s of talking.
  - carabiner 1y ago
    I did, and I gave it lots of detailed, nuanced answers about my life specifics. I spent an hour answering its questions and the end result was it telling me to watch the movie "man called otto" which I had already done (and hated) among other pablum.
pickledonions49 1y ago
Agreed. I think AI can be a good tool, but not many people are doing very original stuff. Plus, there are many things I would prefer be greeted with, other than by an algorithm in the morning.
afro88 1y ago
I got in a Waymo today and asked it where it wanted to go. It tried to suggest places I wanted to go. This technology just isn't there. /s
- Agraillo 1y ago
  Reminded me of many movie plots where a derailed character sits in a taxi and, when asked where to go, replies with "anywhere" or "I don't know." But before imagining a terrible future where an AI-driven vehicle actually decides, I suggest imagining an AI-infused comedy exploring this scenario. /s
brookst 1y ago
They’re more like synthesizers or sequencers: if you have ideas, they are amazing force multipliers, but if you don’t have ideas they certainly won’t create them for you.
nilkn 1y ago
Try turning off memory. I've done a lot of experiments and find ChatGPT is objectively better and more useful in most ways with no memory at all. While that may seem counter-intuitive, it makes sense the more you think about it: (1) Memory is primarily designed to be addictive. It feels "magical" when it references things it knows about you. But that doesn't make it useful. (2) Memory massively clogs the context window. Quality, accuracy, and independent thought all degrade rapidly with too much context -- especially low-quality context that you can't precisely control or even see. (3) Memory makes ChatGPT more sychophantic than it already is. Before long, it's just an echo chamber that can border on insanity. (4) Memory doesn't work the way you think it does. ChatGPT doesn't reference everything from all your chats. Rather, your chat history gets compressed into a few information-dense paragraphs. In other words, ChatGPT's memory is a low-resolution, often inaccurate distortion of all your prior chats. That distortion then becomes the basis of every single subsequent interaction you have. Another tip is to avoid long conversations, as very long chats end up reproducing within themselves the same problems as above. Disable memory, get what you need out of a chat, move on. I find that this "brings back" a lot of the impressiveness of the early version of ChatGPT. Oh, and always enable as much thinking as you can tolerate to wait on for each question. In my experience, less thinking = more sychophantic responses.
- barneysaurus 1y ago
  I might want to have an LLM hit me with temperature 100% weird-ass entropic thoughts every day. Other that that, what recycled bullshit would I care about?
- cruffle_duffle 1y ago
  Totally agree on the memory feature. You just have to look at the crap it tries to remember to see how useless it is and the kind of nonsense it will jam into the context. “Cruffle is trying to make bath bombs using baking soda and citric acid and hasn’t decided what colorant to use” could be a memory. Yeah well I figured out what colorant to use… you wanna bet if it changed that memory? Nope! How would it even know? And how useful is that to keep in the first place? My memory was full of useless crap like that. There is no way to edit the memories, decide when to add them to the context, etc. and adding controls for all of that is a level of micromanaging I do not want to do! Seriously. I’ve yet to see any memory feature that is worth a single damn. Context management is absolutely crucial and letting random algorithms inject useless noise is going to degrade your experience. About the only useful stuff for it to truly remember is basic facts like relationships (wife name is blah, kid is blah we live in blah blah). Things that make sense for it to know so you can mention things like “Mrs Duffle” and it knows instantly that is my wife and some bit about her background.
jaredhallen 1y ago
Maybe the next hype train won't rely on GPU's.
smugglerFlynn 1y ago
Replies you get tell me it is more akin to Agile movement at this point. People are mixing “lines of code per minute” with tangible results. Are you more personally ‘productive’ if your agent can crunch out PoCs of your hobby projects at night when you sleep? Is doing more development iterations per month making your business more ‘productive’? It is like expecting that achieving x10 more sunny side ups cooked per minute will make your restaurant more profitable. In reality amount of code delivered is rarely a bottleneck for value delivered, but for ‘productivity’ everyone has their own subjective definition.
straydusk 1y ago
Comparing this to blockchain and Web3 is fucking hilarious. Web3 literally has like no real use case, LLM tech has a billion. It literally passes the Turing test.
- kitku 1y ago
  How is a Turing-passing AI useful?
- paool 1y ago
  No use case? How are AI agents going to open up a credit card or bank account? You think the government will grant them a SSN? It's a good thing we have a Internet native, programmable money, that is permissionless, near instant, and already supports USD(c).
  - rollcat 1y ago
    As a bystander watching the world burn, I find it hilarious that you're both opposing and arguing against the other's chosen planet-incinerator.
davedx 1y ago
I think you're expecting too much from it? It's great at "interpolating" across its training data, but it can't really "extrapolate" (think of brand new, ambitious ideas). If you gave it some more constraints then it could definitely come up with an ambitious project for you, but it wouldn't be something entirely new to the world.
kylebenzle 1y ago
[dead]

dingnuts 1y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I want to be excited about new tech but I have found these tools extremely underwhelming and I feel a mixture of gaslit and sinking dread when I visit this site and read some of the comments here. Why don't I see the amazing things these people do? Am I stupid? Is this the first computer thing in my whole life that I didn't immediately master? No, they're oversold. My experience is normal. It's nice to know my feelings are shared; I remain relatively convinced that there are financial incentives driving most of the rabid support of this technology

fragmede 1y ago
How does that... work? Disclaimer: I work for a large tech company as an IC software-dev type person, and own stock in the stock market. I'm waiting on CI to finish running, but I'm salaried, so it's not accurate to say I'm being paid to make this comment. I could just as easily be scrolling Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or any number of other distractions to be had. But I mean, sure. But again, how does this work? After twirling my moustache that I wax with Evil Villian brand moustache wax, I just go on HN and make up shit to post about companies that aren't even public but are in the same industry, and that'll drive the stock price up... somehow? Someone's going to read a comment from me saying "I use plan mode in Claude Code to make a Todo.md, and then have it generate code", and based on that, that's the straw that breaks the camels back, and they rush out to buy stock in AI companies because they'd never heard of the stock market before I mentioned Claude Code. Then, based on randos reading a comment from me about Claude Code, the share price goes up by a couple of cents, but I can't sell the handful of shares I have because of blackout windows anyway, but okay so eventually those shares do sell, and I go on a lavishly expensive vacation in Europe all because I made a couple of positive comments on HN about AI that were total lies. Yeah, that's totally how that works. I also get paid to go out and protest on weekends to supplement the European vacation money. Just three more shitposts about Tesla and I get to go to South East Asia as well!

Dilettante_ 1y ago

>pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on The LLM does not have wants. It does not have preferences, and as such cannot "pick". Expecting it to have wants and preferences is "holding it wrong".

password54321 1y ago
So are we near AGI or is it 'just' an LLM? Seems like no one is clear on what these things can and cannot do anymore because everyone is being gaslighted to keep the investment going.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  It will always just be a series of models that have specific training for specific input classes. The architectural limits will always be there, regardless of training.
  - beering 1y ago
    That’s an interesting point. It’s not hard to imagine that LLMs are much more intelligent in areas where humans hit architectural limitations. Processing tokens seems to be a struggle for humans (look at how few animals do it overall, too), but since so much of the human brain is dedicated to movement planning, it makes sense that we still have an edge there.
- monsieurbanana 1y ago
  The vast majority of people I've interacted with is clear on that, we are not near AGI. And people saying otherwise are more often than not trying to sell you something, so I just ignore them. CEO's are gonna CEO, it seems their job has morphed into creative writing to maximize funding.
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
    As a CEO, I endorse this message

mythrwy 1y ago

It's a little dangerous because it generally just agrees with whatever you are saying or suggesting, and it's easy to conclude what it says has some thought behind it. Until the next day when you suggest the opposite and it agrees with that.

swader999 1y ago
This. I've seen a couple people now use GPT to 'get all legal' with others and it's been disastrous for them and the groups they are interacting with. It'll encourage you to act aggressive, vigorously defending your points and so on.
- wussboy 1y ago
  Oof. Like our world needed more of that...

qsort 1y ago

I wouldn't read too much into this particular launch. There's very good stuff and there are the most inane consumery "who even asked" things like these.

jasonsb 1y ago

> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point.

antihero 1y ago
It sounds like you are lacking inspiration. AI is a tool for making your ideas happen not giving you ideas.
- throw101010 1y ago
  I find your comment funny considering the OP, it's literally OpenAI claiming ChatGPT can start conversations now (in extenso give you inspiration/ideas).
jsheard 1y ago
> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.
- jasonsb 1y ago
  Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.

dakiol 1y ago

> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools Same. It reminds me the 1984 event in which the computer itself famously “spoke” to the audience using its text-to-speech feature. Pretty amazing at that time, but nevertheless quite useless since then

ElFitz 1y ago
It has proven very useful to a great number of people who, although they are a minority, have vastly benefited from TTS and other accessibility features.
- MountDoom 1y ago
  I think it's easy to pick apart arguments out of context, but since the parent is comparing it to AI, I assume what they meant is that it hasn't turned out to be nearly as revolutionary for general-purpose computing as we thought. Talking computers became an ubiquitous sci-fi trope. And in reality... even now, when we have nearly-flawless natural language processing, most people prefer to text LLMs than to talk to them. Heck, we usually prefer texting to calling when interacting with other people.
  - jama211 1y ago
    I don’t think anyone watched that demo back in 1984 and thought “oh this tech means we can talk to computers!” - it was clearly a demonstration of… well text to speech. It demonstrated successfully exactly what it could do, and didn’t imply what they’re implying it implied.
jama211 1y ago
Text to speech has been an incredible breakthrough for many with vision, visual processing, or speech disabilities. You take that back. Stephen Hawking without text to speech would’ve been mute.
tracerbulletx 1y ago
Its not useless, you're just taking it for granted. The whole national emergency system works off text to speech.

simianwords 1y ago

> It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. Every time I keep seeing this brought up I wonder if people truly mean this or its just something people say but don't mean. AI is obviously different and extremely useful.. I mean it has convinced a butt load of people to pay for the subscription. Every one I know including the non technical ones use it and some of them pay for it, and it didn't even require advertising! People just use it because they like it.

bonoboTP 1y ago
Obviously a lot of grifters and influencers shifted from NFTs to AI, but the comparison ends there. AI is being used by normal people and professionals every day. In comparison, the number of people who ever interacted with blockchain is basically zero. (And that's a lifetime vs daily comparison) It's a lazy comparison, and most likely fueled by a generic aversion to "techbros".
- bigfishrunning 1y ago
  That aversion to "techbros" comes from people who constantly oversell whatever the current thing is for personal benefit, and these technologies come up short time and time again. The "techbros" as a consort have proven themselves not to be trusted. Say what you want about AI, it's hard to argue that it isn't oversold constantly. I sincerely doubt it would continue to exist without a stream of VC money to sustain it (All of those paying customers still don't cover the bills...)
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    Everything is oversold, even the useful things. Nuclear, space, genetic engineering, x rays, vaccines, the internet itself, personal computers, phones and apps, etc. etc. If something is of value X, the hype will be X+Y. That's why this is too shallow an analyis. It's just vibes, based on cultural feelings and emotional annoyance. AI is nothing like blockchain. It's fine to be anti-AI, but the smart anti-AI people recognize that the real danger is it will have too large an impact (but in the negative). Not that it will evaporate some investment dollars.

jedbrooke 1y ago

> I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on, and I’d carry out whatever physical world tasks it needed me to, and all it did was just come up with project plans which were rehashes of my prior projects framed as its own. Mate, I think you’ve got the roles of human and AI reversed. Humans are supposed to come up with creative ideas and let machines do the tedious work of implementation. That’s a bit like asking a calculator what equations you should do or a DB what queries you should make. These tools exist to serve us, not the other way around GPT et al. can’t “want” anything, they have no volition

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
venusenvy47 1y ago
The posted article starts off by claiming that the AI can take the lead. I don't believe their hype, but I think that it the basis for the above comment. "Since ChatGPT launched, that's always meant coming to ask a question .... However that's limited by what you know to ask for and always puts the burden on you for the next step."

carabiner 1y ago

Yeah I've tried some of the therapy prompts, "Ask me 7 questions to help me fix my life, then provide insights." And it just gives me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something.

ip26 1y ago
Argue with it. Criticize it. Nitpick the questions it asked. Tell it what you just said: you just gave me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something When you open the prompt the first time it has zero context on you. I'm not an LLM-utopist, but just like with a human therapist you need to give it more context. Even arguing with it is context.
- input_sh 1y ago
  I do, frequently, and ChatGPT in particular gets stuck in a loop where it specifically ignores whatever I write and repeats the same thing over and over again. To give a basic example, ask it to list some things and then ask it to provide more examples. It's gonna be immediately stuck in a loop and repeat the same thing over and over again. Maybe one of the 10 examples it gives you is different, but that's gonna be a false match for what I'm looking for. This alone makes it as useful as clicking on the first few results myself. It doesn't refine its search, it doesn't "click further down the page", it just wastes my time. It's only as useful as the first result it gives, this idea of arguing your way to better answers has never happened to me in practice.
  - jackphilson 1y ago
    I would recommend talking out loud to it with speech to text software, it has been pretty helpful for me. Like around 60s of talking.
- carabiner 1y ago
  I did, and I gave it lots of detailed, nuanced answers about my life specifics. I spent an hour answering its questions and the end result was it telling me to watch the movie "man called otto" which I had already done (and hated) among other pablum.

pickledonions49 1y ago

Agreed. I think AI can be a good tool, but not many people are doing very original stuff. Plus, there are many things I would prefer be greeted with, other than by an algorithm in the morning.

afro88 1y ago

I got in a Waymo today and asked it where it wanted to go. It tried to suggest places I wanted to go. This technology just isn't there. /s

Agraillo 1y ago
Reminded me of many movie plots where a derailed character sits in a taxi and, when asked where to go, replies with "anywhere" or "I don't know." But before imagining a terrible future where an AI-driven vehicle actually decides, I suggest imagining an AI-infused comedy exploring this scenario. /s

brookst 1y ago

They’re more like synthesizers or sequencers: if you have ideas, they are amazing force multipliers, but if you don’t have ideas they certainly won’t create them for you.

nilkn 1y ago

Try turning off memory. I've done a lot of experiments and find ChatGPT is objectively better and more useful in most ways with no memory at all. While that may seem counter-intuitive, it makes sense the more you think about it: (1) Memory is primarily designed to be addictive. It feels "magical" when it references things it knows about you. But that doesn't make it useful. (2) Memory massively clogs the context window. Quality, accuracy, and independent thought all degrade rapidly with too much context -- especially low-quality context that you can't precisely control or even see. (3) Memory makes ChatGPT more sychophantic than it already is. Before long, it's just an echo chamber that can border on insanity. (4) Memory doesn't work the way you think it does. ChatGPT doesn't reference everything from all your chats. Rather, your chat history gets compressed into a few information-dense paragraphs. In other words, ChatGPT's memory is a low-resolution, often inaccurate distortion of all your prior chats. That distortion then becomes the basis of every single subsequent interaction you have. Another tip is to avoid long conversations, as very long chats end up reproducing within themselves the same problems as above. Disable memory, get what you need out of a chat, move on. I find that this "brings back" a lot of the impressiveness of the early version of ChatGPT. Oh, and always enable as much thinking as you can tolerate to wait on for each question. In my experience, less thinking = more sychophantic responses.

barneysaurus 1y ago
I might want to have an LLM hit me with temperature 100% weird-ass entropic thoughts every day. Other that that, what recycled bullshit would I care about?
cruffle_duffle 1y ago
Totally agree on the memory feature. You just have to look at the crap it tries to remember to see how useless it is and the kind of nonsense it will jam into the context. “Cruffle is trying to make bath bombs using baking soda and citric acid and hasn’t decided what colorant to use” could be a memory. Yeah well I figured out what colorant to use… you wanna bet if it changed that memory? Nope! How would it even know? And how useful is that to keep in the first place? My memory was full of useless crap like that. There is no way to edit the memories, decide when to add them to the context, etc. and adding controls for all of that is a level of micromanaging I do not want to do! Seriously. I’ve yet to see any memory feature that is worth a single damn. Context management is absolutely crucial and letting random algorithms inject useless noise is going to degrade your experience. About the only useful stuff for it to truly remember is basic facts like relationships (wife name is blah, kid is blah we live in blah blah). Things that make sense for it to know so you can mention things like “Mrs Duffle” and it knows instantly that is my wife and some bit about her background.

jaredhallen 1y ago

Maybe the next hype train won't rely on GPU's.

smugglerFlynn 1y ago

Replies you get tell me it is more akin to Agile movement at this point. People are mixing “lines of code per minute” with tangible results. Are you more personally ‘productive’ if your agent can crunch out PoCs of your hobby projects at night when you sleep? Is doing more development iterations per month making your business more ‘productive’? It is like expecting that achieving x10 more sunny side ups cooked per minute will make your restaurant more profitable. In reality amount of code delivered is rarely a bottleneck for value delivered, but for ‘productivity’ everyone has their own subjective definition.

straydusk 1y ago

Comparing this to blockchain and Web3 is fucking hilarious. Web3 literally has like no real use case, LLM tech has a billion. It literally passes the Turing test.

kitku 1y ago
How is a Turing-passing AI useful?
paool 1y ago
No use case? How are AI agents going to open up a credit card or bank account? You think the government will grant them a SSN? It's a good thing we have a Internet native, programmable money, that is permissionless, near instant, and already supports USD(c).
- rollcat 1y ago
  As a bystander watching the world burn, I find it hilarious that you're both opposing and arguing against the other's chosen planet-incinerator.

davedx 1y ago

I think you're expecting too much from it? It's great at "interpolating" across its training data, but it can't really "extrapolate" (think of brand new, ambitious ideas). If you gave it some more constraints then it could definitely come up with an ambitious project for you, but it wouldn't be something entirely new to the world.

kylebenzle 1y ago

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