I think the big difference between this and crypto spam is how it impacts the people ignoring all the hype. I have seen crypto spam and open AI spam and while both are equally grifty, cryptocurrencies at their baseline have been completely useless despite being around for over a decade whereas GPT has already been somewhat useful for me.
The hype is a bunch of people acting like this AI is the messiah and is going to somehow cure cancer. Once you take that away, you have a pretty useful tool that usually helps you do what Google does with a few less clicks. One caveat is you should be willing to verify the results which you should always be doing with Google anyway.
The AI Tutors being given to students is going to exponentially change education. Now a tireless explainer can be engaged to satisfy innate curiosity. That alone is the foundation for a serious revolution.
I completely agree. Being able to generate a bash command that includes a complicated regular expression is like magic to me. Also, I consider myself a strong writer, but GPT4 can look at things I write and suggest useful improvements. These capabilities are a huge advancement over what was available even a few years ago in a general purpose application. GPT2 wasn't all that impressive.
Can and will you really read all the sources that you find with Google? What about topics people are talking about on all the different social media platforms? Will you really read all the comments?
I think these tools will help us break out of local bubbles. I'm currently working on a Zeitgeist [1] that tries to gather the consensus on social media and on the web on general.
What do you use it for? As a web developer I use Github's Copilot and enjoy its assistance the most in unit tests. I haven't found any use case for ChatGPT yet. I get better & quicker results searching what I need on Google. I'm much quicker searching by keywords as opposed to putting together a full sentence for ChatGPT.
I am completely unable to put myself in the headspace of someone who thinks this is all just empty hype. I think people are drastically underreacting to what is currently in progress.
I'm not saying that it's all empty hype. ChatGPT is useful for some tasks, like rewriting a paragraph or finding a regexp oneliner to do something specific. It works surprisingly well at times. However, I don't see it becoming as impactful as it's hyped. It's main limitation is that it hallucinates. I don't think this will change anytime soon, because that's a common issue of deep learning.
