Why obviously? It might as well be a passing fad, and all those uses oof ChatGPT might turn out to be a temporary amusement rather than real and lasting improvement of people's workflows. It's interesting how something comes out, and then all of a sudden so many people are immediately absolutely certain that it will have a massive impact at many levels, even before we've seen any meaningful ROI. To me it is a bit absurd and somewhat annoying. Of course, the tech is cool, it does have some amazing uses, but to forecast growth to trillions of dollars over the next few years and massive job losses seems premature and fuelled by relentless promotion, not only by the likes of OpenAI, but also by all the investment-hungry tech businesses - large and small.

> Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know

Same thing is happening with “AI”. I think it’s not a fad but at the same time it is.

In the company I work for, in the media sector, there’s clear and direct use of LLMs (it’s already being done, and yes it will mean quite a few people will lose their jobs, despite many HNers saying that it won’t happen), but with all the hype they want to get some sort of “AI” everywhere and the most ridiculous ideas are being POC’ed.

How is crypto a passing fad? ETH is $2k and BTC $30k. Shouldn’t this be 0 by now?

> A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks.

But soon after they realized it wasn't as useful for these tasks as initially thought. Interestingly, a lot people started to believe that the tool had been limited on purpose, where in fact they were just becoming a bit more objective.

That being said, it's better than crypto and there are applications (although maybe not life changing). The bar is low though.

> Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was.

Currently, nobody is talking about ChatGPT more than the crypto/NFT hustlers who now need a new angle.

I like ChatGPT, but it is literally the autocomplete function from your favorite email interface. Give it a standalone prompt and a new name and everyone will embrace it? No, it's not that helpful and after some initial exploration they will disable it.

My moment was when I realized if you ask ChatGPT a question about itself, like how ChatGPT works, you are not receiving an authoritative or 1st person kind of answer, the way everyone assumes. You are getting a rehash of press releases from a text autocomplete engine. Everyone when they interact with it intuitively feels they are receiving an authentic, slightly flawed, interaction with intelligence, but it's just PT Barnum with a text completion feature. Bravo.

> but it's obviously not a passing fad

Citation needed.

I put it in the same bucket as deep CNNs - very good for specific tasks, but ultimately their lasting impact will be something trivial and faily non-world-changing like being able to search your photo collection in a slightly more clever way.