[rubyist5eva]

It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors akin to blockchain, bitcoin (and the entire web3/crypto space in general) - a whole bunch of hype and "evangelists" who keep saying it's going to change the world (and make them a whole lot of money in the process, how convenient!) but if you do look at it critically even at a surface level you realize it's just a bunch of really computationally expensive BS that isn't any better or more officient than existing status quo solutions.

[myrmidon]

Strongly disagree with this.

You can call it smoke and mirrors all you want, but its utility is pretty self-evident- you can really just talk with this thing, and it will give reasonable answers. Is it perfect, or even as good as a human? Hell no, but it for sure is not going to get worse, and it's already remarkable in ways that were barely imaginable only a few years ago...

I have a friend that has been using this as an infinitely patient mentor for learning embedded programming, and chatgpt delivers in that capacity unlike any automated system we had before.

If a glorified autocomplete can fake human intelligence reasonably well, maybe we should question our notions of superiority instead of trashtalking the machines...

[ian0]

Its not, really. The major difference between this and web3/crypto is utility. Its actually useful. In our office we have people from three different teams using it near daily. Out of choice. As do many kids in our network for homework. For a recently released product effectively in beta thats insane.

Theres a bunch of snake oil salesmen jumping on the bandwagon which is very unfortunate. But lots of people sell fake pharmaceuticals online doesn't mean paracetamol wont help with your headache.

[busyant]

> Its actually useful. In our office we have people from three different teams using it near daily. Out of choice. As do many kids in our network for homework. For a recently released product effectively in beta thats insane.

Yep.

I asked it to make a worksheet for students to practice converting numbers written in scientific notation back to "standard" format.

So, it gave me a bunch of output like:

6.2x10^-6: ___________________

What annoyed me about this is that it used the letter "x" instead of the proper multiplication symbol "×" and it used the hyphen (-) instead of the appropriate "minus" sign (−).

So, I told it to use proper typographic symbols, and it did!

It converted "6.2x10^-6" to "6.2×10^−6"

It even told me the Unicode numbers it was using for × and −.

Then I asked it to re-generate the worksheet using LaTeX and the siunitx package.

It nailed it.

It's like someone just handed me a turbo-charged assistant. Yeah, I have to make sure my assistant hasn't gone insane, but it has already spared me a ton of grunt work.