Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

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Well put. I share the sentiment.

I used GPT-3/3.5/4 for multiple tasks and I never found it useful. It just feels… average.

It can “answer” many questions correctly but that’s only on the data set it’s been training on. I asked it to solve Elixir issues, write Elisp snippets, figure out why my Rust code was complaining about lifetimes and even went for easy mode and asked for JavaScript code.

Only JavaScript (very popular) responses were workable but they still had popular problems included in it (e.g. not clearing out timers or dealing with common edge cases). Elixir “hints” were very interesting since - when out of water - it would produce code assuming that it’s a OOP and that was a rabbit hole it declined to exit.

Too technical? Went for fun with family members who have exceptional cooking skills. We tried to figure out a dish variation of an apple pie. Suggestions were heavily criticized as non workable for many reasons (too sugary, consistency wouldn’t be too good, modification change the ingredients but GPT refuse to break of out theme etc.)

Colin Meloy made an experiment some time ago and created The Decemberists-like song with it and then actually recorded it. It worked but it was described as below average and bland. I share that vibe.

In the end I have this feeling that GPT is on a level of 7 year old with an access to vast library. It uses proper grammar it can copy parts of texts, but one needs to provide it with a great benefit of doubt and energy just so that it’s useful.

In contrast to 7 year old, GPT isn’t grateful for that sacrifice and is actually making money of you.

You probably never had to work with one of the 99% of programmers in the world that are not of your level (I am assuming it is high, otherwise you might just be very scared saying all this, and rightfully so), but me, working in the fortune 1000 company space, worked with many. Most of my colleagues can readily be replaced by gpt-4 today as far as coding and documentation goes. They make the same errors as you noticed gpt make (which I have to fix usually), only gpt does it in seconds vs hours and practically for free. By replacing all these people, I don’t have to build in the overhead of communicating with them (I just copy the jira task in gpt with some context and a few seconds later I have something better than most my colleagues write in 2-3 hours, on a good day), and they are happier doing nothing anyway. The company won’t fire them probably as managers get paid more and promoted more ‘managing’ more people.

This is not an exception either; teams like mine exist in every large enterprise. I worked in several of them and this AI makes life so much better. Let’s not pretend it makes certain outsourcing countries not fully obsolete though, to the tune of 10s of millions+ programmers, data entry workers, text producers (bloggers for seo, docs no one reads etc) and more are mostly all already worse than gpt3.5 and 4. Wait for 6 or 7.

Many humans have lost their jobs to dumb programs before. If your job is mostly copying code snippets and modifying them a tiny bit then yeah, you should worry, these language models are great at that. If you are doing more creative coding then it will probably take a while.

Yes, totally correct. I am just saying what I see as the norm; the norm is not you and me or many other HNers. They should worry in my opinion. I see it every day, and worse, none of them even heard of gtp or copilot.

> Many humans have lost their jobs to dumb programs before

I do think really this is you’re not being in touch with most of reality and what most people on earth do daily at this moment. It definitely as nothing to do with the productivity you have and the drive you feel internally to ‘get shit done’. Most people, by a huge stretch, get education, want to do work what they are told to do related so that education and that’s it. They have no, at all, drive to ever move beyond that. They learned Angular on their first job; that’s it. Etc.

This is now replaceable; this is not, at all, comparable to automation before this. It’s a threshold; it you cannot see it, you definitely will be shocked in the coming years. This is not going away and it is replacing humans now on a small scale. The companies that really can just remove 90% of their staff are late always, but it will come. I see this all day because I work in massive orgs where this holds, not only for tech.

> I used GPT-3/3.5/4 for multiple tasks and I never found it useful.

I’ve found it useful for drafting cover letters (I just need to do final edits).

I’ve also found it useful as an adjunct to google when I’m searching for niche things like “Luxury resorts with activities for my dog and lots of off-leash trails”.

So far that’s it, but it does seem like a useful addition to Google search for super niche things. Obviously it hallucinates a lot on these niche edge cases but it gives some great starting points.

>Colin Meloy made an experiment some time ago and created The Decemberists-like song with it and then actually recorded it. It worked but it was described as below average and bland. I share that vibe.

So... this early-stage AI was able to make music that's better than the vast majority of commercial recording artists these days? I fail to see how that's a failure.

> In the end I have this feeling that GPT is on a level of 7 year old with an access to vast library.

It's probably more like a 14 year old but I think you're probably right. It can give step-by-step instructions and even the code to set up entire web apps, but it's only when you go through those steps that you find the issues. Packages out of date, less-than-optimal ways of handling non-obvious cases, and I've even found it trying to use javascript functions that have never existed. To its credit, it apologizes and tries again when I call it out. Maybe GPT-5 will be the real one to worry about.

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