Now that you've all tried it ... ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%
ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%, analytics show
Slow June, people voting with their feet amid this AI craze, or something else?
It's Summer. Students are on break, lots of people on vacation, etc. Let's wait to see if the trend persists before declaring another AI winter.
Agreed. I think being between academic years is likely a much bigger factor than we realize. I’m a college professor, and at the end of spring quarter we had a lot of conversations with undergrads, grad students, and faculty about how people are actually using AI.
Literally every undergrad student I spoke with said they use it for every written assignment (for the large part in non-cheating legit educational resource ways). Most students used it for all or most of their programming assignments. Most use it to summarize challenging or long readings. Some absolutely use it to just do all their work for them, though fewer than you might expect.
I’d be pretty surprised if there isn’t a significant bounce-back in September.
This worries me though. I've found chatgpt to be wrong in basically every fact-based question I've asked it. Sometimes subtly, sometimes completely, but it always hallucinates. You cannot use it as a source of truth.
I have been using it to do deep dives into subjects. Especially text analysis. Do you want to know the entire voc of the Gospel of Mark in original greek for example? 1080. Now how does this compare to a section of Plato's republic of the same size? About 6-7x as large.
So right there we can see why Mark is often viewed as a direct text while Plato is viewed as a more ambiguous writer.
I think you're being a bit self-centered, i's always going to be summer somewhere. This is a tool used globally.
I see your point but:
It's summer somewhere half the time, but thank you for reminding them the southern hemisphere exists!
It's really fucking annoying getting "As an AI language model, I don't have personal opinions, emotions, or preferences. I can provide you with information and different perspectives on..." at the beginning of every prompt, followed by the driest, most bland answer imaginable.
It definitely has its uses but it also has massive annoyances as you pointed out. One thing has really bothered me, I asked it a factual question about Mohammed the founder of Islam. This is how I a human not from a Muslim background would answer
"Ok wikipedia says this ____"
It answered in this long winded way that had all these things like "blessed prophet of Allah". Basically the answer I would expect from an Imam.
I lost a lot of trust in it when I saw that. It assumed this authority tone. When I heard about that case of a lawyer citing madeup caselaw from it I looked it as confirmation. I don't know how it happened but for some questions it has this very authoritative tone like it knows this without any doubt.
Yeah, it's boring as shit, if want a conversation partner there's better (if less reliable) options out there, and groups like personal.ai that repackage it for conversation. There's even scripts to break through the "guardrails"
I love the boring. Every other day, I think "man, I really don't want to do this annoying task. I'm not sure if it even saves much time since I have to look over the work, but it's a hell of a lot less mentally exhausting.
Plus, it's fun having it Trumpify speeches. It's tremendous. I've spent hours reading the bigglyest speeches. Historical speeches, speeches about AI, graduation speeches where bears attack midway through... Seriously, it never gets old
I use it now and again but I couldn't imagine paying $20+ a month for it.
It's not just that the novelty has worn off, It's progressively gotten less useful. Any god damn question I ask gets 90,000 qualifiers and it refuses to provide any data at all. I think OpenAI is so terrified of liabilty they have significantly dumbed down it's utility in the public release. I can't even ask ChatGPT to provide a link to study it references, if it references anything at all rather than making ambiguous statements.
I got it to give me a book that was still in copyright status by selectively asking for bigger and bigger quotes. Took a while. Now it seems to have cottoned on to that trick.
Also, ChatGPT 4 came out but is still only available to people who pay (as far as I know). So using ChatGPT 3 feels like only having access to the leftovers. When it first came out, that was exciting because it felt like progress was going to be rapid, but instead it stagnated. (Luckily interesting LLM stuff is still happening, it's just nothing to do with OpenAI.)
I tried it for about 20 minutes
Had it do a few funny things
Thought huh that's neat
Went on with life
Since then the only times I've thought about ChatGPT has been seeing people using it in classes I'm in and just sitting here thinking "this is a fucking introductory course and you're already cheating?"
In discrete mathematics right now and overheard way too many students hitting a brick wall with the current state of AI chatbots. as if thats what they used almost exclusively up to this point
If only there was some way these student's could've learned how to understand the material
ChatGPT has mostly given me very poor or patently wrong answers. Only once did it really surprise me by showing me how I configured BGP routing wrong for a network. I was tearing my hair out and googling endlessly for hours. ChatGPT solved it in 30 seconds or less. I am sure this is the exception rather than the rule though.
It all depends on the training data. If you pick a topic that it happens to have been well trained on, it will give you accurate, great answers. If not, it just makes things up. It's been somewhat amusing, or perhaps confounding, seeing people use it thinking it's an oracle of knowledge and wisdom that knows everything. Maybe someday.
I still use free GPT-3 as a sort of high level search engine, but lately I'm far more interested in local models. I havent used them for much beyond SillyTavern chatbots yet, but some aren't terribly far off from GPT-3 from what I've seen (EDIT: though the models are much smaller at 13bn to 33bn parameters, vs GPT-3s 145bn parameters). Responses are faster on my hardware than on OpenAI's website and its far less restrictive, no "as a large language model..." warnings. Definitely more interesting than sanitized corporate models.
The hardware requirements are pretty high, 24GB VRAM to run 13bn parameter 8k context models, but unless you plan on using it for hundreds of hours you can rent a RunPod or something for cheaper than a used 3090.
What exact ones are you using and how can I use them?
This vid goes over it in better detail than I can.
I have a number of language models running locally. I am really liking the gpt4all install with Hermes model. So in my case i used chatgpt right up untill i had one i could keep private.
How does it compare with ChatGPT (GPT 3.5), quality and speed wise?
Depends how you get in accomplished if you use the python bindings its slow but using the gpt4all its quick and there is a gpt4all api should you wish to build a private assistant. I like that one but its still run by a company so mileage may vary there are a few projects on github for use with opensource models. I can get better quality from the hermes model than i can with GPT 3.5 IMO but some models are better than others in regards to what you are trying to do. If you have done any work with stable diffusion lots of different models are popping up right now for different use-cases like you see on civit.ai. A good coding bot is probably going to be a bit shit in a conversation.
How do I get started with the models you are mentioning?
On that, what would people recommend for a locally hosted (I have a graphics card) chatgpt-like LLM that is open source and doesn't require a lot of other things to install.
(Just one CMD line installation! That is, if you have pip, pip3, python, pytorch, CUDA, conda, Jupiter note books, Microsoft visual studio, C++, a Linux partition, and docker. Other than that, it is just one line installation!)
I looked into this too and it’s pretty resource heavy. I actually had a really good conversation with Chatgpt about making a separate instance of itself locallly. It’s worth talking to it about that and some of the price options
Look into llama.cpp - it's a single C++ program that run quantified models (basically models with some less precision - don't need a full 64 bits for a double, really). As for models to run on it, there's so many but I think WizardLM is pretty good.
I still use it sometimes, but ohhh boy it can be a wreck. Like I've started using the Creation Kit for Bethesda games, and you can bet your ass that anything you ask it, you'll have to ask again. Countless times it's a back-and-forth of:
Me: Hey ChatGPT, how can I do this or where is this feature?
ChatGPT: Here is something that is either not relevant or just does not exist in the CK.
Me: Hey that's not right.
ChatGPT: Oh sorry, here's the thing you are looking for. and then it's still a 50-50 chance of it being real or fake.
Now I realize that the Creation Kit is kinda niche, and the info on it can be a pain to look up but it's still annoying to wade through all the shit that it's throwing in my direction.
With things that are a lot more popular, it's a lot better tho. (still not as good as some people want everyone to believe)
Lol, Chat has it's pros and cons. For helping me write or refine content, it's extremely helpful.
However I did try to use it to write code for me. I design 3D models using a programming language (OpenSCAD) and the results are hilarious. Literally it knows the syntax (kinda) and if I ask it to do something simple, it will essentially write the code for a general module (declaring key variables for the design), and then it calls a random module that doesn't exist (like it once called a module "lerp()" which is absolutely not a module) - this magical module mysteriously does 99% of the design..... but ChatGPT won't give it to me. When I ask it to write the code for lerp(), it gives me something random like this
module lerp() { splice(); }
Where it simply calls up a new module that absolutely does not exist. The results are hilarious, the code totally does not compile or work as intended. It is completely wrong.
But I think people are working it out of their system - some found novelty in it that wore off fast. Others like myself use it to help embellish product descriptions for ebay listings and such.
I’ve been building a tool that uses ChatGPT behind the scenes and have found that that’s just part of the process of building a prompt and getting the results you want. It also depends on which chat model is being used. If you’re super vague, it’s going to give you rubbish every time. If you go back and forth with it though, you can keep whittling it down to give you better material. If you’re generating content, you can even tell it what format and structure to give the information back in (I learned how to make it give me JSON and markdown only).
Additionally, you can give ChatGPT a description of what it’s role is alongside the prompt, if you’re using the API and have control of that kind of thing. I’ve found that can help shape the responses up nicely right out of the box.
ChatGPT is very, very much a “your mileage may vary” tool. It needs to be setup well at the start, but so many companies have haphazardly jumped on using it and they haven’t put in enough work prepping it.
OpenAI's models, including its GPT series, are available via APIs and Microsoft Azure, and so a drop in ChatGPT's website use may be due to people moving to programmatic interfaces
I feel like this is an important detail that changes the conclusion of the article: there may be a lot more end user, through 3d party apps, but the way of measuring won't reveal it. This especially important considering that (correct me if I'm wrong) API users are paying ones !
I love Stable Diffusion but I really have no use for ChatGPT. I'm amazed at how good the output can be... i just don't have a need to generate text like that. Also, OpenAI has been making it steadily worse with 'safety' restrictions. I find it super annoying and even insulting when Bing-Sydney is "THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER". It's like being chastised by facebook or twitter for being 'violent' when you made a joke.
The ability to generate photographs and illustrations of practically anything, though, is fantastic. My girlfriend has been flagellating me into creating a bunch of really useless crap to promote her business on social media using SD, and I actually enjoy that part. I've made thousands of photos of scenery.
It was in the major TV news cycle for weeks but now it's back to normal levels I'd say. Curious onlookers without a real need have moved on.
Tried it a few times with poor results, it will eventually get better I guess.
For my professional work, the training data is way too outdated by now for ChatGPT to be anywhere near being useful. The browsing feature also can’t make up for it, because it’s pretty bad at Internet search (bad search phrases etc).
i find even for really complex stuff it’s pretty good as long as you direct it: it can suggest some things, you can do some searching based on that, maybe give it a few links to summarise for you, etc
it doesn’t do the work for you, but it makes a pretty good assistant that doesn’t quite understand the subject matter
I'm old enough to not needing a babysitter to use the Internet for research.
It even told me a few times that its training data is too outdated and that there probably was some progress in that area. I have to freaking push it to actually do a web search to update that knowledge with prompts like “You have web access, use it!”. It then finds a few posts on stackoverflow I've already seen and draws some incorrect conclusions from that.
I'm way faster on my own.
I'm not really surprised at all, a lot of people I know wouldn't stop talking about it for the grand total of maybe 2 weeks but then it all went quite. In fairness this is a sample of people who are all non-tech people, so I think a lot of it is just the fact they probably forgot the name of it or how to turn their computer on (definitely the case for some).
The recent changes made it faster but near useless for coding.
GPT-4 is quite a bit better, but the subscription is expensive. I subscribe because I think it saves me quite a bit of time. I use it almost every day for things like refactoring (shorter) blocks of code, "translating" code into different languages or frameworks, or just for generating examples for completing tasks using frameworks or libraries I'm unfamiliar with.
What has changed? I still use it for small things and find it quite helpful. I avoid using it for serious things though, as that'd require giving it the company's data.
I'm finding the opposite actually. Tried it months ago for basic python scripts and it was garbage. Recently started a project where I needed some c++ scripts to flash into an avr microcontroller and it's been killing it. To be fair I did a decent amount of code myself and also knew exactly what I wanted the program to do. But it has been really good about cleaning up my code, keeping the code consistent through multiple iterations, and understanding my explanations. It teaches me new functions that I didn't know existed which make the code better and faster. Also, when I was designing the circuit, I could describe what I needed a component to do and it would give me whole lists of, for example, possible types of 5volt voltage regulators and the differences between them.
I equate it to having a coworker rather than an employee. I can't really just tell it to do stuff and it'll spit out a perfect script. I need to work with it to make sure it understands my requirements and realizes it's errors. The biggest advantage is this coworker has encyclopedic knowledge of electrical components and c++.
I have noticed that I use it less myself. I think honestly though, at least for me, that it is 90% related to the clunky and awkward UI of ChatGPT. If it was easy to natively type the prompt in the browser bar I'd use it much more.
Plus, the annoying text scrolling thingy ... Just show me the answer already, hehe.
The annoying text scrolling can't be removed because the AI generates one word at a time, which is what you are seeing.
I still use it daily. I made a decent Set of prompts and it pretty much does all of my daily annoying writing Tasks at work. This saves me a lot of time and i can Focus on more exciting projects. 10% isnt even that much after everyone tried it out and Played around with it. I think as a tool it just isnt useful for everyone, but for my Job it defenitely is.
Did you use it to write this comment? And if so, is that why random words are capitalized?
No i didn't. Random words being capitalized is because my phones keyboard is Set to german and i dont bother correcting it.
I didn't and don't really care. Call me when there's (free) AI that is good at dirty talk.
Orca 13b is coming out and is open source and can be run locally so you’ll get your wish really soon
Well yeah it's kinda cool but the novelty will wear off. It's useful sometimes but it's not a magic elixer.
I use it for quick dnd ideas. Need an NPC on the fly? Chatgpt will help you out
What a fantastic use case.
Using it for work from time to time, mostly when I have issues with HTML/CSS or some quick bash scripts. I'd probably miss copilot more. It saves a lot of time with code suggestions.
The novelty has worn off. I jumped on board and tried out every bot when they were first released: Bard, Bind, Snapchat, GPT—I've given them all a go.
It was a fun experience, asking them to write poems or delve into the mysteries of consciousness, as I got to know their individual personalities. But now, I mainly use them for searching niche topics or checking grammar, maybe the occasional writing.
In fact, this very comment was reformated in Bard for instance. Though, since Google integrated their LLM into search (via Labs), I use them even less.
It's not a craze. ChatGPT is going to change 80% of the jobs on the planet, and most people don't even know what it is.
It's because it's summer and students aren't using it to cheat on their assignments anymore.
It's definitely this. Except the kids taking summer classes, which statistically probably have higher instances of cheating.