ChatGPT is losing some of its hype, as traffic falls for the third month in a row::August marked the third month in a row that the number of monthly visits to ChatGPT’s website worldwide was down, per data from Similarweb.

  • The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website
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    10 months ago

    These types of articles bother me. Almost every game, movie, and product has an initial unsustainable level of hype, then comes back down from it.

    But these articles inevitably try to frame it as if it’s an indication that something’s failing.

    • orclev@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      That very much depends on if you believed all the hype or not. If you did, then yes, it’s failing, as ChatGPT was supposed to be the next big breakthrough that was going to automate everything ever, and any company that didn’t get in on that right now was going to be left in the dust by all their competitors. On the other hand, if you were an actual sane person (so you know, not a CTO/CEO), then this is very much a non-story as you always knew that all those outlandish claims were nonsense and that this was always going to be yet another niche piece of tech that’s useful in a few places in limited amounts.

  • SSUPII@sopuli.xyz
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    10 months ago

    I mean, yeah? You can’t rely on hype ever being present. Honestly with the very light use I do (Asking a couple of questions at most in a month) I feel like it has not changed at all. Just at the top I now have a locked button that says “GPT 4”.

    • moog@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      you have to pay for gpt4. its smarter and more capable, but slower than gpt3.5

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 months ago

    I’m starting to think I’m incompatible with GPT. Code that’s laughably wrong (like sticking in things that aren’t even in the language), DM advice that I could get walking down a greeting card isle, and explanations that would get a Wikipedia editor sent to the firing squad.

    • orclev@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Nah, that sounds about right. This is just the natural result of people actually trying to use GPT for all the things they were told it would be able to do, and now discovering that was in fact all bullshit. The LLMs are and always have been massively overhyped and oversold on what they can do. Sadly this won’t stop the corporate executives from trying to use them to replace workers, although when that effort eventually face plants they’ll just quietly re-hire a bunch of people and find some middle manager to blame for their failure. This is was and always will be merely a productivity tool to automate some repetitive work, but it still needs someone to review and clean up its output. It’s not “replace someone doing 40 hours of work a week”, it’s “allow someone to do what used to take 40 hours in 35 hours instead”.

      Sadly the most impact this is going to have is on spammers and scammers, who can now automate generating their garbage since it never mattered that any of that crap was accurate or not, merely that on a casual glance it looks reasonable.

      • superkret@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        It’s not “replace someone doing 40 hours of work a week”, it’s “allow someone to do what used to take 40 hours in 35 hours instead”.

        That someone will then still have to work 40 hours for the same pay, but be more productive, so then 1 in 8 of these someones can be fired.

        • Womble@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          The exact same statement applies to computers, mechanical looms and the plough. Thats how technology works.

      • penguin@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        I agree. I think people are just missing the point. It’s really far from being able to replace a worker.

        It’s current capabilities at best can help that worker be slightly faster at certain things. It’s akin to a type of search engine.

      • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        Yeah. There are a lot of shitty marketing ideas that suddenly become profitable if you don’t have to pay people to generate the content it needs. Honestly I’ve had a couple of those ideas over the years and I’m glad I’m no longer in a position to propose them to anyone.

    • Sacha@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      When I first started messing with it, I was kind of neat and fun. I like making characters so I was using it for like story prompts and general outlines. Some were better than others, but it was neat for some inspiration and fleshing out. I never took it’s outputs 1:1.

      But when I messed with it again recently. It was a lot worse. Like it ignored parts of my prompt. Like as an example a prompt was about a romance story, but the story was about character A and their family. The love interest character was barely a footnote and could have been removed entirely and nothing would have changed with the story outlines it was giving me.

      I thought maybe it doesnt like romance prompts, so I tried less specific and more broad prompts from there, and it was the same thing of just… not outputting what I was asking it to. It got worse and worse and sometimes wouldn’t output anything at all.

    • Steeve@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      Not sure what language you’re coding in, but I’ve found GPT-4 incredibly helpful for coding in C++ and Python.

  • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Source: Work in AI, sometimes on LLM’s, mostly on the software engineering side rather than the science side.

    I have a few theories on why ChatGPT was so successful, and why the hype is starting to crumble, but they all largely centre around a well-known problem that LLM’s have had for years - they hallucinate, a lot.

    When your product becomes popular, you deal with unique problems that don’t seem to scale without insane amounts of money, or a literal army of people to plug gaps where your model is saying things it shouldn’t - whether it’s accusing high-level politician’s of crimes they didn’t commit, or telling people how to make chemical weapons in the style of your grandma. It’s an expensive loop in compositional models, so I’d hate to know how much work it took ChatGPT to get to it’s “best” version.

    Over time, valuable data disappears, and your data naturally skews over time due to it being incorrect, invalid, or pushed into just being biased towards a given inaccuracy. Sometimes, you do everything right and you train on manual input that you’ve vetted as correct through expert analysis or user feedback - and it’s still wrong. IMO, ChatGPT was always going to struggle to keep the hype, and it will eventually be seen as what it has always been: a concept that shows the utility of LLM’s as a commercial product.

    Make no mistake, the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta will probably plug the gap, and will reach either parity with GPT4 or improve on it. However, the fundamental problem of hallucinations will not disappear, and we’ll continue to see neutered experiences that make for great tools, but burn cash to provide these tools with minimal possibility of offending people/damaging the brand.

    The main thing I hope to see from the rise and fall from ChatGPT is a rise in productivity tooling, but also people to finally see those that hype these technologies as what they are - grifters.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      There’s also the novelty factor. Like how DALL-E was the rage not that long ago, people flocked to it because it was new and interesting.

      But the novelty has rather worn out by now.

      • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        This is a big part for me. When ChatGPT first came on the scene, I was absolutely blown away by its natural language parsing capabilities, but it wasn’t long before I started to hit the boundaries of its abilities. I was disappointed by how unreliable it was with anything but the most simple queries. Now it just doesn’t do enough to really bother with.

  • eddanja@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    ChatGPT has gotten dumb. I used to have to code check it’s answer every few responses. Now it’s every response. It wrote me an if/else statement the other day where if and else had the same outcome.

    • zikk_transport2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Strange that this isn’t top 1 comment in this thread.

      The only reason why I unsubsribed from ChatGPT is because what you mentioned - it became dumber. Now I use GPT4 API via https://bettergpt.chat/ and instead of paying 22€ a month, now I only end up with approx 4-5eur a month depending on my usage.

      I would probably agree to pay 50€ a month if it wouldn’t progress backwards and actually gets better over time, but it is not happening.

      • eddanja@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I had a thought about this. I wonder if they intentionally made it dumb so you would opt for the paid version.

        • zikk_transport2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          10 months ago

          intentionally made it dumb

          They are busimess, their goal is money.

          I am pretty sure they “optimized” it, so it’s cheaper to run and as a result - dumber AI.

  • Widowmaker_Best_Girl@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Yeah I’d love to continue using ChatGPT but I got warned for making it roleplay as Widowmaker and trying to fuck the bot.

    They don’t want my money? Fine. I’ll give it to someone else who doesn’t have arbitrary morality rules on playing wall-ball with linear algebra.

  • gridleaf@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    School’s just starting. It won’t hit the peak of hype without some huge new features or improvements, but it’ll rise again.

  • Iwasondigg@lemmy.one
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    10 months ago

    Hasn’t the service also gotten worse? When it first came out, you kept hearing how it could pass the bar exam and medical license test. And now all you hear is that it can’t do basic high school homework without wrong answers. Maybe it was hype in the beginning and it never could do those things.

    • SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      From what I’ve seen, here’s what happened. GPT 4 came out, and it can pass the bar exam and medical boards. Then more recently some studies came out. Some of them from before GPT 4 was released that just finally got out or picked up by the press, others that were poorly done or used GPT 3 (probably because of gpt 4 being expensive) and the press doesn’t pick up on the difference. Gpt 4 is really good and has lots of uses. Gpt 3 has many uses as well but is definitely way more prone to hallucinating.

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    I made the mistake of asking chatgpt questions about securing my network setup. It confidently gave me a huge amount of misinformation that led to 8-10 hours of frustration and pointless troubleshooting.

    Do NOT trust ChatGPT.

  • arthurpizza@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is just balancing out. Anything that gets over-hyped will eventually drop in use. It’ll eventually be a boring yet useful tool just like spreadsheets, spellcheck, or email.

  • Sygheil@lemmy.worldB
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    10 months ago

    ChatGPT: *declines in popularity *develops sentience *gets emotional *evolves into SkyNet

  • computerboss@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    No one seems to have thought about the fact that most schools have been out for those three months. Not sure exactly how much of the traffic is high schoolers and college students cheating, but that could account for at least some of the loss in traffic.

    Edit: missed a word

    • Lantern@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Cheating isn’t necessarily the only use case for GPT, although it definitely does play an impact on the overall number of users.

  • o0joshua0o@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    They definitely nerfed it. We will probably end up in a situation where corporations and the rich have access to god-tier AI, and everyone else has access to mediocre, ad-supported AI.

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Why does the guy in the thumbnail look like Steven Crowder if you bought him on Wish?