> Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point...
I think it's worth stepping back here and re-examining the hurdles your setting for your own understanding.
The essential question here is: is ChatGPT useful to people. What you seem to be implying with your question is: I will not use ChatGPT unless it can solve problems with X level of difficulty for me. Why have you set that pre-requisite? Would it not still be useful to you if it simply increased the efficiency of solving simple day-to-day tasks that you're not blocked on?
Well I have yet to have been provided a specific example that matches the hyperbolic descriptions people are throwing around. I simply tried to find my own examples, and as is my experience with ChatGPT, it is nearly completely worthless. And then I get told that I'm using it wrong, asking it too niche of questions, and to reset my expectations.
I'm still waiting for the concrete examples that back up the above commentary about how much of a gamechanger it is.
> I've essentially got 15-20 high-priced world-class consultants in every field that I chose to pull from, working at my beck and call
In other words, this comment from above needs backing up. I've seen such descriptions everywhere but no one has ever provided examples that corroborate this.
I have yet to have been provided a specific example that matches the hyperbolic descriptions people are throwing around.
> > I've essentially got 15-20 high-priced world-class consultants in every field that I chose to pull from, working at my beck and call
I'll give you that: many of the claims are hyperbolic & ridiculous, including that particular one by the gp. The only way I can think of that statement being remotely true is if "high-priced" has no bearing on the quality of work of those consultants (though tbh that is often the case in reality).
Personally I have not found ChatGPT particularly good at anything I need to do. I have however found it very passable at many things I don't enjoy doing. It's reporting boilerplate is far more tailored & novel than anything I could ever put into a reusable reporting template. I dread writing reports: it's not a technical challenge for me but I gain no stimulus from it, so reducing the task to one where I just have to heavily edit something ChatGPT prepared for me is frankly incredible. The same goes for formal cold-call emails to people I don't know: another menial, unpleasant but necessary task.
It's also great at spitballing, and - as others have mentioned - quick shallow topic summaries of things you'd normally rely on a quick google & scan to get a quick topic summary (timely as Google gets worse and worse).
These are microgains throughout your day, nothing truly revolutionary, but that's the case for many successful tech we take for granted.
I am decent at writing PHP/WordPress with a basic working knowledge of some js/jQuery.
I wanted to use my GPX files to generate my own private hiking/running log.
With basically zero knowledge specific of GPX files, D3.js, or mapbox before starting I was able to quickly write a plugin that displays a path on a mapbox map as well as generates an elevation profile.
It would have taken me so long to do this before by googling and reading documentation with trial and error I would have stopped the project.
Agree with you, why hasn't someone show a useful prompt or an example of it in more than 8 hours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For me, personally, it has replaced Google Search for the type of query that looks like initial research on a specific subject. "What is X?" then ask a couple follow up questions and I can quickly get a rough idea of some subject that I happen to need at the moment.
I'm not the OP but I had a similar set of experiences with ChatGPT so I find the discussion useful. Essentially I already know how to find what I need using a search engine, and I know how to use cues from the source material to judge if it's correct. When I try using ChatGPT for technical problems I face, I frequently get hallucinated answers that feel like a waste of time.
Then I go on HN and read these paeans from other technologists who say ChatGPT has completely changed how they work and is 10x better than using Google. I'd like to have that too! I just don't get it, it doesn't match my experience at all. And yes I did try the paid ChatGPT model for a month.
> Then I go on HN and read these paeans from other technologists who say ChatGPT has completely changed how they work and is 10x better than using Google. I'd like to have that too! I just don't get it, it doesn't match my experience at all.
This is exactly my experience and what I am trying to get at. I start feeling that maybe I'm missing out, so I go give it a try. My direct experience shows that it spits out gibberish, but then people say things like it's a godsend but don't give any examples besides maybe it generated some HTTP API requests for them.
GPT+ data analysis gives GPT4 access to a jupyter back-end.
I was dealing with a noisy sensor in a factory production line.
I asked GPT to remind me which averaging functions might be usable to smooth out the noise, within the constraint of a PLC with limited memory.
I got GPT to simulate the output from the noisy sensor, apply each averaging function, and supply graphs of inputs and outputs. It was then pretty easy to eyeball which function was most suitable for the task.
I then gave GPT a code-style example and asked it to provide an (IEC 61131-3) Structured Text implementation using that code style. Which it did. This turned out to be pretty close to the final implementation (after careful reading and testing.)
Because it's so cheap to do (time and money wise), I used GPT to generate quite a lot of throw-away code to get to the final result. I probably wouldn't have considered this particular approach if doing it by hand.
I think there are really people that have jobs where they mostly write the same http request code all day everyday and then go home. Especially in the web space and startup world. ChatGPT isn't optimized for us, it was designed for the JavaScript tutorial audience that somehow have remained gainfully employed.
I think it's worth stepping back here and re-examining the hurdles your setting for your own understanding.
The essential question here is: is ChatGPT useful to people. What you seem to be implying with your question is: I will not use ChatGPT unless it can solve problems with X level of difficulty for me. Why have you set that pre-requisite? Would it not still be useful to you if it simply increased the efficiency of solving simple day-to-day tasks that you're not blocked on?