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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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"Long ago"? ChatGPT is 5 months old and GPT4 is 3 months old. We're not talking about a technology long past maturity, here. There's plenty of room to experiment with how to get better results via prompting.

Personally, I use GPT4 a lot for my programming work (both coding and design), and it still gets things wrong and occasionally hallucinates, but it's definitely far better than GPT3.5. Also, as mentioned above, GPT4 can often correct itself. In fact, I've had cases where it says something I don't quite understand, I ask for more details, and it freely admits that it was wrong ("apologies for the confusion"). That's not perfect, but still better than if it doubles down and continues to insist on something false.

I'm still getting the hang of it, like everyone else. But an oracle whose work I need to check is still a huge productivity boon for me. I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true in the medical industry.

GPT4 is 3 months old

6 weeks, actually. It was announced on March 14.

Technically Bing was using it before then, but good point. It's insane how fast things are progressing.