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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had a thought about this. I wonder if they intentionally made it dumb so you would opt for the paid version.
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.
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.
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.
Just wait until we find out what the US military has.
School’s just starting. It won’t hit the peak of hype without some huge new features or improvements, but it’ll rise again.
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.
ChatGPT: *declines in popularity *develops sentience *gets emotional *evolves into SkyNet
I would like to see if the use of their API increased.
Why does the guy in the thumbnail look like Steven Crowder if you bought him on Wish?
I switched from their $20 interface to straight API, it makes more sense for me. I wonder if other people are doing this and these metrics aren’t accounting for that.
Do you know of any interfaces like (or better than) ChatGPT that you can selfhost, that uses the openai api?
I absolutely love typingmind.com, I’ve invested a lot of personalization into it’s prompt library, and characters.
That you!
Edit: wow…
Thank you
Aw yeah dude chatgpt sucks for sure all of you should stop using it immediately so all the rich people who wanna fuck with it and discover ways to make money can and you can continue to be a little bitch to the system.
Definitely don’t use the api and learn some Python so you can control all the settings including system level prompting and so on. Definitely not a fucking blast to play with and I’ve definitely been so annoyed and have hated it for months and months. 👌🏻
