Comment by palmotea
1 month ago
> How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have.
Very, because you missed my point entirely. I said built not used. Analogies could be made to social media and tobacco, which have also been very popular.
You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend?
I think it's being built to solve problems they have. OpenAI shut down GPT-4o because it leaned too hard into getting people addicted to it.
> You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend?
No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily replaceable ways (which my intuition says are the numerical bulk of users), many people use it because they're required to, and a relatively small fraction use it to build things or replace human labor in their employ, etc.
But to restate my point: AI systems like ChatGPT weren't built to solve any kind of problem most people actually have. Few people, if anyone, had a ChatGPT-shaped hole in their life in 2021. It was built because it could be built, and it continue to be built because some other people have a "problem" that they have to pay a lot of money to workers and they hope to do less of that in the future. And causing societal harm or damage doesn't seem to any kind of deterrent to many of them, if they think about it at all.
Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now.
I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be.
Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans.
Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
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