According to the analytics firm’s report, worldwide desktop and mobile web traffic dropped by 9.7% from May to June, and 10.3% in the US alone. Users are also spending less time on the site overall, as the amount of time visitors spent on chat.openai.com was down 8.5%, according to the reports.
The decline, according to David F. Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, is an indication of a drop in interest in ChatGPT and that the novelty of AI chat has worn off. “Chatbots will have to prove their worth, rather than taking it for granted, from here on out,” Carr wrote in the report.
Personally, I’ve noticed a sharp decline in my usage. What felt like a massive shift in technology a few months ago, now feels like mostly a novelty. For my work, there just isn’t much ChatGPT can help me with that I can’t do better myself and with less frustration. I can’t trust it for factual information or research. The written material it generates is always too generic, formal, and missing the nuances I need that I either end up re-writing it or spending more time instructing ChatGPT on the changes I need than it would have taken me to just write it myself in the first place. Its not great at questions involving logic or any type of grey area. Its sometimes useful for brainstorming, but that is about it. ChatGPT has just naturally fallen out of my workflow. That’s my experience anyway.
School is out. Fewer kids asking if for homework help
Meanwhile because school is out, they seek out character-based chatbots like character.ai, probably one of the reasons there was a server outage recently.
there just isn’t much ChatGPT can help me with that I can’t do better myself and with less frustration. I can’t trust it for factual information or research
This mixed with the constant reprimanding and moral instruction just makes it so frustrating. I’m not asking for no filter, but it’s gotta be more lenient if they want it to be a good and useful tool. I am so over reading “It is important to remember…” because it misunderstood a prompt.
They completely banned it at my job, I’m willing to bet some companies are banning it.
Especially frustrating because we work very closely with Microsoft and have a team specifically for helping our clients develop applications with AI.
I can see where they’re coming from in terms of security, but that sounds a bit harsh.
At least where I work, we’re told basically “use it if you want, just be prepared for it to be wrong and double check everything it tells you” which sounds a little more reasonable IMO
Ironically, security isn’t a concern at all. With our relationship with Microsoft, we can use the Azure OpenAI API which, despite my own strong personal distrust in Microsoft, still meets all of our privacy and security standards. We trust Microsoft as much as we do our internal teams.
The concern is mostly legal/copyright related, as they’re worried any code or documents that come out of it could be considered copyrighted.
Wow that’s a very protective stance to take! Good reason though. There’s probably enough people out there actually copy + pasting the code that gets spit-out to have to worry about that. I try to only use ChatGPT to figure out syntax or get a high-level understanding of an approach to doing something, without having to scour the web for documentation.
Not only is it banned from my work, they have banned anything even close to AI. Even deepL is blocked and I need to translate things for my job daily. Google and Bing aren’t blocked so I could still use their AI if I was going to use AI but that’s not what I’m even trying to do lol.
DeepL is just the best at translating business related language things. Google does a decent job at it anyway…
I find that recently the effort needed to get the “right” answer is much more than in the past for gpt-4. That’s my impression. At the end I am finding myself more often going back to google, stack overflow, manuals, medium…
I believe they distilled the model to much for performances, or the rlhf is really degrading the model performances
The fact that you have to double-check the answers anyway is a pretty big sign that it’s not useful for finding information.
I used mainly for programming support, brainstorming on techs and libraries, and to refine technical documentation. But support for programming is becoming a bit of a pain honestly…
I use it for help with relatively simple scripting at least once a month and it’s become noticeably dumber recently. I find it’s a lot more obnoxious to interact with and generally just isn’t as useful as it was a month or two ago.
I see this becoming more of an advanced “auto-complete”. It really shouldn’t be authoring anything, but instead work with software to make suggestions on how to improve human generated work.
Also, for software development it is a minefield. They train the AIs on code from GitHub and other projects and then suggest it back to users in violation of the license the code was built with.
That’s exactly what a LLM is, an advanced autocomplete using a huge training database to determine the probabilities. It never was anything more, even with the unexpected characteristics from further development. The models that are being fine-tuned for their training (stepping them back to a more narrow field LLM) do a lot better than a general purpose one.