My thoughts about AI – November 2023

Honestly, when GPT4 came out in early 2023, I had a couple of sleepless nights. I was blown away by the capability of GPT4. Since then, ChatGPT is a daily companion for a lot of tasks including software development.

I had sleepless nights because of the following points:

1. Job displacement
2. The potential for dehumanizing communication
3. Growing disparities in AI literacy and the resultant inequality
4. The proliferation of indistinguishable fake content
5. The daunting prospect of superintelligence

I actually also signed the well know "Pause Giant AI Experiments" petition in March 2023

Now, in November 2023, my perspective has shifted to a more balanced view. I've come to recognize the limitations of ChatGPT, which include:

• Accuracy: The output is mostly accurate, but not 100%. I ran into long debugging sessions several times, because there was a non obvious issue.
• UX: I see myself copy text back and forth, for example from VS code to ChatGPT
• Efficiency: Typically I need to instruct the GPT with a lot of context upfront which is time consuming. 

What I like

• ChatGPT for me is a companion which takes away a lot of the boring work, like typing the actual code. It makes me faster in building things.
• I can truly focus on solving problems. ChatGPT helped me several times to build prototypes for our new product to explore new approaches. I can do that now myself very quickly and make much faster iterations.
• ChatGPT enables me to write code which I can throw away immediately if the idea was not good, because it’s so simple to create.
• ChatGPT is a valuable resource for debugging and handling repetitive tasks.
• It also aids in refining and enhancing my written content.

I'm still very concerned as the mentioned points above are still valid, and the speed of innovation is rapid.