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Yes. I actually had a doomer crashout a few years ago when GPT3 hit the scene and they were claiming it could pass the bar exam, and my tech writer friend was expecting his entire profession to be rendered obsolete within a year.
Three years in, I've gotten used to the way the hype cycles are exaggerated.
But I still think there's a large chance that this tech ends up upending my life in ways I find terrible and existentially horrifying, if not ending all life as we know it. I still think it's the lamest sci-fi tech we could have gotten. I just don't expect it to (up)end society within the next 18 months and I basically ignore the new SMASHED BENCHMARKS SO STRONG AND GOOD AGI COMING OMG announcements.
There's clearly something very powerful with the tech and just as clearly a deranged funding and quasi-religious cult element to how people talk about the tech.
For an example, we have an enterprise version of Gemini at work. I can do things like feed it an Excel file with some info about customers, and have it search publicly available data to fill in contact info, business details, upcoming events, etc. That's pretty neat. I can also get help writing corporate slop emails to the proper corporate slop tone. But they also want this to be something my frontline employees can use to help with their actual job. I was assigned to figure it out and prepare our people to use it and after some investigation and experimentation my actual recommendation to my boss was that no one ranked below me should ever be allowed to use it for anything ever. I don't want to dox, but imagine that my first interaction was having Gemini eagerly offer to coach me through violating HIPAA requirements before underestimating our pricing structure by a factor of ten. I explained the error and it begged for forgiveness and then multiplied the original numbers by 20.
We're seeing the same thing from all major providers. It has seriously dampened management enthusiasm for anything more intense than automating LinkedIn posts.
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