I have an uncle who is an attorney in X state. I had him try, using GPT4, a bunch of prompts about X state law in his specialty and the rate was of hallucination was much higher than 1 in 6. Probably half or more were incorrect. Often the answers would be correct for other states, but not for X state. Alternatively, they were correct for X state at a certain point in time, but no longer are.
I'm Gen-Z and talking to a human representative of a company makes me much more confident that something will happen as a result of my efforts (though still not certain).
I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasing office when I showed up at the scheduled time. Came back later and eventually found somebody - they had not seen anything I'd done with the bot.
Software for small businesses and local governments is often really bad and I'd much prefer to make sure a person knows what I'm trying to get accomplished.
When I was searching for apartments every complex had the same AI program for scheduling. It was horrible.
I got to talk to one of the leasing managers at one of the viewings and I told him it made them seem cheaper, not more tech-savvy. He told me they had spent millions of dollars on it.
Crazy. If they won't let me speak to a person I'd still much prefer just having a generic click-your-timeslot web app than waste time talking to a bot. And for millions of dollars they could just hire a human for a decade or more...
There seems to be a semi-infinite market for garbage software sold to landlords. At my current place I need an account to unlock my door, a different account to open the garage door (because the garage is managed by a third party), an account to reserve the elevator for move in day (which tried to up sell me moving services), an account to get sent my water bill which charges me $15 a month for the privilege (I don't pay me bill though this service, just have it emailed to me) , an account to pay rent and and an account to submit maintenance requests. Part of the trick seems to be to offload the costs onto the tenets who have no choice, but I'm sure our landlord is paying a good chunk for some of these.
If you have minimal to zero scruples, this seems to be an easy market to make a start up in. Landlords will buy anything!
Don't forget the account to open shared mailboxes for packages. "Luxor" for me. It actually works so I don't mind much but I hadn't really considered how much extra rent all the apps might be costing me.
Had the same thing happen for a town home I was interested in buying. Went through their online scheduling app. Got email confirmation with agent's name, but no phone number. Got another confirmation day of. Didn't think anything was amiss. Go out to building, wait for 20 mins and leave after agent was a no-show, no-call.
I called their office and after 20 minutes of trying to go around their obnoxious automated phone menu's I finally got someone who informed me who said they don't use THAT app any more to schedule appointments I need to use their NEW app and sent me a totally different app link in an email. I told them they are probably losing a ton of business because very clearly the OTHER app is still very much out in the wild and still very much being used.
I went with a different company and had much better luck.
Yup... Firefox, Kagi, & Protonmail get me away from the worst of it but YouTube doesn't really have a good competitor and other people using things like Google Forms (whatever the surveys are called) sometimes ends up forcing me to log into a Google account or have certain features locked out.
Similar experience using GPT4 for help with Apple's Accessibility API. I wanted to do some non-happy-path things and it kept looping between solutions that failed to satisfy at least one of a handful of requirements that I had, and in ways that I couldn't combine the different "solutions" to meet all the requirements.
I was eventually able to figure it out with the help of some early 2010s blog posts. Sadly I didn't test giving it that context and having it attempt to find a solution again (and this was before web browsing was integrated with the web app).
More of an issue than it not knowing enough to fulfill my request (it was pretty obscure so I didn't necessarily expect that it would be able to) was that it didn't mind emitting solutions that failed to meet the requirements. "I don't know how to do that" would've been a much preferred answer.
This seems an important failure mode to me. I too have noticed gpt4 looping between a few different failure cases, in my case it was state transitions in js code. Explaining to it what it did wrong didn't help.
Yeah I really don't understand why research is still being published that uses GPT3.5 rather than GPT4 or both models. ~500 programming questions is maybe a few bucks on the API?
I think if the average person was made aware of the hidden costs in free services, and alternatives to them, that far less people would pick the free services. Imagine browsers were forced to present multiple default search engine options with a list of what data they collect and their price point. It might look something like this:
Google
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Data collected: All of it.
Uses it for: Whatever they want. Advertising, sells to your insurance company, sells to the government, trains AI models.
Price: Free
Kagi
----
Data collected: Your signup email
Uses it for: Giving it to the government if legally mandated
Price: $10/mo
I think a large double digit percentage of average people (in countries where $10/mo is cheap at least) would not choose Google. Maybe I'm being too optimistic though.
Among the people I've discussed recent AI with that aren't in tech, almost everyone is very uneasy about it. Some of them use it, and all of them recognize it as potentially useful, but almost everyone is more concerned than excited. Seems like surveys back my personal experience:
Maybe try looking for Clojure jobs? They aren't super common but are a lot more so than any other lisps or functional languages that I'm aware of (except maybe Scala).
They might occupy more space but I still think most people would opt to live X miles from the center of a wind/solar farm than a coal plant. Mildly bad aesthetics vs breathing in heavy metals...
