“No one would say this was a great, well-integrated product yet.”
Downtime and Misinformation
OpenAI’s blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT is really great at coming up with creative and believable-sounding answers to pretty much any prompt you can come up with.
But it’s also extremely good at coming up with outright lies and misinformation, making its use case far more limited than it could be.
Then there’s the fact that making use of the tool can still be a confusing mess, requiring users to refine their prompts in a process that can end up taking longer than simply coming up with the required text oneself.
ChatGPT is also experiencing a lot of downtime these days, making the process even more irritating.
Horrible Product
OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman is well aware of the tool’s shortcomings, calling it a “horrible product” during a recent episode of the New York Times tech podcast “Hard Fork.”
“People are really just going to a site that sometimes works and sometimes is down,” Altman said during the interview, pointing out the many error messages users have been getting.
“They’re typing in something, they’re trying until they get it right, and then they’re copying that answer and going to paste it in somewhere else — and then going back and trying to integrate that with search results or their other workflows,” he argued.
“It is cool, for sure,” Altman said. “And people really love it, which makes us very happy. But no one would say this was a great, well-integrated product yet,” adding that it’s more of a version “0.7” rather than a “1.0 version.”
Growth Spurt
Fellow OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman aligned with Altman’s sentiments during an interview with Forbes earlier this month, saying that “None of us were that enamored by” ChatGPT. “None of us were like, ‘This is really useful.'”
Its shortcomings didn’t stop ChatGPT from becoming a massive success. In fact, by some accounts, it’s the fastest-growing app in human history, boasting over 100 million active monthly users in just two months.
While it certainly has managed to upend the AI industry and will likely leave a lasting mark on the way we use the internet on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget that ChatGPT, at least as it stands right now, is an inherently deeply flawed piece of tech — a mere glimpse of a still distant future.
READ MORE: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT is ‘cool,’ but it’s a ‘horrible product’ [Insider]
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