OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent on Thursday, its latest effort in the industry-wide pursuit to turn AI into a profitable enterprise—not just one that eats investors’ billions. In its announcement blog, OpenAI says its Agent “can now do work for you using its own computer,” but CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
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OpenAI research lead Lisa Fulford told Wired that she used Agent to order “a lot of cupcakes,” which took the tool about an hour, because she was very specific about the cupcakes.
Man, remember all the custom cupcake bakers who were clamoring for an AI to take their craft?
Me neither. Billionaires are a scourge upon society.
I think in some ways Generative AI is very emblematic of the current state of software development. Projects are approached from the outset with the driving question being, “how can we make money materialize out of thin air?” Not, “What kind of problems are we trying to solve?” Or, “Why would someone pay for this?”
The last several projects I’ve worked on have been solutions in search of a problem. Hyped up products that made executives see dollar signs but didn’t actually produce any because they failed to provide any tangible value.
For anyone wondering what the fuck that title meant:
OpenAI research lead Lisa Fulford told Wired that she used Agent to order “a lot of cupcakes,” which took the tool about an hour, because she was very specific about the cupcakes.
“It was easier than me doing it myself,” Fulford said, “because I didn’t want to do it.”
I’m still wondering. Like did it call up a bakery and place an order? Or go online? I know it didn’t actually make the cupcakes itself.
But I’m not sure that spending an hour trying to wrangle ChatGPT into getting your cupcakes is any faster or easier than placing the order yourself.
The article also noticeably omits what happened after. Were the cupcakes made, and did they match what she wanted?
Also did baking the cupcakes use more or less energy than ChatGPT used to order them?
I’m guessing it’s the AI agent stuff. Which at the moment is literally just automating browsing through a website.
Apparently there will be APIs to do this in the future. Ironically, AI wouldn’t even be needed for that to be useful.
With how terrible Google Search has become, I think I’m on Lisa’s side this time.
unfortunately any ai service is going to make things worse. right now we can discover and choose. with search and browsing dead, ai provider will shove the product giving them the highest cut aka most garbage or snake oil products.
even today targeted advertising for poor people is filled with betting, lottery & poker game. similarly elder people are primarily shown ads of miracle cure for chronic illness and scammy religious crap.
edit: switch to kagi. its paid but well worth it. searchXNG is also a good alternative if you have got time for hosting it urself.
CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
But that doesn’t prevent his profit motive from consuming untold amounts of electricity to shove this into your face. They know what they’re doing. They know their product is used primarily to generate spam, and secondarily is designed to form addictive faux-relationships with their users.
Burn in hell. Actually, given the direction this is all going, we will all be burning in hell within generations.
And produced with a shit ton of copyright violations, etc. Just about everything is immoral about it.
So instead of working on fixing an existing problem for anybody, they’re solving a new problem for nobody. Let them eat cupcakes, I guess.
I spent maybe 90 minutes trying to get ChatGPT to write me a fucking AppleScript or bash to copy all calendar events from a source calendar to a destination. That shit does not work.
It won’t do that well. What you have to do is ask it to help you leverage your existing development skills in an unfamiliar domain. I used it to help me write a python program to authenticate, pull and filter data from a GCP firestore database and create an XLSX with summary and detail sheets.
I’ve never used Python before in my life. It took me about 4 hours. Of course I’ve been doing that sort of thing in Java for many years. Turned out I wrote that faster in Python than I could in Java. Configuring the connection to that database in Python was so simple compared to Java.
The stuff it wrote was sometimes incomplete or wrong in subtle ways, but I could see the bits that didn’t make sense which helped me focus on those things and ask better questions to help me figure it out. I think the last hour was just me tweaking stuff by myself because I didn’t need help with it by that point.
I needed about 30 minutes to do a python application from scratch that took linear JSON data files, merged them and presented them as a tree in a GUI.
Before that I had barely done anything in python, basically could do a basic function declaration with a simple operation and nothing else. I even didn’t have a lot of experience with UI at all.
But like you I had experience with java and such, and those skills transfer. All it took was searching basic syntax/related code examples and required library imports. And I mean basic, search engine search, not AI answers.
All I’m saying is, I really don’t think AI is providing anything a lot more efficient than doing a good old crawl through API docs and stack overflow. So the fact it’s using tremendous amounts of resources to maybe achieve a 10% efficiency boost is bothering me a lot.
If that was a 10% boost for you and you could’ve done it in 33 minutes without AI or experience, then my imposter syndrome has been right all along!
I’d bet that would’ve taken me a few days and maybe buying a reference book and starting with hello world.
Anyone who already knows another programming language but has never used python in their life can write a simple python app quickly, regardless
No you can’t if you don’t know the libraries. Python is entirely dependent on what libraries you include. If you don’t know what you need you can’t do shit.
No you can’t if you don’t know the libraries
IDE.
Python is entirely dependent on what libraries you include
??
If you don’t know what you need you can’t do shit.
IDE.
The problems you propose in your comment are not only greatly exaggerated but already been solved for decades using conventional tools AND apply to literally all languages, having nothing at all to do with python. Good try! My statement holds true.
Maybe your assumption is that you’re in a cave writing code in pencil on paper, but that’s not a typical working condition. If you have access to Claude to use as a crutch, then you have access to search for an available python library and read some “Getting Started” paragraphs.
Seriously, if the only real value that AI provides is “you don’t need to know the libraries you’re using” 💀 that’s not quite as strong of an argument as you think it is lmaooo “knowing the libraries” isn’t exactly an existing challenge or software engineering problem that people struggle with…
In a cave with pen and paper is nearly what I learned with. I learned with the run time, msdn, notepad and the cmd line. And yes you do end up in many situations where you simply don’t have or can’t use a full on ide everytime. Sounds like you’ve never really left your comfort zones and stuck your neck out in some tech you don’t understand quite yet. Or worked in areas under strict software controls.
It’s telling that you’re focused on personal assumptions instead of addressing the argument
What was the argument. Use an IDE which was the proposed answer for most of my objections. Which i did address.
So much for the internet. We somehow managed to turn one of humanity’s greatest achievements into a hateful echo chamber we use for warfare first and then into a blackbox where inefficient AI agents communicate with each other in the most inefficient way so the planet can cook us alive even faster. God forbid just calling up a bakery to order some cupcakes.
What’s more high stakes than a complicated cupcake order?
An order for a weed smoking cow.
