About as killer as that twitter clone that was in the news for a minute after forcing people to use it and immediately losing 90% of the captive audience..
They have been losing users. Summer is here, school is out, the kids are back in reality for the moment and apparently when they aren't busy plagiarizing homework the interest is very limited.
It might not be a killer app for you, but it's a killer app for me as an engineer, and I'm definitely not alone.
To give a concrete example, I used it to write and test a VSCode extension that provides autocomplete and type-checking for environment variables in 46 programming languages[1]. It was the first VSCode extension I've written and I have zero experience in the majority of those languages. The whole project took a little over a week. Without ChatGPT, it would have taken months to add support for so many languages.
lol, now who’s demented? Everyone I know uses it. It even diagnosed a problem with my pool filter among dozens of other uses I find for it. I like it and use it more than Google and stack overflow now. Losing the school crowd for the summer isn’t the beginning of the end, it just means there’s a cohort that doesn’t need it as much for a few months while they’re out having fun instead of stuck inside writing papers and doing math problems.
It is great that everyone you know uses it but the traffic to ChatGPT is decreasing and has been for over two months now. If pointing this fact out makes me demented consider that perhaps you are emotionally invested in this new toy/brand.
I guess we can wait and see what kind of usage trends will emerge long term. My anecdotal evidence (which is not worth much, same as yours) is that many normies tried it a few times and it was a topic of conversation but is no longer mentioned much.
> the traffic to ChatGPT is decreasing and has been for over two months now
This seems entirely unsurprising, and isn’t by itself enough to support your general thesis.
Interacting with these LLMs was extremely novel for most people when the tech first dropped, and those earlier months were the peak of the viral growth/expansion into public awareness.
As the novelty dies down, it’s not surprising that there would be less traffic. Early on, I had all sorts of ridiculous conversations just to see what would happen. Now, I only use it when I have some task in mind.
That transition points to this being the opposite of a toy - after the fun dies down, the real work begins.
> My anecdotal evidence…is that many normies tried it a few times and it was a topic of conversation but is no longer mentioned much.
This has not been my experience at all. Most non-technical folks I know who are interested in ChatGPT see value in its ability to expand their technical capabilities/knowledge.
People who are motivated to learn will continue to use this to their advantage.
If some subset of that population has no such interest, this has no bearing on the usefulness of the tech, nor is it representative of the population.
And even if the “normie” population (this is pretty reductive…) abandons it entirely, this again says nothing about the value/utility of LLMs, and hints at a product/market fit issue.
We don’t say programming languages are useless because they’re not adopted by the general public.
> Early on, I had all sorts of ridiculous conversations just to see what would happen. [...] That transition points to this being the opposite of a toy - after the fun dies down, the real work begins.
The "intelligence" behind it is too unpredictable to be reliable for work, and using it for fun is about as amusing as emailing HR.
> The "intelligence" behind it is too unpredictable to be reliable for work
This highly depends on the kind of work you’re doing. It’s great as a starting point for exploratory learning, helpful for some coding tasks, and useful for summarizing text.
As I work on a writing project that benefits from all of these use cases, it’s a good tool.
Not so great if you’re trying to write legal briefs.
> using it for fun is about as amusing as emailing HR
All due respect, but you’re either doing it wrong, or you’ve encountered some hilarious HR departments.
Ask it to speak in cockney as an 18th century barker trying to convince you to buy a lame horse or to continue the conversation in brolish as though you were two surfer dudes sitting on the beach and then just ask it anything you want like “explain modern monetary theory”. If you enjoy fiction then get it to help world build a new setting and then act out a scene with you playing one character and it playing the rest.
To get it to stay in character use the custom instructions feature to set the requirements.
ChatGPT itself is a killer app.