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.
I need an agent who would set up DevOps for me. Then robots would definitely be the ones working hard, not humans.
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.
Or just sending an email.
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.
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.
Is just ordering them, not making them yet
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.
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.”
Okay but that’s not what easier means.
Easier would be to call the bakery or spending 10 minutes browsing their website, asking to cast, and checking out.
I don’t want to spend an hour on tasks that would normally take 10 minutes. My executive dysfunctions already make me good at doing that.
This might be a revolutionary idea, but what if they helped me do that take an hour in 10 minutes?
I’m just putting that idea out there totally for free in case any AI companies want to jump on that opportunity.
I don’t want to spend an hour on tasks that would normally take 10 minutes.
I don’t get it, do you think she spent an hour talking to ChatGPT to try and get it to order doughnuts?
It’s a starting point
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?
The AI willed those cupcakes into existence, why don’t you trust them?
It’s like the metaverse and NFT, you’re not supposed to think about how it works. Instead you just need to believe reality will magically reorganize to make it work.
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.
It really is a nightmare brewing. And they will hide behind excuses and keep it all opaque unless they are strongly regulated.
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 take me a few days and maybe buying a reference book and starting with hello world.
Did the AI gave you a starting point that would be very different from a bit of code someone submitted 10 years ago on stack exchange? Because in my experience, everything has already been asked and answered. This includes the most basic and naive stuff, and often I am very grateful for it, because, yeah, sometimes I need someone to guide me through the most basic stuff.
In fact, the AI needed that exact knowledge base and a bunch more to exist in the first place. It’s just vaguely competent at retrieving it.
Anyway, I didn’t say I had no experience, just the most minimal python experience. There are definitely a few quirks I had to learn (the data structures mostly), but for the rest is mostly finding the right method in the reference library, like you would in java.
