Matthew Mandel

ChatGPT is incredible. It’s only the first iteration of a consumer LLM product, and I already use it everyday. Ordinary internet tools like search and wikipedia are still best for quickly finding a fact or going deep on researching something, but until ChatGPT’s release, I hadn’t realized their inadequacy for grokking concepts. There’s no guarantee that a Wikipedia page summarizing a concept will explain it with the context that’s most relevant to what I’m doing or in a way that answers my most pressing questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, obviously excels at adapting to the context and questions I have. The stack of googling a topic, hitting an unfamiliar concept, getting the rundown from ChatGPT, and then going back to search with greater understanding is so powerful, it’s hard to imagine trying to learn about something without ChatGPT in the loop.

… which is insane! ChatGPT didn’t exist a year ago, and now I totally take it for granted and only really recognize it as a novel tool when it’s not working how I want. Of course it has to be this way — no one would get anything done if we were constantly marveling at all the incredible innovations our ordinary functioning depends on. But, man, have we built some cool stuff