I'm in the beta and this hasn't been my experience at all.
Yes, if you treat Bing/ChatGPT like a smart AI friend who will hold interesting conversations with you, then you will be sorely disappointed. You can also easily trick it into saying ridiculous things.
But I've been using it to lookup technical information while working and it's been great. It does a good job of summarizing API docs and stackoverflow posts, and even gives me snippets of code. I had it generate Python scripts to do simple tasks. Sure, it's not always accurate - but it's saved me time and I find it at least complementary to Google.
So it's a tool. Fairly immature at the moment but very useful.
> It does a good job of summarizing API docs and stackoverflow posts, and even gives me snippets of code. I had it generate Python scripts to do simple tasks.
That's because these are highly uniform, formulaic and are highly constrained both linguistically and conceptually.
It's basically doing (incredibly sophisticated) copying and pasting.
Try asking it to multiply two random five digit numbers. When it gets it wrong, ask it to explain how it did it. Then tell it it's wrong, and watch it generate another explanation, probably with the same erroneous answer. It will keep generating erroneous explanations for the wrong answer.
Knowing that the bot will confidently present fabricated information, how can you trust that the summarizations and code snippets are correct as presented?
Yes, if you treat Bing/ChatGPT like a smart AI friend who will hold interesting conversations with you, then you will be sorely disappointed. You can also easily trick it into saying ridiculous things.
But I've been using it to lookup technical information while working and it's been great. It does a good job of summarizing API docs and stackoverflow posts, and even gives me snippets of code. I had it generate Python scripts to do simple tasks. Sure, it's not always accurate - but it's saved me time and I find it at least complementary to Google.
So it's a tool. Fairly immature at the moment but very useful.