Is it just me or ChatGPT's hype is way overblown?

In a way yes, some people are ascribing to these technologies powers they don't actually have. LLMs are good at generating text but they are not AI and AGI is not coming anytime soon.

I think we all need a break from "hype" cycles in general. Its become pervasive in every space, and IMO it correlates with how we consume and receive "information". News/posts on this subject have felt unique in how much attention it's gotten, I feel like a lot of it comes from lack of understanding about the technology from many posts especially those from "mainstream" media outlets with limited tech knowledge in general. The news cycle has absolutely turned "AI" into a marketing buzzword and feels hyperfocused on the negative. I'd say do a bit more research if your interested, no need to interact with it if you don't want to. My feeling on LLMs in general is relative to their use cases. LLM's are powerful tools for which can be useful/helpful and unfortunately can and will be leveraged in the opposite way. That said, what new tech advancement which has had a tenable and rapid influence on society hasn't had its speculative doom cycle. It will be a part of our lives, and in some ways has been for longer than many realize, I'm trying to educate myself more as well, there is definitely way too much bs to filter as is.

Hype has become culturally embedded into the tech world unfortunately. There are whole ecosystems incentivized to hype the next new wave of whatever in hope of monetary or other gain. After this there will be something else so best to practice maintaining a reasonable perspective on tech advancements. I agree its annoying but am trying to use it as a tool where its useful.

I was like you, until I actually tried it. It’s not overblown, believe me.

Here is the new tech obelisk. Come on, time to worship. Look, the tech influencers are building apps with the GimP-Tech-Four. You have to feed data to the obelisk, come on, it won't hurt.

I think it is not, because ChatGPT has immediate widespread practical utility already

And this is just starting, most businesses are now trying figure out how can they use it, and monetize it

Crypto, NFTs, 5G, metaverse, AR, VR... are yet to prove their widespread high productivity increase

Yes, as of writing this comment there are 3 GPT related posts on the front page. GPT is one of the big thing happened in the AI industry but the hype giving me crypto vibes.

From my dabblings in interacting with ChatGPT and Bard, I think it marks a very important leap forward in technology. But not in any kind of "intelligence" as we'd generally understand it.

After using any of these chatbots for a while you realise that there is no real "intelligence" there. What there is, is a very impressive text-parsing engine combined with a very efficient search facility. But there's no nuance to the replies you get, no "personal" [or machine] opinion. It's just rapidly collated [and often tortuously balanced] data, quickly presented and nicely formatted.

The thing that suprised me most about ChatGPT et al is just how quickly everyone seemed to have one on offer. It seemed like one week we were all shaking our heads at the moronic stupidity of Alexa / Siri / etc.... and the next we had all these superficially much more intelligent and responsive AI chatbots to talk to.

Most of the "AI Powered" sites and applications that are springing up everywhere are based on ChatGPT [and I presume will be based on Bard too in future]. So are all essentially sharing the same dataset and programming biases.

One concern I have about this whole development is that it even further reduces the access to alternate views and non-mainstream controversial opinions. Microsoft has already integrated ChatGPT into Bing and I've been using standalone ChatGPT as a sort of pseudo search engine for a while now, as it's really handy for the kind of questions that you just want a quick answer to, without having to pick through a list of search results.

I do worry that, in future, pretty much all search on the web will take this form and these AIs will become the gatekeepers to knowledge in an even more prescriptive way than the current search giants are. I'm very uneasy about a future where our access the sum total of human knowledge and opinion is pre-filtered through the political and social biases of a clutch of pro-Western, pro-Capitalist west coast USA billionaires.