ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm since its launch in November. It has already disrupted the education sector, helping students write essays and pass exams. The bot is also very adept at writing job application cover letters, lines of code, and insider articles.
But OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman asserted in a podcast with NYT that its company’s ChatGPT tool is a “horrible product,” which comes as a big surprise. He highlighted a few errors that the tool made and the issues that are associated with it.
“People are really just going to a site that sometimes works and sometimes is down,” Altman said on the New York Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork,” citing ChatGPT’s frequent error messages.
“They’re typing in something, they’re trying until they get it right, and then they’re copying that answer and going to paste it in somewhere else — and then going back and trying to integrate that with search results or their other workflows,” he added, seeming to reference the product’s simplistic design.
However, ChatGPT is also prone to breaking down; often telling users it is currently at capacity or unexpectedly rejecting their queries. Altman acknowledged that ChatGPT’s AI technology is “cool, for sure”, but is also prone to malfunctioning.
Greg Brockman, another cofounder of OpenAI, recently said that launching ChatGPT in its current form was a last resort for the company after internal issues with beta testers. “None of us were that enamored by” ChatGPT. “None of us were like, ‘This is really useful.'”
Despite the so-called haphazard technology release, it became a viral sensation overnight: a week after its launch, ChatGPT had one million users, growing faster than Instagram and TikTok combined.
“It is cool, for sure,” Altman said. “And people really love it, which makes us very happy. But no one would say this was a great, well-integrated product yet,” adding that it’s more of a version “0.7” rather than a “1.0 version.”
The ChatGPT bot, which launched in November, has quickly become a viral sensation, disrupting the education field and helping students with their essays and exams. It was even praised by Bill Gates, saying it will “change our world”.
