I don't think you understand the value proposition of chatgpt today. For context, I'm an expert too. And I had the same experience as you. When I asked it questions about my area of expertise, it gave me a lot of vague, mutually contradictory, nonsensical and wrong answers. The way I see it, ChatGPT is currently a B+ student at basically everything. It has broad knowledge of everything, but its missing deep knowledge. There are two aspects to that to think about: First, its only a B+ student. Its not an expert. It doesn't know as much about family law as a family lawyer. It doesn't know as much about cardiology as a cardiologist. It doesn't know as much about the rust borrow checker as I do. So LLMs can't (yet) replace senior engineers, specialist doctors, lawyers or 5 star chefs. When I get sick, I go to the doctor. But its also a B+ student at everything. It doesn't have depth, but it has more breadth of knowledge than any human who has ever lived. It knows more about cooking than I do. I asked it how to make crepes and the recipe it gave me was fantastic. It knows more about australian tax law than I do. It knows more about the american civil war than I do. It knows better than I do what kind of motor oil to buy for my car. Or the norms and taboos in posh british society. For this kind of thing, I don't need an expert. And lots of questions I have in life - maybe most questions - are like that! I brainstormed some software design with chatgpt voice mode the other day. I didn't need it to be an expert. I needed it to understand what I was saying and offer alternatives and make suggestions. It did great at that. The expert (me) was already in the room. But I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of every single popular library in cargo. ChatGPT can provide that. After talking for awhile, I asked it to write example code using some popular rust crates to solve the problem we'd been talking about. I didn't use any of its code directly, but that saved me a massive amount of time getting started with my project. You're right in a way. If you're thinking of chatgpt as an all knowing expert, it certainly won't deliver that (at least not today). But the mistake is thinking its useless as a result of its lack of expertise. There's thousands and thousands of tasks where "broad knowledge, available in your pocket" is valuable already. If you can't think of ways to take advantage of what it already delivers, well, pity for you.
- Text
- verbatim
- Model
- ChatGPT
- Source
- Hacker News ↗
- Published
- 2024-10
- Added
- 2026-09-05