[HN Gopher] New Capabilities for GPT-3: Edit and Insert
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       New Capabilities for GPT-3: Edit and Insert
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2022-03-15 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
        
       | drusepth wrote:
       | Really, really happy they're enabling the edits endpoint as a
       | free-to-use beta for now. In my experience, GPT-3 works really
       | well but is pretty prohibitively expensive unless you're
       | optimizing for profitable tasks. Offering even limited-time free
       | use (and unlimited tokens) is a nice nudge toward the "open" in
       | OpenAI.
       | 
       | Also, the edit/insert endpoints specifically should
       | hypothetically help a _lot_ with plot divergence, which has been
       | a huge problem trying to generate long-form works with standard
       | completions, even with top-down outline expansion strategies,
       | scene transition metadata, etc.
       | 
       | Excited to see what the millions of "AI word processors" that've
       | sprung up over the past year actually do with it, besides the
       | obvious.
        
       | minimaxir wrote:
       | I did a few nonscientific tests:
       | https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1503822287903985664
       | 
       | Both the edit endpoint (used in those tweets) and the insert
       | endpoint have mixed performance and tend to go off-the-rails
       | often, especially compared to the new "Instruct" models which do
       | a much better job, although expensive while these new endpoints
       | are in a free beta.
       | 
       | The coding endpoints are slightly better but a more narrow
       | domain.
       | 
       | In all cases I recommend looking at the docs for examples.
        
       | jarbus wrote:
       | Does anyone actually use Copilot for their work? I can't imagine
       | it's anywhere near as reliable as OpenAI claims. I'd imagine a
       | user would spend more time fixing mistakes or re-trying with
       | different queries than they'd actually save.
        
         | gavinray wrote:
         | Yeah. I thought the same thing at first, had it for ~2 months
         | in early access and never turned it on.
         | 
         | Now I can't live without it.
        
         | rictic wrote:
         | I use it all the time, it's significantly improved my
         | productivity.
         | 
         | It's a little like pair programming with an incredibly eager
         | junior developer who has read a lot of the documentation of
         | every popular API in the world. I need to review the code it
         | produces, but it's very fast, and its suggestions are usually
         | great.
         | 
         | It's annoying when I know exactly what I want to write, and
         | most helpful when I'm unsure (either because I'm trying things
         | out, or if I'm using a new API or a language I'm rusty at).
        
         | zoba wrote:
         | In my experience copilot is amazing.
         | 
         | It prompted the (joke) thought that perhaps it is making me
         | less productive because of how often I end up sitting back and
         | marveling at how amazing it is. I really can't believe how good
         | it is.
        
         | unwoundmouse wrote:
         | I use copilot, it's much more useful than you'd expect. Really
         | helpful for places where you would normally need to record a
         | small macro, copilot can infer the completions easily
        
         | powersnail wrote:
         | One thing that it's really good at is writing boilerplate-y
         | code. For example, web scrapers. It can even read the
         | function's name and deduce some proper variable names, or use
         | variable names to deduce whether I want a list of elements or
         | one element. Not 100% correct, of course, but good enough if
         | you treat it like an advanced snippet manager.
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | For boilerplate code, Copilot gets the job done.
         | 
         | But you need to set the right expectations that it is not
         | magic, which requires some tuning.
        
         | davidbarker wrote:
         | I've been using it every day for a few months (for
         | Typescript/React), and it still astounds me.
         | 
         | I can write a comment outlining what I want a function to do,
         | and 90% of the time it will generate the code I need (or very
         | close with a couple of small tweaks needed).
         | 
         | Coincidentally, my Stack Overflow visits have decreased by
         | approximately 90%.
        
         | IanCal wrote:
         | It really is surprisingly good. I use it.
         | 
         | It's quick to scan and ignore things that aren't right, and
         | it's either completely right or close enough that it definitely
         | feels like a timesaver.
         | 
         | The best parts are where it's doing something long-winded but
         | fairly straight forward (e.g. assigning variables). But it has
         | moments of shocking ability with more complex things.
        
         | drusepth wrote:
         | I've used it briefly in someone else's IDE (who swears by it)
         | and it blew me away. It pretty much removed ever having to
         | google syntax or snippets from SO in a language I wasn't
         | totally familiar with (python).
        
         | nyanpasu64 wrote:
         | Just wanted to have a less glowing counterpoint to the other
         | claims. I've used Copilot a bit, and found that the automatic
         | completion was frequently interrupting my train of thought,
         | making it harder to concentrate ("intrusive thoughts as a
         | service"). I preferred only triggering completions upon
         | pressing a keystroke, so I _choose_ when to take a shortcut and
         | ask to have code generated. I found it very helpful for
         | generating boilerplate code, and debug logging I shouldn 't
         | have to think too hard about. Also it sometimes gave me clever
         | ideas better than I thought of myself (like Rust code matching
         | on a HashMap's Entry). Nonetheless I felt uneasy because I
         | noticed myself getting too "lazy", not thinking about what code
         | I want written before asking for help.
         | 
         | In the end, aside from boilerplate, I spend most of my time in
         | Qt Creator (which doesn't have a Copilot plugin) rather than VS
         | Code, so I mostly stopped using Copilot anyway.
        
         | muzani wrote:
         | Personally using Codex, not Copilot, but similar engine.
         | 
         | It's really good for boilerplate. Things like TDD tests where
         | I'm just modifying a few parameters. You can get it to write
         | functions like "parse this DateTime object into a format like
         | Tuesday, 15 May 2020".
         | 
         | It's a useful lookup too. Like often I just want to extract a
         | variable from a List and would spend 15 mins looking up the
         | docs or sifting Stack Overflow. Codex is more faster and
         | accurate.
         | 
         | With GPT-3 it's garbage in, garbage out. You have to invest a
         | few days in learning the prompts that work.
        
         | jjwiseman wrote:
         | I use it constantly and hope I never have to code without it
         | (or something better) again. It does a good job writing the
         | kind of boring code I don't want to write, and it generally
         | seems to include fewer errors than I write in my first drafts
         | of code. More than once I ignored its suggestion and wrote my
         | own version, only to later realize its version was more correct
         | and efficient. It does a good (sometimes incredible) job of
         | even handling pretty specialized subject matter, and of using
         | the context of other code and comments you've written to
         | suggest exactly what you need next.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | > It does a good job writing the kind of boring code I don't
           | want to write (...)
           | 
           | If only we had programming languages that didn't force us to
           | write boring code in the first place ...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | At first I thought copilot would be pretty useless until I
         | actually tried it. It turns out that a lot of code is
         | boilerplate and the same simple patterns, even with
         | abstraction. Copilot is not particularly genius, but it fills
         | in simple patterns (e.g. do the same for the Y-axis that you
         | did for the X-axis), and autocompletes typical utility
         | functions (e.g. add 2 2d positions, shuffle an array,
         | setTimeout promise, etc. which I have to write functions for
         | because they are not in the JavaScript standard library.) These
         | may seem like odd scenarios but there are actually a lot of
         | them.
        
         | superasn wrote:
         | Big supporter of Copilot. I am still amazed how good it is and
         | I feel it's getting better and better. So much boilerplate code
         | gone. Also it really gives you a boost in confidence when the
         | A.I writes the same code you're thinking. I feel so lucky
         | having to see these amazing developments in A.I and V.R.
         | recently.
        
       | samwillis wrote:
       | I'm on the copilot wait list, super excited to give it a go.
       | Cheeky question, does anyone know of a way to get it sooner?
        
         | davidbarker wrote:
         | Try emailing the GitHub CEO. I did, regarding the Codespaces
         | waitlist, and he sent me three riddles to answer correctly
         | before I could get access.
         | 
         | (I realise this sounds like I'm making it up, but I promise
         | this is a real story. It was quite fun.)
        
       | Smaug123 wrote:
       | I find the autocompletion for "improve the runtime complexity of
       | the [Fibonacci] function" at the top excruciating. Surely Codex
       | has seen verbatim the two-argument form many times?
        
       | zackees wrote:
       | The open ai project CoPilot is just absolutely amazing. I would
       | say that it increases my productivity by 5x because it eliminates
       | a lot of going to stack overflow to find the answer.
        
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