When they first launched the bing AI powered by GPT I used it for everything, then it became pretty clear they nerfed it and I've been waiting for a competitor to catch up. Bard's gotten a little better, but it hallucinates way worse still, making up answers.

I'm secretly hoping for one of these open-source projects like Llama 2 or Orca to lead to a totally unrestricted chatbot even if it's short-lived

I wouldn't be surprised if it is getting worse. It's not "real" intelligence that "understands" your questions, and unlike more targeted solutions like GitHub copilot they don't have a strong use-case focus that can guide their progress.

But I think it's also that people are coming to terms with what ChatGPT actually can and more importantly cannot do. It's crazy sometimes to hear what the average person thinks the current iteration of AI's is capable of.

Yep, definitely. I have a plus subscription, and stuff that was easy for it just a few months ago now seems to take several back-and-forths to barely approach similar results.

Science content is where I noticed the most degradation. It just stares at me using blank “it’s not in my training data” answers to questions that used to have comprehensive responses a while ago.

I think they’re scaling down the models to make them cheaper to run?

Yeah I just cancelled my plus sub because it's not valuable to me anymore. It feels nearly as bad as 3.5 at times, and having to go back and forth with it on a 25 message per 3 hour budget is extremely stupid.

A month ago, as a man working in IT and graphic design I was getting the "ai is going to replace you" every day and I'm loving the ai decline headlines this week.

Was it ever good?

Yes. Get ready for the advent of REAL, paid models. Gotta make the free ones stupid first.