I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".

I’ve heard this recently too.

It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.

I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.

Are you sure they were using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT? I have noticed many kids now use chat to refer to the collective audience/chat participants, and then gets used rhetorically even when no literal chatroom exists. A streamer says things like “Chat, what do you think?” or “Chat, are we cooked?” That usage has spread well beyond literal livestream chats, particularly among younger people.

This has been a thing well before chat.com even among engineers at our company.

Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.

Dhamesh Shah (Hubspot founder) grabbed chat.com and then in late 2024 sold to openai

https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1854307883304792294

I've heard people affectionately call ChatGPT 'chatty'

Just redirects to chatgpt.com

Surely the way streamers talk to "chat"? I've never heard anyone call ChatGPT "chat".

This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.

In general you can't take anyone whose job is to opine too seriously. When you're not familiar with what they're talking about, they make it sound reasonable and convincing. It's their skill after all. But now and then they talk about some topic you understand and care deeply about, and realize they're just repeating the talking points some staffer prepared for them shortly before. Most recently it happened to me with John Oliver talking about housing, reading from the standard left-NIMBY bingo card. I like him as a comedian, still.

i think the spread of youtube shorts and tiktoks is the reason for this. In around a minute, an expert provides a quick summary (talking points) in a digestible format that the person fully understands, but of course, no details or caveats etc are provided. Because this person now is able to understand that content, they conflate that understanding to an much broader understanding. This is even in areas they should know more, like the current geo-political or trade conflicts

edit : is there a name for what I am describing, different from the Gell-man amnesia? ( which assumes experts?).

Its fine if he trusts the right experts.

And its not really hard to at least understand one point: We are putting the most amount of money ever into compute and the smartest people on the planet on one topic: AGI and we see progress every month.

If you don't take this serious, even if we hit a hard plateu very fast (not seeing one at all) you are ignorant as hell.

You don't go to bed without a worry in the world if you have a wildfire 20km away you can see. You would also not see it as a waste to be awake and aware and alert while seeing were it moves.

The timeline thing though, its ranges right? But if you hear about the same or similiar timelines across different independent people, they just might have seen things in frontierlabs you can't.

Btw. AI feels complelty different if you have a lot more tokens available to you than if you wait or constantly run into token limits or if you skip fable level because you can't /wont afford it.

Imagine sitting in Anthropic or OpenAI and having the best moodel doing all the work for you vs. sometimes playing with it a little bit.

Is this unique to AI? I feel like something changed with social media becoming kinda ubiquitous. Like everyone suddenly felt the need to have an opinion on every thing. And on lots of divisive topics the fact you might not have an opinion could have you face criticism for not caring and/or being on the "other" side to whatever position your accuser/interrogator is.

I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.

You don't have to "be like" anyone but yourself. You should, however, be aware of what you know and more importantly what you do not know.

Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge. How many languages do you know? Do you know the styles of Renaissance painters? Slept with super-model? Ever seen an elephant stampede? Meditated by the Ganges? Read thousands of stories? Climbed a mountain so high you need Oxygen? Tech stuff is so boring.

    > I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do

well probably even your friends know a lot more than "most people". But walk into a random town and ask a random person and I'd wager they'll be about at what I described, on average.

Wait, isn't it ChatGBD?

How would I be able to help do something like that?

You're one of those people who needs to expand their worldview, then.

I live in a progressive city in North Carolina and constantly find that when people have never heard of them things that every HN reader (and probably every Bay Area resident, I dunno) would know about. Bubbles are real.

You're grossly overestimating how many people care about big companies, at least on a daily basis. Most people don't invest in anything and will never get a job at a big American company. They do know about ChatGPT but that doesn't mean they know who makes it.

go ask 100 random people across the world and I bet less than 20 will know both those company names.

I live in Raleigh, NC and it’s a going joke the amount of travelers or newcomers who refer to the area as RDU (the Raleigh/Durham airport code). I guess it’s a common problem elsewhere.

Both are wrong. It's called "the city".

I'm a pretty seasoned software dev, but I've also kept the frontier AI race at arms length from myself. I run Claude alongside my day to day workflow but don't really get overly concerned about the latest and greatest models, as I'm not leaning on it to do my job for me I suppose.

In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.

Everyone calls it chat. I am technical and even I’ve come around to calling it that because that is what everyone, including very technical people, call the product.

Even Shingy. Ia he really the standard for explaining tech to normies? Ouch.

Shingy, from “Everybody in the club getting Tipsy”?

I didn't know who Shingy was. He looks like Jensen Huang's subconscious.

Over 90% of humanity and that's probably still underestimating it. Most people cannot point on a map where they live. Many people think 'chat' is conscious and being locked up by evil humans: many think 'chat' is a god or aliens communicating with us. And getting worse as people cannot make a sandwich without asking 'chat', let alone learn anything worthwhile.

I think you are wrong, but of course it's just a guess.