What an understatement. It has me thinking „man, fuck this“ on the daily.
Just today it spontaneously lost an entire 20-30 minutes long thread and it was far from the first time. It basically does it any time you interrupt it in any way. It’s straight up data loss.
It’s kind of a typical Google product in that it feels more like a tech demo than a product.
It has theoretically great tech. I particularly like the idea of voice mode, but it’s noticeably glitchy, breaks spontaneously often and keeps asking annoying questions which you can’t make it stop.
And the UI lack of polish shows up freshly every time a new feature lands too - the "branch in new chat" feature is really finicky still, getting stuck in an unusable state if you twitch your eyebrows at wrong moment.
Copilot Chat has been perfect in this respect. It's currently GPT 5.0, moving to 5.1 over the next month or so, but at least I've never lost an (even old) conversation since those reside in an Exchange mailbox.
I use a modeling software called Rhino on wine on Linux. In the past, there was an incident where I had to copy an obscure dll that couldn't be delivered by wine or winetricks from a working Windows installation to get something to work. I did so and it worked. (As I recall this was a temporary issue, and was patched in the next release of wine.)
I hate the wine standard file picker, it has always been a persistent issue with Rhino3d. So I keep banging my head on trying to get it to either perform better or make a replacement. Every few months I'll get fed up and have a minute to kill, so I'll see if some new approach works. This time, ChatGPT told me to copy two dll's from a working windows installation to the System folder. Having precedent that this can work, I did.
Anyway, it borked startup completely and it took like an hour to recover. What I didn't consider - and I really, really should have - was that these were dll's that were ALREADY IN the system directory, and I was overwriting the good ones with values already reflecting my system with completely foreign ones.
And that's the critical difference - the obscure dll that made the system work that one time was because of something missing. This time was overwriting extant good ones.
But the fact that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success made me very wary of the harm it could cause.
> ...that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success...
Since you're using other models instead, do you believe they cannot give similarly stupid ideas?
Until you queried I had forgotten to mention that the same day I was trying to work out a Linux system display issue and it very confidently suggested to remove a package and all its dependencies, which would have removed all my video drivers. On reading the output of the autoremove command I pointed out that it had done this, and the model spat out an "apology" and owned up to ** the damage it would have wreaked.
** It can't "apologize" for or "own up" to anything, it can just output those words. So I hope you'll excuse the anthropomorphization.