You say “only” 6 months ago but it’s surprising to me just how quickly this time has passed.
I was a Reddit every day user pre-Lemmy. I happened to get linked to something there yesterday and saw all my sub’s “last visited” dates at 6 months. It’s crazy how easy it was to go cold turkey and I haven’t seen a need to go back.
Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don’t know if I would use the word “great”.
GPT-4… not really. Unless you’ve got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you’re not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the “average” person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the “basic” models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.
If you’re willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you’re basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.
Image generation tech has gone crazy over the past year and a half or so. At the speed it’s improving I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.
Here’s a paper from this year discussing text generation within images (it’s very possible these methods aren’t SOTA anymore – that’s how fast this field is moving): https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/WACV2023/html/Rodriguez_OCR-VQGAN_Taming_Text-Within-Image_Generation_WACV_2023_paper.html
They wouldn’t make these games if they didn’t work.
Part of their shtick is to get you to make any purchase at all. Then you might go on to spend hundreds! Or you might quit. But in some sense that’s also good because the plan was never for you to play for free.
Seems like you might have fallen victim to the Scunthorpe Problem. I’m sure you can guess what word they were trying to censor there…
If you click on the graph, it’ll turn into a data table showing ~48 hours worth of information. Is that what you’re looking for?