H: Huge demand has caused the site to crash
A: All users will have to wait
T: Time is needed for the servers to catch up
G: Go grab a coffee and check back soon
P: Patience is key in this situation
T: Trust that the team is working hard to fix it up
I am still in Nairobi, Kenya, getting to know the lay of the land and team here, as well as setting up my new computer; meanwhile, OpenAI ChatGPT is making global waves and first explorative steps are being made to use it with the Revit API:
My colleagues warn me of the dangers of moving around freely here, so I am being careful. Not a single bad experience so far, though. All good. Lots of security all around, such as security checks entering every building. The people I meet in the street are either neutral or friendly, though, and I feel happy and safe.
So far, besides working, I went for a hike to Mount Longonot on Saturday and took a long walk into the centre of town on a Sunday; however, most things were closed and the city was pretty empty with very little going on that day.
Here are my pictures in and around Nairobi so far.
ChatGPT is currently a very hot topic among techies, so I created an account and checked it out:
Jeremy: can you speak swahili?
Huna! Naunga mkono nyumbani kwako. Samahani, sijawahi kusoma Swahili. Je, unaweza kusema kwa Kiingereza?
Jeremy: oh dear. i am afraid i cannot.
Asante sana. Inawezekana kukutumia lugha ya Kiingereza katika mazungumzo yetu. Kwamba ni ajabu kwa sababu Swahili ni lugha nne ya makundi ya Bantu na inatumika sana katika Afrika Mashariki. Kama una nia njema, unaweza kusoma zaidi kuhusu Swahili kupitia tovuti za mtandao.
Jeremy: i wish i could.
Kama unahitaji msaada zaidi, basi wasiliana nami. Napenda kusaidia katika mambo yanayohusiana na lugha za Afrika.
Jeremy: can you translate all that you said for me, please?
Sure! Here's my previous response translated into English: "Hello! I extend my hand to your home. Sorry, I haven't read Swahili. Well, can you speak English? Thank you very much. It is possible to use the English language in our conversation. It is strange because Swahili is one of the four languages of the Bantu group and is widely used in East Africa. If you are interested, you can learn more about Swahili through websites. If you need more help, please contact me. I like to help with things related to African languages."
I was surprised how much sense that made. Since some people I talk with make less sense, I would say the Turing test is passed.
Another interesting example was brought by Raphaël Millière @raphaelmilliere on twitter, triggering a lot of response and discussion:
I asked ChatGPT to rewrite Bohemian Rhapsody to be about the life of a postdoc, and the output was flawless...
Check out the full thread with comments for details.
The obvious next step for this community is to try out its abilities helping with Revit API questions. My colleague Jacob Small tried that out and documented his steps on twitter:
__revit__ also hasn't been defined. No longer a user guided chat though.You need to look at the original thread including all the screen snapshots to see the details of what he's talking about.
Bird Tools also tried out and documented using ChatGPT for Revit API in a LinkedIn post, with many more interesting comments.
Last but not least concerning the Revit API, our active contributor Chuong Ho started exploring the possibility to integrate ChaGPT interactively into Revit. Here are the first few comments on that effort, with many more following since then:
For an example beyond the Revit API where ChatGPT really excels and surpasses all expectations, check out my namesake Jeremy Pinto's 20-minute AI training implementation article on teaching ChatGPT about the birds and the bees.
Leon Furze takes his analysis one step further and explores aspects of writing essays, disrupting education, ChatGPT limitations and improvement possibilities in his article on prompt whispering: getting better results from ChatGPT.
Finally, to round this off, demand seems to be pretty high now; I wanted to ask for a suitable French idiom to wish Cyrille happy holidays, and was rewarded with an acrostic poem:
So, enough of ChatGPT for now.
Meanwhile, moving on from this inexhaustible and rapidly evolving topic, I received and started setting up my new PC, a MacBook Pro M1 with an Apple M1 Pro ARM chip.
So, with no Intel hardware, can I use it for Revit at all?
Well, I gave up trying to install Visual Studio 2019, which I had previously been using. The final decision was prompted by a thread on running Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 11 on M1 Mac, since it ends with the following unequivocal advice:
I genuinely recommend just using VS2022; it's actually ARM-native, so it will run a lot faster and with far less issues.
I installed Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac, Windows 11, Revit 2023 and Visual Studio 2022, in that order, and am now able to open and compile a sample Revit add-in, launch Revit in the Visual Studio debugger and successfully trigger a breakpoint:
No further testing performed yet, though.
Finally, completely unrelated to ChatGPT and Revit, Diego Vicente published a new approach to approximately tackle the well-known hard NP-complete challenge, successfully using self-organizing maps to solve the traveling salesman problem.
I'm only adding the first two of them... can't keep on updating forever...
Hi, Jeremy. How are you testing your addins on MacBook? Revit doesn’t work on MacBook 🤔 or is Windows installed?
Answer: I use Parallels to run Windows on MacOS
I am literally amazed by #ChatGPT after seeing it can actually write a functioning Revit plug-in. Thank you for fantastic sharings 👍