I still hear people asking: “how this different from xyz hype?”. This is different, please bear with me while I attempt to articulate why. Short version: Is it

I still hear people asking: “how this different from xyz hype?”. This is different, please bear with me while I attempt to articulate why. Short version: Is it spam? Yes. Scam? No. Ignore it at your own peril. Long version: The cat is out of the bag now. The power of transformers is real. They are smarter and more intelligent than the least 20% smart humans (my approximation), and that’s already a breakthrough right there. I’ll paraphrase Steve Yegge: > LLMs of today are like a Harvard graduate who did shrooms 4 hours ago, and is still a little high. Putting the statistical/probability monkey aspect aside for a minute, empirically and anecdotally, they are incredibly powerful if you can learn how to harness them through intelligent prompts. If they appear useless or dumb to you, your prompts are the reason why. Challenge them with a little guidance. They work better that way (read up on zero shot, one shot, two shot instructions). What is most relevant this time is that they are real (an API, a search bot, a programming buddy) and democratized - available to anyone with an email address. More on harnessing their power: squeezing your entire context into a 8k/32k token will be challenging for most complex applications. This is where prompt engineering (manual or automated) comes in. To help with this, some very cool applications that use embeddings and vectors will push them even further - so the context can be shared as a compact vector instead of a large corpus of text. While this is certainly better than a traditional search box, it’s still far from a fully-autonomous AI that can function with little to no supervision. OpenAI plug-ins are a band-aid towards that vision, but they get us even closer.