3 ms·

People have been saying that for a few years now. I've been using it as a very advanced autocomplete while coding for that time and not much else.

ben_w 2y ago
I use it for cooking, proofreading, learning German, skimming long documents, shopping advice (by uploading photos), and asking dumb questions about physics that get me [closed] if I were to post on physics stack exchange, in addition to being a coding assistant.
- Sateeshm 2y ago
  Most of those existed before llms. Also still like a microwave, not very essential.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Farming existed before the combine harvester, and like the combine harvester LLMs are very useful tools in these tasks. You can't get a useful response from German for Dummies if you ask it to rate the email you're writing in German and let you know what needs improvement, human teachers who can are expensive, and friends may not wish to be constantly bothered by a 40 year old asking the kinds of questions a native speaker might have asked their teacher when they were 13.
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      As a new language learner you're, by definition, not going to be in a place to judge the quality of the "feedback" you get from it.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Course not. I can make the judgement call "this is good at German" by virtue of all the Germans around me using it. (Conversely, I'm told it's quite bad at, say, Chinese — though mainly by people online, as there aren't many native Chinese speakers in my life right now).
tim333 2y ago
Electricity probably had niche uses for the first few years but as electrical stuff got better it got used in all sorts of things. I imagine AI will go a bit like that if quicker. Looking back at the history of electricity, there is early stuff from the Greeks and then: Faraday's homopolar disc generator 1831 Light bulb 1870 Transistor 1947 etc. So quite leisurely.
- parineum 2y ago
  Considering the exponential increases in invention and adoption of new technologies for the past 200 years, I'm not sure that timeline is very close to what I'd expect from a new technology in this era. I'd argue that we've already passed peak LLM as I think, after been having burned by it a few times, it's usage as a professional or reliable technology has seceded, rather than accelerated, over the past 6 months. Gone are the days of doom sayers talking about AGI taking over the world and LLMs replacing every single job at the call center and in software teams. Now everyone's scaled back to the things you can actually let it do, which is assist with a lot of coddling/verifying.

ben_w 2y ago

I use it for cooking, proofreading, learning German, skimming long documents, shopping advice (by uploading photos), and asking dumb questions about physics that get me [closed] if I were to post on physics stack exchange, in addition to being a coding assistant.

Sateeshm 2y ago
Most of those existed before llms. Also still like a microwave, not very essential.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Farming existed before the combine harvester, and like the combine harvester LLMs are very useful tools in these tasks. You can't get a useful response from German for Dummies if you ask it to rate the email you're writing in German and let you know what needs improvement, human teachers who can are expensive, and friends may not wish to be constantly bothered by a 40 year old asking the kinds of questions a native speaker might have asked their teacher when they were 13.
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    As a new language learner you're, by definition, not going to be in a place to judge the quality of the "feedback" you get from it.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Course not. I can make the judgement call "this is good at German" by virtue of all the Germans around me using it. (Conversely, I'm told it's quite bad at, say, Chinese — though mainly by people online, as there aren't many native Chinese speakers in my life right now).

tim333 2y ago

Electricity probably had niche uses for the first few years but as electrical stuff got better it got used in all sorts of things. I imagine AI will go a bit like that if quicker. Looking back at the history of electricity, there is early stuff from the Greeks and then: Faraday's homopolar disc generator 1831 Light bulb 1870 Transistor 1947 etc. So quite leisurely.

parineum 2y ago
Considering the exponential increases in invention and adoption of new technologies for the past 200 years, I'm not sure that timeline is very close to what I'd expect from a new technology in this era. I'd argue that we've already passed peak LLM as I think, after been having burned by it a few times, it's usage as a professional or reliable technology has seceded, rather than accelerated, over the past 6 months. Gone are the days of doom sayers talking about AGI taking over the world and LLMs replacing every single job at the call center and in software teams. Now everyone's scaled back to the things you can actually let it do, which is assist with a lot of coddling/verifying.