Not to dismiss Chollet’s work, but I’m starting to think he need prove nothing to even the muggles. For example, nearly any endurance athlete stands a good chance of being a Strava user. If you run in those circles, have you heard a single person with anything good to say about Strava’s “Athletic Intelligence”? Garmin is rolling out a beta right now that includes “AI Insights” or summat. Same deal: useless summaries like “you ran 5 miles today, which contributes to your aerobic base”. I could do better with a database and some if/else statements. And Garmin wants a subscription for this. (It’s included in Strava’s subscription, but I suppose you’re still paying for it.) And so now the memes tend toward “dumb AI insight of the day” on many online forums.
Seems to me that a lot of folks are enjoying having an LLM rewrite their email or whatever, but I wonder how many are actually buying the rest of it? The companies themselves sure aren’t helping.
I use Strava for mountain biking and the Athletic Intelligence is just comical.
"This ride was longer and harder than usual" - no sh*t, the map, elevation profile and my legs have already informed me.
"You set 3 new PRs" - I can see that with one flick of the thumb thank you.
"Consider a rest day" - consider? None of my job, spouse, equipment or body is too keen on doing that again for a while.
I think some of the AI demos are kind of comedy gems.
I have seen the Apple Intelligence presentation a while ago and in the span of five minutes they had someone asking the assistant to expand a one liner into an e-mail and then someone receiving a long e-mail and asking the AI to summarize it.
We spun GPUs to expand, then spun them again to summarize. Gold.
I'm taking a university course right now and one of the big textbook companies (McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, one of those) has an "AI Tutor" on their homework assignment.
It's somehow LESS helpful than just having a pointer to which part of the text to revisit.
It basically just restates the question/problem. Even worse than that is that it's an essentially STATIC note for each question yet it appears to be REAL-TIME GENERATED each time. I guess that could just be for appearances but it's just dumb all the way around really.