Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
"If they felt like it" is key here: in my experience, AI makes it very easy to not feel like anything and just trust whatever the AI comes up with. The barrier to diving deep into code, or researching any other topic by myself, has become higher.
At the same time the barrier to getting some results has become much lower, especially for complex topics I knew nothing about. So that seems great, but I keep running into cases where I do check sources and the AI turns out to have summarised it incorrectly.
The biggest market for AI, possibly even bigger than tech, is mass manipulation, lying, and scamming. Destabilizing countries has never been easier now that social media and messengers allow believable lies and manipulation to spread like wildfire, and the AI industry has massively reduced the cost of believable lies.
Up until a few years ago, believable videos of politicians or famous people or people targeted for blackmail were expensive and required acting or VFX work. Now anyone can do it with a handful of dollars and half an hour to spend.
The industry is threatening to enrich the elite by taking people's jobs in economic uncertain times while at the same time resource hogging data centers are popping up all over the world like weeds. Big AI couldn't be more dislikable if they tried.
My favorite use is to give me PhD level tours of art museums and historic sites. It seems to know everything about every single artwork, the lives of the artists, and the economic and cultural context. It's willing to go at my pace and field as many or as few questions as I want.
Frequently use it to come up with recipes when cooking, repair electrical equipment, or seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family.
It's pretty hard to imagine life without it at this point. I know it's possible, but like the internet, I would feel crippled by the lack of information and things that I can no longer easily do
Why do you use hacker news when anyone can lie to you? You still use it because it is directionally correct and the accuracy rate is high enough that it makes it worth it.
Same with ChatGPT. I use the thinking model and rarely (if not never) get obvious errors.
Its not perfect, just like talking to humans, online information, the news, or even books. It makes mistakes all the time, so you have to think and judge, just like the rest of life, but I find it is a tremendous resource.
Recipies are one of the strongest areas given the low complexity and obvious training data. Im curious what it messed up on with.
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.
Having Claude calculate which beers are the best deal at the bar based on price to alcohol from a picture of the menu is currently a massive party trick.
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
"If they felt like it" is key here: in my experience, AI makes it very easy to not feel like anything and just trust whatever the AI comes up with. The barrier to diving deep into code, or researching any other topic by myself, has become higher.
At the same time the barrier to getting some results has become much lower, especially for complex topics I knew nothing about. So that seems great, but I keep running into cases where I do check sources and the AI turns out to have summarised it incorrectly.
It’s solving open problems in mathematics that stumped humans.
No one uses it outside of tech or office jobs. There's no use case.
I think it's worse than that.
The biggest market for AI, possibly even bigger than tech, is mass manipulation, lying, and scamming. Destabilizing countries has never been easier now that social media and messengers allow believable lies and manipulation to spread like wildfire, and the AI industry has massively reduced the cost of believable lies.
Up until a few years ago, believable videos of politicians or famous people or people targeted for blackmail were expensive and required acting or VFX work. Now anyone can do it with a handful of dollars and half an hour to spend.
The industry is threatening to enrich the elite by taking people's jobs in economic uncertain times while at the same time resource hogging data centers are popping up all over the world like weeds. Big AI couldn't be more dislikable if they tried.
False.
I used it for
1. Filling bank forms, filling visa for South Africa
2. Understand movies and literature
3. For understanding public transport in new countries (pretty anxiety inducing)
4. As a 100x jump over Google search
5. Reading and answering emails
6. Fact checking dubious claims on the internet
7. Finding new music I might like
Incurious read on AI belongs to say 2024.
Imagine queueing up to get benefits and food stamps so simianwords can continue to find new music he might like.
Same could have been said during advent of internet. Imagine world has a fixed pie of wealth to distribute lol
Whether they want to or not even
Use it for... what exactly?
My favorite use is to give me PhD level tours of art museums and historic sites. It seems to know everything about every single artwork, the lives of the artists, and the economic and cultural context. It's willing to go at my pace and field as many or as few questions as I want.
Frequently use it to come up with recipes when cooking, repair electrical equipment, or seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family.
It's pretty hard to imagine life without it at this point. I know it's possible, but like the internet, I would feel crippled by the lack of information and things that I can no longer easily do
> It seems to know everything
'Seems' is a very dangerous word in this context.
It doesnt have to be perfect. It just better than the human tour guides, which it absolutely was on my last trip to Europe.
What about when it just flat out lies to you, how do you sort the right info from the wrong?
> recipes when cooking
I used it for a recipe, gave it a brilliant and detailed prompt, it told me to put 10x a particular spice and it ruined the dish.
> seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family
good luck
> repair electrical equipment
what can go wrong, really
Why do you use hacker news when anyone can lie to you? You still use it because it is directionally correct and the accuracy rate is high enough that it makes it worth it.
Same with ChatGPT. I use the thinking model and rarely (if not never) get obvious errors.
Its not perfect, just like talking to humans, online information, the news, or even books. It makes mistakes all the time, so you have to think and judge, just like the rest of life, but I find it is a tremendous resource.
Recipies are one of the strongest areas given the low complexity and obvious training data. Im curious what it messed up on with.
uh yeah, all the subscriber numbers from ai companies are because it was baked into every product humans already used on their tech i.e. browsers and search engines.