In just a hundred years, we were able to successfully develop a device that has all of the information in the entire world contained in it, handheld and portable, which has expanded our technological capabilities. This has also created an incredibly frustrating problem for us in our daily lives. We have an exponential amount more information to deal with now than we ever had before. Back in the '70s or '80s you wanted to know something, you go to the library, watch a documentary that’s on a DVD. Now? You have to navigate the terrifyingly bad search engines that are out there today like Bing and Google which are increasingly getting more and more unreliable. You have to take notes which are frustratingly complicated, and unless you are some extraordinary gifted college student who is a master at taking good notes, your notes will probably be not perfect… Then you have to search all of the information available to you, to finally make some sort of decision. Even if you know what you want to say or what you want to communicate, you have to put it into the right format…
This is exhausting. Dealing with this much information, synthesizing it, changing the format and display of it, trying to figure out how to work with so much information every single day of your life. It is insanity! A language learning model can actually help you, especially if you train it or use roles to help you shape the learning model into whatever you want it to be doing. For example if I want to put together some well organized notes on Tableau, that awful piece of garbage technology that exists out there in the world today, I can simply use my local llama 3.1 AI model that I have personally trained with a ton of my notes and information, and get any sort of information out of it that I need to in order to explain a very complex topic to someone else easily. The web is not accessed at all, everything is stored locally on my own device. Miraculous and lifts a huge ass load off of my shoulders because now I don’t have to go and sift through my notes and spend a day and a half trying to figure out how to word things and then putting it into a PowerPoint that’s only going to be used for 5 minutes…
This is what I think The technology should be used for. Not artificial intelligence, no one is ever replaced in this process, And as you can tell, I am utilizing the technology to make myself better, augment my capabilities.
AI is a marketing term at the moment, and it’s all orne big financial speculative bubble. Just look at Nvidia and how it’s share price is so divorced from reality.
LLMs can bd uaeful tools and have value in themselves. The problem is the hype and misuse of the term AI to promise the earth. Also the big tech companies rushing to push tools that are not yet fit for purpose.
Any tool which “hallucinates” - I.e. Is error strewn and lies - is fit for nothing. It’s just a curio and these general tools are going AI and LLMs a bad reputation. But well designed and trained LLMs targeted at specific tasks are useful.