The raw hunger for LLMs around here is so insatiable, words fail. Although not those from the mouths of the LLMs themselves.
Granted, it’s also sort of an esoteric taste at this point, to be realistic. The early curiosity has turned into the sense that a new version of familiar stuff has been oversold, and most can’t really figure out what the big deal is.
It’s probably still more for those who are tech-curious or otherwise fooling around with programming and such, professionally or as enthusiasts.
Arnold Kling sums up the spirit:
As of today, large language models (LLMs) are exciting the technology elites, but they have not had any mass-market impact. Ordinary households are not making use of the models. The business world seems to think of the models as research tools, whereas I think of them as human-computer communication tools.
He also wonders when and if there will be a great product innovation to come along that turns the tech into something everyone uses—something like what Netscape did for the early World Wide Web.
But maybe it won’t happen that way at all. AI adoption has been so rapid that it may already have saturated the places where there was interest and practical use. And most people seem to think of the tech as nothing fancier than what everyone already knew of as algorithms. That is, just tools for tech companies to make better guesses as to what individual users will want next.
Elsewhere, writer Venkatesh Rao describes his view of AI for him as a writer:
I was asked in a DM conversation whether I use AI for writing, and I said no, it would be like going for a walk in my car. The only people who seem to directly use AI for writing are people who don’t write for pleasure, but have to write a lot of functional, business-like things that are too varied for boilerplate templates. The sort of writing that might require intelligence or expertise, but which doesn’t offer much pleasure or creative challenge to the writer. It’s an instrumental sort of writing.
Sounds about right. If you hate having to write stuff, AI can handle the chore. If you enjoy writing, you don’t want a machine to do it for you.
I just found out that my choice for Congress has dropped out of the race ahead of the primary run-off scheduled for May 14. Brad Knott will represent District 13 because the is no Democrat in the race.
The only glimpse of hope is that both of them had significant "RINO" (In Trump's usage) tendencies.
And the house band is the holy molar rollers