This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
I don't use it for large-scale code generation, but I do find it useful for small code snippets. For example asking how to initialize a widget in Kendo UI with specific behavior. With snippets, I can just run the code and verify that it works with minimal effort. It's often more about reminding me of something I already knew rather than discovering something novel. I wouldn't trust it with anything novel.
In general, I think of it as a better kind of search. The knowledge available on the internet is enormous, and LLMs are pretty good at finding and synthesizing it relative to a prompt. But that's a different task than generating its own ideas. I think of it like a highly efficient secretary. I wouldn't ask my secretary how to solve a problem, but I absolutely would ask if we have any records pertaining to the problem, and perhaps would also ask for a summary of those records.
Strong agree. This reminds me of one of my pet theories: that research and education are fundamentally different skills. A good researcher should be flexible and open-minded, almost to a fault, but a good educator needs to be committed to certain beliefs in order to teach them. More important, an educator should instill good habits (even if those habits involve asking good questions) and set a good example, a requirement entirely lacking from research.
So why do all of our universities only employ teachers who have been trained as researchers?
I think much of the 80% grinding that you describe is just the publish-or-perish mindset of graduate school, which the teachers pick up along the way (I'm not faulting them so much as the process). It's more about appearing to know, rather than knowing. This may be what you have to do to survive in a competitive research environment, but one is left wondering what any of that has to do with educating our children, especially the majority who will never become researchers.
If you want books that can help you learn to think, you can't do better than the classics. I suggest Plato's dialogs or the Analects of Confucius. You may find them more accessible than you expect. They were excellent teachers.
Both translations are from the 19th Century and so have entered the public domain. But both are also often considered the best English versions of these works, even today.
(Note you can download a facsimile pdf of the original book, and print it out as you go. I prefer to read anything long-form that way. Better for concentration in my opinion).
More likely future LLMs will mix ads into their responses. ("Your air filters are in stock in aisle A6. Have you heard about the new membership plan from Lowes...?")
No one seems to have mentioned what is most obvious to me about this: if this goes through, Google will corner the market on mobile (on-device) AI. They already have Android users, this would give them iOS users too. Not a large market right now, but the way things are heading it could prove significant in the future.