What I don't understand is that on one hand we read 'what they charge is much less than it costs them' and on the other hand this thread seems to suggest that 'what they charge is more than it would cost me'.
I picked up miniature painting as a hobby around Christmas icm 3D printing with the idea of building a Christmas village from scratch. It's always fascinating what long and winded funnels every new hobby brings. In this case brushes, synthetic vs sabel, usage, care.
Especially given how fast things progress, timeline and performance are a tradeoff where I'd say swaying things in favour of the latter is not per definition net positive.
Totally agree if the AI or search results are a (relatively) direct answer to the question.
But what if the AI is used to build up a(n otherwise) genuine human response, like: 'Perhaps the reason behind this is such-and-such, (a quick google)|($AI) suggests that indeed it is common for blah to be blah, so...'
What may be added is that some people have a hard time reading words by their 'total shape'. I can imagine that for them, the difference between pattern matching symbols and strings of letters is even more profound.
Comparable to what I read someone say about AI the other day: we're living in the small sliver of history where smart-glasses with cameras are technically feasible yet are still (kind of) detectable.
My mom has hearing aids, I only get all the technical info through her, so it's a bit blurry, but she complained about very unpleasant scratchy noises, for instance when my dad was watching videos on his iPad (for himself) elsewhere in the room. Settings were changed but now she has a harder time understanding us. We don't have to scream but if we don't speak 'clearly', she misses a lot, especially when we are with a larger group (say 10 people at a dinner). She says she has some friends that she understands very clearly, in contrast to others (admittedly, me and one of my sisters are not the best examples of how to speak crystal clear).
Perhaps this is just the limit of her hearing capacity. Or do you think she should not settle for this and push for something better?
It's not just you. The generated stuff - in my opinion - doesn't make any sense at all, with regard to structure or meaning. Unless, perhaps, the aim was to generate some kind of badly designed Ikea store.
I used to be in (molecular biology) research. At some point my supervisors were already working towards a paper in their mind, while I was still doubting (the statistical significance of) my findings.
In the end I left my Phd track before actually finishing it. My conclusion is that I like research(ing stuff) as a verb, but I don't like research as an institute.
This reminds me of my interactions lately with ChatGPT where I gave into its repeated offer to draw me an electronics diagram. The result was absolute garbage. During the subsequent conversation it kept offering to include any new insights into the diagram, entirely oblivious to its own incompetence.
I can understand how/that this works, but it still feels like a 'hack' to me. It still feels like the LLM's themselves are plateauing but the applications get better by running the LLM's deeper, longer, wider (and by adding 'non ai' tooling/logic at the edges).
But maybe that's simply the solution, like the solution to original neural nets was (perhaps too simply put) to wait for exponentially better/faster hardware.
This nicely describes where we're at with LLM's as I see it: they are 'fancy' enough to be able to write code yet at the same time they can't be trusted to do stuff which can be solved with a simple hook.
I feel that currently improvement mostly comes from slapping what to me feels like workarounds on top of something that very well may be a local maximum.
Here in the Netherlands the impact of Nitrogen coming from cattle excretions (mostly through ammonia I believe) is paralizing the entire country (due to the impact on the environment, it's now blocking the building of - very much needed - housing. So there could be a win/win/win/win there.