I’ll get this right out of the way first and foremost: if you absolutely need to use ai, run it locally. If you are gpu poor, find a service that hosts models on someone else’s machine, like silly tavern, kobold, lama, or things like artbot if you want to Vincent Van Techbro.
So I’ve been dabbling in farting around with this job stealing, planet vaporizing, technology for a year now and boy are these things nothing but hot air. I’ve tried all the frontier models for daily search engine stuff, questions, advice on stupid stuff like what games to play or what comics to read. Grok, (gag me) Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, it’s all the same and it’s all shit.
Just yesterday ChatGPT gave me all the wrong issues of spider-man to read and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and pissed me right off. Grok is just unhinged and wants to erp with you especially if you are a minor, Gemini is SORT OF okay, but that’s because they enshittified google search to make way for it. Claude is the most quirk chungus of the models, you can tell it was programmed to talk like a redditor or a discord moderator and that’s apparently the trick to fooling vc dipshit this is AGI.
Anywho these things are not worth it, but apparently capitalism has decided we are eternally 2 years away from agi so it’s full steam ahead of data centers shoved into the orifice of every closed down strip mall in the decaying rustbelt.
I do think there will be a fundamental change in the way people interact with computers, now that AI is being shoved in lieu of an UI. For many non techie people I know, being able to talk to the computer using natural language, and more or less get the result they want is a huge improvement over learning the steps to follow to get the same result by rote memorization (because unlike me, they don’t care about learning why the computer follows the steps in that way, and that’s fine)
The best case scenario for chatbots and LLMs in my opinion is for them to be transformational as an interface, rather than as a key part in applications’ inner workings. I see them much more in the same way as smartphones, the mouse, or graphical interfaces changed the way people interact with tech, and apps had to change to fit this new interface paradigm.
Of course, a mouse doesn’t have a 25% chance of moving to somewhere you don’t want it to or to click randomly. And they don’t take the equivalent of a country’s worth of energy to produce and maintain, either.