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 can’t really differentiate among any of the models cause if one doesn’t work I’ll just toggle to a different model on duckduckgo. They tend to work very well for my purposes, which is locating sources of info that a regular search doesn’t turn up (or the results would take a lot of time to parse through).
Their shortcomings aren’t a big deal for this because if one returns an incorrect result or hallucinates I can just correct it or hop models. And the ability to do fuzzy searches using plain language descriptions engines have never been good at, so in that case the LLMs are straight up better. But yeah otherwise a lot of their role for me is filling in for how bad search engines have gotten.
I only code a little bit to solve my own problems so I’ve left it to people who’ve actually investigated to have an opinion on that angle. But last week I needed to add a quick function to one of my things so I tried one of the models, and it knocked it out immediately with no need for corrections. Less fun than solving the problem myself but woroed in a pinch since I was busy.
I need to look into local models again now that they’re getting good and lightweight. But I’m not sure I’d be able to get much utility since my sole use case right now is search and I’m running an old thinkpad. One of these days I’ll tinker with it.