It's often wrong too.

This is the part that drives me nuts. It is definitely useful and I've started using it alongside "googling" for answers to specific questions.

But it is not infallible and it's confidently incorrect often enough that I often have to check elsewhere to verify.

Ya, AI as a tool has it's place. I'm currently working on documentation to meet some security compliance frameworks (I work in cybersecurity). Said documentation is going to be made to look pretty and get a check in the box from the auditors. It will then be stored in a SharePoint library to be promptly lost and ignored until the next time we need to hand it over to the auditors. It's paperwork for the sake of paperwork. And I'm going to have AI spit out most of it and just pepper in the important details and iron out the AI hallucinations. Even with the work of fixing the AI's work, it will still take less time than making up all the bullshit on my own. This is what AI is good for. If I actually care about the results, and certainly if I care about accuracy, AI won't be leaned on all that much.

The technology actually it pretty amazing, when you stop and think about it. But, it also often a solution in search of a problem.

That's not what I said.

I said it's not any more AI than things in the 90's were. I didn't say we haven't improved things since then.

Neural networks and GPUs alone are huge improvements to the paradigm and design that allow for LLMs to exist.

They're still as far from real AI as the chatbots in the 90's were.

Again, they are a vast, vast improvement over those in ways that nobody in the 90's could have ever predicted. Nobody even knew what a neural network was or how to make one back then (I mean, a few researchers were working on it, to be fair, but we didn't have the hardware to do much than posture).

We're still light years away from real AI. LLMs do not bring us closer. They solve a different problem.

The thing is, they already told you it's the first L in LLM that currently mattered.

@Ferk Ah, I see.

I suppose so.

As a one-time committee member on Skeptics in the Pub, there are a lot of things in life that *demonstrably* Do Not Work, never did work, and can be proved not to ever be possible, which all the same, billions of people are very impressed by.

Homeopathy is my go-to example -- see:

https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

This is true of all Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It's all a S.C.A.M. ;-)

But it goes much further. Gods, for example. All 100% made up.

And yet...