With copilot included in Professional-grade Office 365 and some politician claiming that their government should use AI to be more efficient. I am curious on whether some of you did use “AI” to get some productive things done. Or if it’s still mostly a toy for you.
I use it as a glorified Google search since Google search is absolute dogshit these days. But that’s about it. ChatGPT is one of the most over hyped bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life.
You shouldn’t use it for search like that. They (Gemini and ChatGPT) love to be confidently incorrect. Their perfect grammar trick you into believing their answers, even when they are wildly inaccurate.
I use FastGPT on Kagi and it lists the sources for its conclusions, so it’s like a better aimed search
I use GPT in the sense of “I need to solve X problem, are there established algorithms for this?” which usually gives me a good starting point for actual searching.
Most recent use-case was judging the similarity of two strings: I had never heard of “Levenschtein distance” before, but once I had that keyword it was easy to work from there.
Also: cmake and bash boilerplate
Describing a concept and getting the term is awesome with an LLM.
I’ve found documentation and discussions of various strategies I’m considering in tech work.
I describe my idea, the LLM gives me the existing term for that strategy, and then I can find discussion, guides, and theory about that. Keeps me from reinventing the wheel.
It makes sense when you think about it too: It’s a language model, so it should be expected to do a decent job as a glorified dictionary
As if Google is any better
I think I’m going to disagree with the accuracy statement.
Yes - AIs can be famously inaccurate. But so can web pages - even reputable ones. In fact, any single source of information is insufficient to be relied upon, if accuracy is important. And today, deliberate disinformation on the internet is massive - it’s something we don’t even know the scale of because the tools to check it may be compromised. </tinfoilhat>
It takes a lot of cross-referencing to be certain of something, and most of us don’t bother if the first answer from either method ‘feels right’.
AI does get shown off when it’s stupidly wrong, which is to be expected, but the world doesn’t care when it’s correct time and again. And each iteration gets better at self-checking facts.
certain offerings like MS’s cite their sources inline. i always use it to find those sources and then read it from the sources.
Copilot is actually linked directly into their search engine and it provides the links it pulls its data from.
But you’re correct, ChatGPT is not hooked into the live internet and should not be used for such things.I’m not sure if Gemini is or not since I haven’t used it or looked into it much, so I can’t comment on it.Edit: I stand corrected, ChatGPT is hooked into the live web now. It didn’t used to be and I haven’t used it in awhile since my work has our own private trained model running that we’re supposed to use instead.
Chatgpt also pulls from the web and cites its sources.
That’s not correct. ChatGPT is hooked into the live web.
Ah okay, it didn’t used to be when I used it awhile back. I edited my comment, thanks for the correction.
I have it provide me with its sources
Absolutely agree!! LLMs are good for quick “shallow” search for me (stuff I would find on google in a few minutes). Bad for “deeper” learning (because it’s not capable of doing it). It’s overhyped.
It seems like exactly the moment google’s successor showed up, google has a stroke. it’s awful these days