Technology

The marketing department seems to have highly inflated expectations, so I think this is mostly a marketing thing. They are painting a picture of something that doesn’t exist yet. The same thing happened with Siri and Google Assistant when they were released. People expected these tools to be capable of doing the kinds of things that modern LLMs are now beginning to approach, so the amount of disappointment was pretty brutal.

But is it a solution looking for a problem? If you need to generate pictures for a horror themed book, image AIs can get the job done properly. You don’t even need to request mutated abominations, because the AI gravitates towards those anyway. If you need to write a pointless self help book that meets the page count without conveying any actual information, LLMs are the way to go.

These are all pretty niche examples, but people should understand that all of the AIs we have today are narrow AIs. The scope is about as narrow as the tip of a torx screwdriver. Try it on a different screw and you’ll see what I mean. Use it as a hammer, and you’ll gain full understanding of the nature of this problem.

If you have exceedingly low expectations, LLMs can actually do some trivial tasks very well. If you have hardly any experience in writing or programming, an LLM will prove to be an impressive tool. If you are a professional though, you’ll notice pretty quickly that the LLM is only good for the simplest tasks, while you still need to do everything that is even a little bit demanding.