Comment on Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 week agoI’m about 50/50 between helpful results and “nope, that’s not it, either” out of the various AI tools I have used.
I think it very much depends on what you’re trying to do with it. As a student, or fresh-grad employee in a typical field, it’s probably much more helpful because you are working well trod ground.
As a PhD or other leading edge researcher, possibly in a field without a lot of publications, you’re screwed as far as the really inventive stuff goes, but… if you’ve read “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” there’s a bit in there where the Manhattan project researchers (definitely breaking new ground at the time) needed basic stuff, like gears, for what they were doing. The gear catalogs of the day told them a lot about what they needed to know - per the text: if you’re making something that needs gears, pick your gears from the catalog but just avoid the largest and smallest of each family/table - they are there because the next size up or down is getting into some kind of problems engineering wise, so just stay away from the edges and you should have much more reliable results. That’s an engineer’s shortcut for how to use thousands, maybe millions, of man-years of prior gear research, development and engineering and get the desired results just by referencing a catalog.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
My issue is that I’m fairly established in my career, so I mostly need to reference things, which LLMs do a poor job at. As in, I usually need links to official documentation, not examples of how to do a thing.
LLMs aren’t catalogs though, and they absolutely return different things for the same query. Search engines are tells catalogs, and they’re what I reach for most of the time.
LLMs are good if I want an intro to a subject I don’t know much about, and they help generate keywords to search for more specific information. I just don’t do that all that much anymore.