[adventured]

Nearly six billion people are using mobile phones, most of those are smartphones now. There's no reason to think extending that small cost utility device to the next billion adults isn't a good idea (so long as the cost isn't coming from their pocket, ie it should be subsidized). These are not at all mutually exclusive goals.

The latest LLMs are extraordinarily useful life agents as is. Most people would benefit from using them.

It'd be like pretending it's either water or education (pick one). The answer is both and you don't have to pick one or the other in reality at all. The entities trying to solve each aspect are typically different organization anyway.

[sysguest]

"Most people would benefit from using them"

hmm maybe that "would benefit" is a bit too vague?

[mattskr]

Spare me the rehash of marketing hype rhetoric. It's either a white collar tool to avoid doing boring work or great to identify targets on a battlefield. That's it and both are still questionable. This techno-fetishism of "New technology good, ugga-ooga-booga." 99% of the blind evangelists just spew that same slop just because of fomo of making a few extra shekels by proving "I'm a true believer, and so should you by buying my AI course."

Someone who doesn't have access to clean water and stable food will not benefit from this, nor will powers at be that "make it available" will actually improve their lives. It's already apparent, the tech nerds of the late 90s and early 2000s were NOT the good guys. Being good at computers does not make you a good person. The business model for AI makes zero sense when you have real world experience. Without massive, complete social and economic absolute changes, it won't work out. And for those championing that change, what makes you think you'll be the special comrade brought up the ranks to benefit as the truest of believers?

Sorry, but this shit is really starting to rub me the wrong way, especially with the massive bubble investment that's growing around all of it. This wont be good. The housing collapsed sucked. The same pattern is emerging and I'm getting a bad, bad feeling this will make the housing collapse look like nothing due to long term ramifications.

[jareds]

It's also useful if your blind, I know this from personal experience. The ability to recognize objects, read package labels, read bios and boot menus, etc has been very useful to me. Claiming that the only things it's good for is white collar work or battlefield targeting isn't accurate. In spite of how useful I've found it I'm not claiming it's going to be net positive, I have no idea how this will all turn out.

[Nevermark]

It's a wonderful way to find new tools and materials. Its knowledge of materials is as encyclopedic as it is for everything else.

I use it as a much more efficient version of Wikipedia for quickly finding the basics on many design options in software and physical artifacts. Also great at finding specific words in English or other languages. Unlike a thesaurus it pulls a lot of background on each word including subjective shades.

I could go on, and on.

I think the usefulness of these models is very different for different people. As a way to quickly start digging into novel problems, with aspects that require discovery, I don't know of anything that could possibly compare. No human being or web resource comes close.

As many people relate, it can save me time, but the greater value is it makes my time far more productive, and I tackle problems without hesitation I wouldn't have ever had the time to even think about before.

I could not imagine going back to Google for instance. Stone-age. I still use Kagi, but often for its quick AI question responses. And I still use Wikipedia, and more specific resources.