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by Aerroon 84 days ago
What mess are you talking about? The existence of LLMs? I think it's pretty neat that I can now get answers to questions I have.

This is something I couldn't have done before, because people very often don't have the patience to answer questions. Even Google ended up in loops of "just use Google" or "closed. This is a duplicate of X, but X doesn't actually answer the question" or references to dead links.

Are there downsides to this? Sure, but imo AI is useful.
1 comments
butlike 84 days ago
It's just repackaged Google results masquerading as an 'answer.' PageRank pulled results and displayed the first 10 relevant links and the LLM pulls tokens and displays the first relevant tokens to the query.

Just prompt it.

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Aerroon 81 days ago
1. LLMs can translate text far better than any previous machine translation system. They can even do so for relatively small languages that typically had poor translation support. We all remember how funny text would get when you did English -> Japanese -> English. With LLMs you can do that (and even use a different LLM for the second step) and the texts remain very close.

2. Audio-input capable LLMs can transcribe audio far better than any previous system I've used. They easily understood my speech without problems. Youtube's old closed captioning system want anywhere close to as good and Microsoft's was unusable for me. LLMs have no such problems (makes me wonder if my speech patterns are in the training data since I've made a lot of YouTube videos and that's why they work so well for me).

3. You can feed LLMs local files (and run the LLM locally). Even if it is "just" pagerank, it's local pagerank now.

4. I can ask an LLM questions and then clarify what I wanted in natural language. You can't really refine a Google search in such a way. Trying to explain a Google search with more details usually doesn't help.

5. Iye mkx kcu kx VVW dy nomszrob dohd. Qyyqvo nyocx'd ny drkd pyb iye. - Google won't tell you what this means without you knowing what it is.

LLMs aren't magic, but I think they can do a whole bunch of things we couldn't really do before. Or at least we couldn't have a machine do those things well.

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