[amazingamazing]

GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America.

To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.

[miguel_rdp]

Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown..

Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.

[amazingamazing]

Im unconvinced. How do you trade this for misinformation and scams that will be coming on unprecedented scale? In any case isn’t it the case that the value there is human expertise and search? At least with gpt 5 using it without search will almost certainly give you wrong information in a variety of topics so the value seems to be in search which is old tech

[shepherdjerred]

Are you asking for a use case or the net benefit? Because it sure sounds like you're moving the goalpost.

Considering that ChatGPT has 900 million users I suspect the average person finds value in the technology.

[wrxd]

100% I would be happier to have a small model that can run locally capable of searching the web than a stand-alone frontier model

[undeveloper]

can you not just do this with most local models nowadays? the qwen series is quite capable

[shalmanese]

Apple's problem might be they were right too early which is sometimes worse than being wrong. The original vision of Siri was substantively correct in how AI would supercharge our phones but huge parts of the vision got forgotten when Siri was acquired by Apple and the original founders left. The original technical choices around Siri constrained it from evolving into something useful.

A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.

In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.

But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life?

Coding adjacent, but my small town's small businesses have all dramatically improved their websites with LLMs. Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to.

[2dfdd]

Classic example of a bozo talking out his arse.

"Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to."

You ever heard of squarespace?

[amazingamazing]

Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before? Using a LLM instead of a template seems like ridiculous overkill imho but thanks for the anecdote.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before?

Yes. Code looks intimidating if you aren't used to it (and don't have an IDE). And there are lots of steps between having a file of code and having a hosted website.

[amazingamazing]

I don’t see how a llm solves this. It’s not like a llm hosts the website. Sites like squarespace and Wordpress let you modify your site without ever seeing code. They have graphical editors that you can stay in if you wish. I agree llms help, though if you use a product.

[lxgr]

I know how to set up a static HTML site in about 15 minutes. Building a website to host there usually takes me the better part of a weekend, and usually ends up looking absolutely terrible.

[mold_aid]

I think this really gets at it: people are so terrified of not knowing what to do, of not knowing whether their solution is "good," that they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok, ironically bypassing human judgment in the end. Drudgery or judgery, those are the two task contexts in which AI products* excel.

* It's lovely to have the opportunity to disagree with both Gruber and the "the whole thing smacks of politics" HN commentariat, pulled daily between "it's just a tool, like a hammer, which also kills people, stay with me here" and "AI puts an expert in your pocket; soon, the expert will live in your eyes"

[msabalau]

The MP3 spec was defined a decade before we had iPods. Spreadsheets took a decade to become indispensable to businesses.

Clifford Stoll had used the internet for two decades before writting his infamous 1995 essay in Time saying the internet was overhyped, and "normal" people would never e-mail because they can just fax.

CRISPR was first observed in 1987, and the gene-editing breakthrough came in 2012.

It's really, really unclear why you think LLMs would have faster adoption, when they are already that being adopted faster that anything other tech, ever.

Do you honestly know of no non-technical person who use LLMs? Because an absurd number of people report on surveys that they use it every week.

LLM apps are regularly the top downloads on the iPhone.

[raincole]

Translation. If the said random person is interesting in any media from non-english speaking countries. Anime, manhwa, cultivation web novels.

But you specified America, so I guess no.

[amazingamazing]

Translation existed before llms tho in hundreds of languages. Google translate came out in 2006

[raincole]

And? Coding existed before LLMs too.

[bigstrat2003]

LLMs aren't even useful for coding, the one thing they are supposedly great for. It's a technology without any real use cases yet.

[simianwords]

You can't easily articulate the way in which mRNA vaccines were possible by internet. But internet definitely played an important part.

Internet

- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet

- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet

- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet

Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.