Just a bit of zeitgeist pasted from a conversation…
…Another well worth mentioning is Perplexity. Their pitch is that it’s built for research, the immediate upshot of which is that the results are organized to lead to your likely next questions. The main features are: 1. it actively searches the web as well as generating from LLM’s, and 2. included are links to real web pages supporting the output.
Again with the controversy and likely copyright infringements, but the tools are incontrovertibly useful, astonishingly so. Even the stuff in Apple’s latest “Intelligence” feature set has some nice quick “please capitalize and punctuate this nonsense so I don’t have to” abilities that I use. I don’t yet pay for any subscriptions, only the backend API’s. I am able to get most of what I want for free, although I have considered paying for Anthropic’s Claude mostly just to see what it will do, choosing that one for the reasons we discussed.
I also run a couple of large language models locally on my Mac both for fun and when I don’t want the material out in the world.
One comparative point I wanted to highlight: While these are all, for so many purposes, interchangeable, they each have their moments in the sun. And in this moment, Google happens to have just released a new model that has received praise, and they are offering 2.5 Pro to all accounts both free and paid as “experimental.” This dropdown menu gives you a good idea of how the different models might be used:
To me it’s a sign of how young this technology is that we have to think about which tool is right for the job.
I have to acknowledge here and now how little I like the term “AI” in this context — and for different reasons the movie of that name that Kubrick pawned off on Spielberg — and wish Apple could have kept using “machine learning.” It does not help that now the companies are bandying about “AGI” (“G” for “general”) to represent Kurzweil’s singularity. There is so much nonsense and jazz-hands and jibber-jabber about it, not to mention legitimate concerns and fears, but as that seems true for bloody well everything these days, I’m content using this amazing stuff for what it actually does do very very well.
Finally, the thing I really want it to do is read my whole computer of my own text, and either answer queries about that or spit my own words back out at me, so I can say, for example “repeat what I wrote Lucy about AI last week.” Apple purported to be working on that, but appears to have been failing in that effort, so much so that they have done some reorganization to address the lack.
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