2024-07-01 - useful AI

for some time now AI, GANs and ~recently LLMs, are making headlines. so far though most of the stuff i've tested out was giving mediocre results, to put it mildly. don't get me wrong – it's VERY impressive in a sense of “this thing can even be done with such a basic take on it?!”. it's not however much of a practical use IMHO, for helping out in day-to-day work. ChatGPT / GPT 4 is hallucinating a lot, and often spit out garbage (and then “apologizes”, when confronted). Copilot's code is poor quality and spirals towards increased code churn (although – surprise! surprise! – copilot's owners do not agree with that. on top of that it also lacks recent pieces of information. last but not least – it lacks references to back up its claims.

the last part turned out to actually be an opportunity. it's where RAGs come along.

during recent Lex Fridman's interview with Arvind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity) i've learned about a new tool. it's a mix of LLM and RAG, that it's a kind of search engine, where you state a problem, and instead of links, it generates a concise response, with references and some follow up topics, that you might want to dive into next. it's also faster in giving responses. it does fill a bit like Wikipedia in that regard.

while it inherits the LLM flaws, thx to RAG's grounding in data and references, it makes stupid mistakes far less often. although i find most answers far from perfect, it's actually the first time i find modern AI useful in my daily work flow. especially when i'm looking for sth i do not have much experience with or i need to find sth to start with unusual problem at hand.

i highly recommend you give perplexity.ai a shot! :)