Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point?
Because it summarises the results, it’s like a search engine but better
The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.
I’m using it for coding in a way that it isn’t going anywhere, I’m using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they’ll continue to work.
Example of what it looks like:
It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:
While originally it was constantly making mistakes there’s now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly
So now I’ve got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that’s ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:
https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
song making
etcetc
If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.
When did the web ever present itself as a completely factual and never wrong? There’s plenty of evidence of wikipedia being wrong on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia
Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!
The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.
That’s not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I’m looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:
Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation
I get essentially what I’m looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I’m looking for is:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/do-you-have-a-basic-egg-on-toa-pkpsq9WwSMm5G8ICsmDnbw#0
Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.
I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we’re starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/deepseeks-new-ai-model-appears-to-be-one-of-the-best-open-challengers-yet/
*This could turn out to be wrong hence why I’m keeping an eye on it **I’m absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they’re spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them