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So besides coding, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, images, translation, proofreading, analysing contracts, tech support, playing Minecraft with, ERP, military targeting analysis, cybersecurity (defensive/offensive), drafting emails, summarizing documents, explaining history/science, doing everything that a search engine can do and more, writing and analysing spreadsheet functions, making charts and dashboards, sales research, writing fanfiction, earnings call analysis, document dump analysis, home repair/DIY fixes, recipes for cooking, car diagnostics from symptoms, real-time captioning for the deaf and literally lifesaving medical diagnoses...
Besides this handful of niche fields, what have LLMs ever done for us?
Doesn't it surprise you that Google is planning to spend $200 billion on AI this year? Mysteriously they don't seem to think it's a niche use-case but vital to their whole company's future since their core business of 'search' is another word for AI. And LLMs are at the heart of AI.
When I have issues with a piece of software not working and spitting out some incomprehensible error message I can now ask an AI and get a much better answer compared to trawling through forum posts from 8 years ago. Or get it to directly analyse and fix the code. Most programs have gotten much better in useability.
There are strong arguments against AI but 'it's mostly useless' is extremely silly. If it were useless nobody would care much about it, mostly useless is Siri-tier AI in the 2010s. Nobody cared much about Siri.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
That's a long list you've got there, but it includes things that LLMs have not made any useful contributions to (e.g. teaching, physics, chemistry), things that are obviously frivolous (e.g. cybersex, playing video games), things that LLMs are fundamentally untrustworthy with (e.g. legal contracts, most analyses), and things that LLMs are just plain terrible at (e.g. fiction, image generation), so... yes, besides those things. I think that was a long list of nonsense intended to overawe, rather than a serious discussion of what these bots are able to do.
I think there are some use cases for LLMs, but overall much less than their boosters think. When the general public rejects this technology as not useful for them, the general public is mostly correct.
This is exactly the problem. What we are talking about is public opposition to data centres, which, as Sun discusses, is predicated at least in part on the judgement that bots are not particularly useful. If 'AI' companies want to earn the public trust, they need to demonstrate both their trustworthiness and the usefulness of their products, and thus far they are failing at both those tasks. Sneering at the peasants is certainly not going to help them in these tasks.
Fiction is middling at best but LLMs (or adjacent technologies) are now pretty great at image generation. perhaps a bit narrow but the six-fingered hand is a thing of the past, and text is more or less solved on top models.
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