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No offense, but this is an incredible statement of ignorance. I use them at work and they are amazing. Not in any way a toy or marginal in value.
You get it. Same thing for LLMs. Most Americans regularly use LLMs. A vast supermajority of younger adults do. There's such real and obvious demand.
What do you do, out of curiosity?
I design electronics. I can make layouts and order PCBs. I design RF structures. I also test my designs myself. I need practical coding skills to automate testing, run FEM simulations programmatically, process measured data, etc.
I currently work for a major tech company and some would call me a tech bro. My work gives me LLM access for free. The Google search free LLM is mentally retarded. If you tried free LLMs and found them to be dumb, try a good one instead.
Are you using it mostly for coding, then?
To the latter point - I hope you can understand why many people are skeptical of arguments that go, "oh, of course the samples of our product that you can try are crap, you have to pay us, then you'll realise why it's worthwhile". Well, no. It's the company's job to sell the product to me, not vice versa. There's also a bit of a psychological trick there as well, in that once you pay money for something, you have a bias toward convincing yourself that it was worthwhile. Lastly, I am skeptical because people who seem to have good judgement who do pay for it also seem to report that it's crap. All the patterns of conversation look the same. I've read transcripts of LLM conversations on advanced models and... I'm sorry, it's all the same old beige. There is no evidence available to me that they're worthwhile, and "oh, you have to pay for it in order to understand why it's worth paying for" is not a reasonable argument.
For what it's worth, I work in a very different area to you. I work in aged care, and I cannot think of a use for LLMs here. The main way they have changed my work is just by requiring me to sort through and filter out a lot more slop when I try to find a picture, piece of music, or video to show to residents, so the main way they have featured in my workplace is as a mild annoyance. What on Earth could I use generative 'AI' for?
As another data point, I currently use a $100/month Claude subscription, duck.ai free from the browser, and midjourney.
Claude was paid for and set up from work, and it is very, very good. I am an artist, and it is much better at coding than me, and is able to implement code solutions for the technical problems I run into integrating my art into my company's project. It is tremendously efficient and effective so far with all the tasks I've thrown at it.
Midjourney, I paid a hundred bucks for a year's subscription. I used it very heavily on a project, and got some excellent results out of it, but the project petered out and trying to apply it to other projects has not worked well so far. Mostly I've dropped it for the time being to work on other things.
Duck.AI I've found is pretty good at solving code problems, but more than that is very good at assisting in finding solutions to technical problems with complex art software like blender. It is much, much better than the old solution of googling questions, even before google search enshittified, because it generates topical summaries aimed specifically at the question presented rather than websites which contain keyword matches somewhere within them. I've been making really good progress in areas that were too frustrating to pursue previously, and it's frankly pretty great.
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