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Notes -
Since people keep talking about/recommending them, how do you use an LLM? I mean, most everything I search online is paywalled, and the free "AI tools" I've tried weren't very impressive (and ended up either shut down or paywalled)?
Could somebody give some ELI5-level guidance and/or recommendations?
Pick your poison, ChatGPT or Claude Sonnet. Go to their website, make an account with username and password, do a mobile verification and give them your email, promise not to do anything bad... and that's it. You just ask the machine your questions: "What are some good names for an enormously long armoured train?" and have a conversation with it: "Why do they [spiders] have eight eyes if their vision isn't so great, while birds have good eyesight with two?" You can ask it for code, stories, translation, just about anything you might ask a human (except anagrams and certain kinds of wordplay) and you get a pretty decent response, albeit it may make things up or give you blather.
It's like using microsoft outlook or gmail in your web browser, you're not downloading stuff unless you're an advanced user with a very powerful PC.
If you want the best models, you have to subscribe to Claude Opus or GPT-4, lesser models are free with ratelimiting. It's no harder than using netflix really.
Does that require having a smartphone?
Well, given that I've never used them, or any other streaming service (particularly as my Internet isn't good enough to support them), this isn't exactly a helpful comparison.
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