I’m not much of an AI skeptic compared to most on Lemmy. I think the technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society if we can remove the control of the ruling class.

That said I truly don’t understand how the AI business model is supposed to work. I’m sure there is some market for businesses, governments, etc., basically people who have too much money who may want to pay for the latest and greatest models.

But I don’t really see the average consumer doing this when slightly less good versions will almost certainly be available for free. And the above customers will not be able to support the level of investment that’s going on right now.

technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society

For what? It’s not reliable enough to actually automate anything and people that use it regularly inevitably stop checking the output and start falling victim to hallucinations. It’s pretty good at rifling through social media posts which I don’t think is good for society and it’s OK as a frontline support system but even that they normally go too far and just make it infuriating

It’s not reliable enough to actually automate anything

This is half true. It’s not reliable enough to automate an entire job but it is reliable enough to automate tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time, usually related to sifting or searching data.

If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.

You don’t even need the cloud models for this, you can slap SearXNG onto a local model at home.

It’s basically just an autocomplete search on steroids which is its biggest advantage. Any documentation you need is immediately accessible, which is especially useful if you have zero experience with something niche or new.

Now actually getting the LLM to consistently generate output is a completely different story lol.

We call that vibe coding.