The future and the role of Artificial intelligence.

[ChrisOnBali]

Sure, if you really must

My dog's got no nose
How does it smell ?
Terrible !

Maybe you've heard that one before, IMHO it's a great gag and has an inherent cleverness that means it's still amusing second time around; but even with that, one would tire quickly on reading it time after time after time again, like one does the "I dislike trump, isn't that funny" gag on forums everywhere, every day, for years now.

Anyway, I'm not the Humour Stazi (or not until my reign of terror begins anyway) - so just IMHO and all that

 

[Helpful Herbert]

My company has invested a huge amount in various Microsoft AI products. Unfortunately hardly anybody uses them because they just aren't very useful. We are now getting begging emails asking us if we would kindly use co-pilot (which I believe costs $30 per person for a license). Apparently one of the things we can use it for is summarising email threads. Well whoopy doo. For me it's just clippy 2.0.
However people do use Gemini on their own phones when they need to pass an online training module

 

[ChrisOnBali]

It seems to me that these tools are useful for people who don't know much/bugger all about a subject and want to make it look like they do, while putting in the absolute minimum effort in the process.

While for people who really do know their stuff, it's like having a trainee do your work for you and having to explain to them what you want, then correct what they do, and then re-explaining, re-correcting etc etc. - which ultimately takes longer than if they'd just done it themselves in the first place and come up with a better solution too, not a bad solution that's been beaten with a stick until it's just about OK - this is especially the case for writing programming code - which is my area of 'knowing their stuff'.

Worse, the LLM doesn't learn from that process like a trainee might, so next time you have to explain the same thing again, and again, like having a very dumb trainee that you're forced to work with.

Really not great in either scenario - except for the charlatan who wants to do the minimum work to look good in the short term, it's absolutely spiffing for them of course.

Why anyone puts any stock into online technical tests these days is a mystery - plonk them in a room with an air-gapped computer, give them a simple spec and half an hour, then you'll see who knows what they're doing and can work well under pressure

 

[ChrisOnBali]

My company has invested a huge amount in various Microsoft AI products.

I feel for you - I'm retired these days, I did contract dev work for blue chips and the like in the UK for 30+ years but I still have pet projects and keep up with the latest tech, which is lovely as I can choose my own development stack, use the bleeding edge stuff that's not reliable enough for production, not have to smile at people at 9am and not be forced to use the latest cool methodology or bloody co-pilot etc