Sri's AI Thoughts

Here is my hot take AI statement:

• AI is useful when you are too tired to think or don’t want to, which means you should be taking a rest instead of using AI
• AI is reliable for determining what the average person might claim to know about any subject, so you know what’s likely to be the common wisdom or dumbness about something. That is a useful reaction prompt to do something better.
• AI is useful for looking up patterns and names of things that are standard practices.
• Agentic AI and related harnesses are as smart as the average person working with such things, and the biases and limits of these persons are starting to hamstring it toward their own shaky thinking.
• AI is freeing creatives from having to work with people who don’t appreciate their work, whether they like it or not. Those people will gravitate toward cheap generated garbage that looks good enough to them. It’ll be obvious to anyone with taste, and the use of AI generation will likely make lack of taste even more obvious.
• Well-defined and well-scoped assistive technologies based on AI is useful.
• Local LLMs are probably nearly good enough to work in the assistive capacity to look up things and concepts, like a compressed Wikipedia, for concepts like mathematics, engineering principles, computer languages, chemistry. It replaces Internet search, which is full of garbage now and practically useless. This seems like an OK use of the technology, though stripping the data from its sources is a problem that hopefully open source model advocates figure out how to incorporate into the systems. I know there are some people trying to figure that out.
• Like AI-based pattern recognizers in machine vision and signal analysis. That’s super useful.
• In generative scenarios, it’s dumb.
• Cloud-based LLMs and services built off of them are the gold rush people are diving into hoping to strike it rich, and it’s making EVERYTHING more expensive for EVERYBODY.
• I currently think AI will at most raise the bar as for what is considered “average”. Taste and discernment might be the human qualities that keep humans competitive.