Pure opinion, but I feel like the UK has a strong cultural bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been done, which can make us a bit resistant to new technologies and ways of doing things.
With this strategy I entirely missed blockchain, crypto and NFTs and am in the process of missing AI.
AI is a completely different story: you likely not even realize you are already a heavy user just as a side effect of everything technological you use, from voice dictation, to medical, to all the images you see around. Soon also: when you are going to watch a movie. Moreover LLMs are already transforming the way people work.
These two entities, blockchian and AI, have very little in common if not the hype.
There's a lot of stuff that LLMs can do for me that Google never could, like synthesise a new python script to solve some idea I want to iterate on.
But also, Google results nose-dived and only recently seemed to get less bad… though now it seems to be the turn of the YouTube home page to be 60 items of which 45 are bad, 14 are in my watch later list already, and only 1 is both new to me and interesting.
What I am saying is that the applications of AI cannot be fulfilled to the level of the promises made. The promises were made to solicit hype to generate cash, not because the idea was viable or achievable on proof. When we reach maturity, we'll see what is left and I'll wait for that. That's fine. In the mean time I'll have to put up with cats appearing every time I search for dogs in Apple Photos and arguing with ChatGPT about its understanding of the relative magnitude of 9.9 and 9.11, while everyone tells me repeatedly with sweat on their brow that WhateverMODEL+1 will make that problem go away, which it didn't on WhateverMODEL-3,-2,-1,0. Only another $2 billion of losses and we'll nail it then!!!
The end game for all technology changes is not what we think it will be. Been in this game a long time and that is the only certainty.
For general Q&A they can hallucinate, but so long as you are using it to augment your productivity and not as a driver this isn't any different than using stack overflow, or any other kind of question you might ask on the internet. It's basically a non issue too if you upload a document into its context window and stick to asking questions about that document though.
As for the other points, I rather like to spend some time thinking on them personally. If you're not connected to the decision yourself, what are you?
Just so we are clear, for Japanese to English translation, DeepL is hot garbage compared to a top class LLM with the right prompt. DeepL translations are basically unreadable, and regularly just cut sections out entirely! So I wouldn't call DeepL "best of breed" by any means, it's not even at the starting line. Can't comment on English <-> French/Spanish/German/etc though, never tried it with those.
In my case the epub was technically a replacement for a fan translation I was reading, which was decent enough, but with a simple script and instructions to keep the vibes of a light novel, it got very good, I remain impressed. Next I plan to convert it all to markdown to see if I can help encourage it to structure paragraphs properly, the html tags have so far limited it to line by line translation.
When I've experimented with officially translated works, meaning cases where I've translated the raw and compared it to the official, it's still not up to par, but good enough in my opinion. I'm not aware of any payed service that streamlines this yet though, not sure why. It's nothing like traditional MTL.
> As for the other points, I rather like to spend some time thinking on them personally. If you're not connected to the decision yourself, what are you?
What? It's a dialogue, a conversation, I bounce ideas off it and ask for advice to help guide the direction of my thinking, have you ever even used an LLM? I do this with my friends and co-workers too, do you not do this?
This comes off as a bit presumptuous, an LLM lacks executive thinking, if I'm not directing the conversation then the LLM has nothing to give.
AI wiping out programming as a career. AI wiping out writing stories. AI replacing the need for doctors to diagnose illness. AI generally replacing all white collar jobs.
LLMs are useful assistants, but they are nowhere near the hype flooded everywhere a year or so ago.
Did everyone think it would take two months and all the doctors in the world would lose their jobs to ChatGPT?
AI is a societal shift that will take place over the next 20, 30, and 40 years, much like what happened with personal computing. This is a time horizon that impacts investments right now. Professions that existed for thousands of years will cease to exist. That is an unbelievably big change.
> AI wiping out writing stories
FWIW, I think LLMs make better stories than quite a lot of the human writers on Reddit.
Not that many of the Redditors were ever going to go on to be successful novelists of course (and I say that as someone who is struggling to finish writing this darn book for the best part of a decade now…)
Well, so long as the monarchy and the castles remain.
The House of Lords though, now that is weird.
I see people who are doing white collar jobs where most of it is doing stuff on computers being absolutely not interested in any of it.
I work with generally people from all over Europe and it mostly is the same so I would not say Brits are like that but more generally people have bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been doing.
Last month our company released new interface because old one is built on unsupported tech and with all the regulations we have to change it anyway - outrage lasted 2 weeks - people are getting used to new way and in 2 months no one will remember the old way.
Much better than having sheepish mentality and chasing what rest of the crowd is chasing too, shows some character and thinking for oneself and not being an easy subject to manipulation. X was almost pure toxicity even before musk's ego trip and I never understood why I should care about some random brainfarts of people 'I should be following', don't people have their own opinions formed by their own experience? Thats rather poor way of spending limited time we have here, on top of training oneself in quick cheap dopamine kicks which messes up people for rest of their lives.
ChatGPT at least tries to be added value, but beyond a bit better search, hallucinating some questionable code and some random cute pics (of which novelty wears off extremely fast), I don't see it, I mean I see the potential, just not reality right now. Plus that code part - I want to keep training myself and my analytical mind, I don't want to be handed easy answers and become more passive and lazy. That's why I do git via command line tool and not just clicking around. That's why I don't mind at all doing some easier algorithms instead of having them served. My employer only wants good result, I am not working in sweat shop being paid by number of lines of code per day.
Quality life is about completely different things anyway. IMHO UK is fine in this regard.