Hacker News Reader

Comment by StopDisinfo910 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is absolutely selling them as pa and already selling a lot. I think HNers being mostly software developers live in a bubble when it comes to the reality of what LLMs are actually used for.

Speedy minutes are absolutely not a template away. Anyone who ever had to write minutes for a complicated meetings knows it’s hard and requires a lot of back and forth for everyone to agree about what was said and decided.

Now you just turn on Copilot and you get both a transcript and an adequate basis for good minutes. Bonus point: it’s made by a machine so no one complains it has bias.

Some people here are blind to how useful that is.

View on HN

There are so many tasks in the world that

1. Involve a computer

2. Do not require incredible intelligence

3. Involve the messiness of the real world enough that you can't write exact code to do it without it being insanely fragile

LLMs suddenly start to tackle these, and tackle them kind of all at once. Additionally they are "programmed" in just English and so you don't need a specialist to do something like change the tone of the summary or format, you just write what you want.

Assuming the models never get any smarter or even cheaper, and all we get is neater integrations, I still think this is all huge.

Do you really believe the outlay in terms of computer power is worth it to change the tone of an email? If it never gets better, this is a vast waste of an enormous amount of resources.

That's not what I've talked about them being for, but regardless it depends on the impact surely. If it can show you how someone may misunderstand your point and either help correct it or just show the problem then yes that can easily be worth spending a few cycles on. The additional energy cost of further back and forths caused by a misunderstanding could very easily be higher. At full whack, my GPU draws something like 10x what my monitor does, so fixing something quickly and automatically can easily use less power than doing it automatically.

Again though, that's not at all what I've talked about.

This is a business practice issue and staff issue, not a meeting minutes issue. I have meetings daily, and have never had this issue. You make it clear what is decided during the meeting, give anyone a chance to query or question, then no one can argue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com