Comment by xiphias2
20 days ago
Putting generative AI inside tools without giving deep understanding of those tools to the AI generally made me more confused and frustrated than outside of it:
for example Gemini forced itself on me on my SMS app, so I thought I ask it to search something simple inside the messages, and it just started generating some random text about searching and saying that it doesn't have access to the messages themselves.
When I use ChatGPT, of course I know they don't have access to my SMSs (it would be weird).
I can give ChatGPT the exact context I want to, and I know it will work with it as long as the context is not too big.
I think that’s fundamentally an important part of the value of ChatGPT compared to all the “integrated” AI approaches. Like you, I like that ChatGPT doesn’t have access to my SMSs, emails, documents, code, etc. When I use it, I like to choose the context it’s exposed to and then evaluate the output based on how much context I exposed it to.
For example, one of my main use cases for ChatGPT is crafting SQL queries. I never liked the SQL language. I understand how powerful it is, but I was never good at it. I find it to be structured in such an awkward and confusing way. I’m not smart enough to express what I’m looking for in SQL format. But ChatGPT is perfect for that. I give it a brief explanation of tables schema then ask it for a query and it spits out a SQL query for me. 70% of the time it looks good, 30% I’m skeptical it solves what I want.
I have tried many “Database/postgres AI services” that promise much better interface. They ask you for creds to your database, then inject all context/schema into the LLM so you just ask questions directly. They have all been too underwhelming. I ask a question about joining and reducing tables A and B, and it insists to involves tables C and D. I have to say “don’t worry about C and D”. So it involves E and F. I say “fuck, only consider A and B” and it generated an invalid query that assumes A and B have some columns from C, D, E or F. I say “please don’t consider any schema other that A and B schema. I’m looking for a result of joining A and B, reduces by columns X/Y giving the average of those” then feel stupid having to argue with a machine about what I’m looking for.