Comment by ssl-3
4 hours ago
As a realistic construct:
When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation.
(And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well.
Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning.
It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
I wouldn't even use a bot for that, there's price comparison websites and of course I know where to find the cheapest stuff already.
Which makes me think: would a generation raised on AI and automating these things even consider looking for e.g. deals on household consumables? This is spiraling doomerism at this point, but, do people who outsource the hard thinking to LLMs get fresh ideas or inspiration still?
I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then.
These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :)
I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly.
But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[].
[]: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
I wanted some banana plugs for my speakers, as well as I needed some longer speaker wire. I kinda wanted it for the weekend so I could watch movies with some friends. I didn't want to order online as that wouldn't arrive in time. Three stores around me had some, but they were quite far apart and I didn't want to drive to all of them, so I needed to figure out which store had ones that were actually decent and not too crappy.
LLMs completely and utterly failed at this.
The Mensa test results are impressive but are in no way shape or form relevant to real world scenarios.
I wanna see benchmarks on successfully completing benefits applications, on finding the best option to purchase X from, on correctly identifying a piece of furniture and its condition and setting a correct price on it and selling it on craigslist/FB market place and so forth.
You've got a good approach.
Also: What banana plugs did you wind up with?
I've been looking for usable, insulated, stackable banana plugs that work with 12 AWG wire for over a decade.
For a lot of my audio things, I can get by with MDPs from Pamona Eelectronics. They're insulated-enough, stackable, dual-banana plugs on 3/4" centers and where they work, they work very well. (I don't recall if 12AWG is within spec or not, but it can be made to fit.)
But they do not work on audio widgets that do not have 3/4" spacing, like my aging Lexicon receiver and its great quantity of binding posts for speakers.
I don't care if they're glitzy or fabulous-looking. I just want functional, insulated, stackable single banana plugs.
(The common marketplace is full of elaborate gold-plated non-insulated things. I guess they're pretty, but they're a hazard and nobody will see them again soon at all if everything goes well. Their function-follows-form beauty is only detrimental.)
Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it:
I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists.
The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?