Comment by iugtmkbdfil834
1 day ago
This is by the weirdest possible opinion on llms as a whole. Not the AI booster club, not the AI doomer, not the undecided, but somehow "I can't think of anything to use it for." It is like watching the beginning of the internet in 90s and saying there is nothing to browse. The whole concept is just weird to me. At least the first 3, I can conceptually understand. It is admittedly hard for me to understand someone saying 'i tried this and best it can do is summarize emails'; I am not saying it is not true ( my boss said that exact thing ), but it is hard for me to reconcile with my view of the world.
To be fair, this was a commonly expressed opinion when the internet was in its infancy.
Paul Krugman (1998)
• "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
Clifford Stoll (1995)
• "We'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure."
• "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."
• "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data."
There's a massive tendency amongst even intelligent people to completely dismiss the potential of new technology based on that technology's current observed capability.
Also seems weird to me. Claude cowork could just do my monthly tax receipt collection and compare with my account better than the bookkeeper I pay for it. That is a very cross sectional problem
Most people rarely have these kind of administrative tasks in the first place, and when they do they often run into GP's barrier 1. I can't recommend that my extended family have Claude do their taxes, even though I work with it on my own taxes, because they might ask for something that produces bad results and can't evaluate the output to double check. ("Hey Claude, I want a higher refund, can you tell me what to put on the forms so I get at least $3000?")