I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
It’s what models people have access to and how they use it. If you are not specific and overly broad it a search engine. If you move to the other end of the spectrum it can be incredibly powerful.
I tend to build projects with very limited sources for it to draw answers from and use complex instructions to guide how it interacts with the source material. It’s a tool. If you learn how to use it you can become extremely proficient/productive with it.
For example, stacks of PDFs may make sense to you and I as repositories of information. But is that the best format for AI to interact with the data? Probably not unless the actual formatting of the information on the page is relevant. I have been converting large groups of sources into databases containing page, line, and text data for groups of references for a given topic. Then you feed it the database and ask it to review and cross reference related lines of text. That serves as your “brain” for questions on a given topic.
I follow you and that all makes sense.