The merits are real. I do understand the deep mistrust people have for tech companies, but there’s far too much throwing out of the baby with the bath water.
As a solo developer, LLMs are a game-changer. They’ve allowed me to make amazing progress on some of my own projects that I’ve been stuck on for ages.
But it’s not just technical subjects that benefit from LLMs. ChatGPT has been a great travel guide for me. I uploaded a pic of some architecture in Berlin and it went into the history of it, I asked it about some damage to an old church in Spain - turned out to be from the Spanish civil war, where revolutionaries had been mowed down by Franco’s firing squads.
Just today, I was getting help from an LLM for an email to a Portuguese removals company. I sent my message in English with a Portuguese translation, but the guy just replied back with a single sentence in broken English:
“Yes a can , need tho mow m3 you need delivery after e gif the price”
The first bit is pretty obviously “Yes I can” but I couldn’t really be sure what he was trying to say with the rest of it. So I asked ChatGPT who responded:
It seems he’s saying he can handle the delivery but needs to know the total volume (in cubic meters) of your items before he can provide a price. Here’s how I’d interpret it:
“Yes, I can [do the delivery]. I need to know the [volume] in m³ for delivery, and then I’ll give you the price.”
Thanks to LLMs, I’m able to accomplish so many things that would have previously taken multiple internet searches and way more effort.
Ah shame - these improvements are unlikely to ever be ported to the HL2 VR mod