The point being made is that while this may be grating for you. It is magic for a large part of the population. This combined with chatgpt advanced voice mode shows a direction of travel for AI agents. It makes it possible to imagine a world where everyone has personalized tutors and that world isn't very far away.
> It makes it possible to imagine a world where everyone has personalized tutors and that world isn't very far away.
My issue with AI hype is exactly this. Everything is “imagine if this was just better enough to be useful”
“Imagine if we had an everything machine”
“Image everyone having a personal assistant/artist/tutor/programmer”
“Imagine a world where finance is decentralized and we all truly own our digital stuff”
<rant>
I’m not much of a visionary, admittedly, but it’s exhausting being told to imagine products that only half exist now.
Having worked with LLMs in the autonomous agent space, I think we’re very far away from agents actually doing useful work consistently.
There are still so many problems to be solved around the nature of statistical models. And they’re hard problems where the solution, at least at the product level, boils down to “wait for a better model to come out”
I’m just tired of people imagining a future instead of building useful things today
At any given time there are millions of children who will fall for the coin behind the ears trick. It's magic to this large part of the population. That doesn't make it a technique I need to evaluate for my professional practice, because I'm not a clown.
Ariana already has personalized tutors. Wikipedia, for example is just arriving in different forms. you could argue chatbots are superior in many forms versus a podcast where you can't just scan information
It does have a tendacy to meander or spend too time reflecting on a topic instead of distilling the details. However the new ability to add a prompt improves this greatly.
Some instructions that worked for me:
- Specifics instead of high level
- Approach from non-critical perspective
- Dont be philosophical
- Use direct quotes often
- Focus on the details. Provide a lesson, not reflections
- Provide a 'sparknotes' style thorough understanding of the subject
The podcasts are grating to listen to and usually only contain very surface information I could gain from a paper’s abstract.
It’s a wildly impressive technical achievement though.