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LLMs are now in the lifeworld

This episode of Hardfork astutely captures something I’ve been trying to articulate for ages. If you see LLMs in terms of the hype cycles, capital investment and the bullshit pathway to AGI, you risk losing sight of the ever expanding range of utterly mundane ways in which LLMs are now in the lifeworld:

I think about it as a journal that talks back to you. Which is like kind of what being coached in anything feels like that. You think about your learning an athletic skill …. you have a coach who is standing there with you and says “hey go try this thing” and you do it and you come back and the coach says “next time do it this way”. That is essentially what the AI is doing. Because it is this general purpose technology it can coach you pretty well in a lot of things. One of the things I like about this is it gets around a common and true criticism of these chatbots which is they make a lot of mistakes, they hallucinate. All of that is true. But if you just want to become a novice at meditating, it can handle that. Actually it’s really good at it.

So I think it’s important to find those chatbot use cases where it’s not mission critical, no one’s life or career is at stake, but it can provide you this meaningful help. That actually is the truest story of AI that is unfolding right now. This expanding set of positive and helpful and increasingly more powerful things. If you’re not encountering that, I do think you’re missing out a big part of what’s missing in Silicon Valley now.

There are simply more people having mundane relations with the technology in their lifeworld, often in specialised and specific ways which don’t show up in the broadest categories of use.

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