Enormous language models are now a solution for everyone. The versatility of this technology is part of its appeal: the apply cases for generative AI seem both enormous and limitless. But then you apply this material, and not enough of it works very well. And you wonder what we’re actually achieving here.
ON this episode VergecastNilay returns to the show with some thoughts on the current state of artificial intelligence — especially after spending the summer trying to get his sharp home up and running. But before we get to that, let’s talk about our up-to-date ad-free podcast option that launched this week! (If you are a subscriber, please go to your account settings to find channels for all our programs.) We also talk about Apple’s up-to-date MacBook Pro, iPad Pro and Vision Pro with the M5 processor and wonder how much of a difference the chip really is.
Then it’s time to talk about artificial intelligence. We’re talking about the state of AI assistants, which are clearly the killer consumer app for LLMs and which no one can yet build particularly well. ChatGPT and others are fun to apply! But that’s not the same as being useful – especially not in the omnipresent, omniscient way that we actually need. The ideal product here is obvious and tempting, but we don’t seem to be anywhere near it. Unless you’re really excited about talking to your laptop.
If you want to learn more about everything we cover in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first in the Podcasts and Gadgets news:
And in the lightning round: