a recent example I came across was losing a single airpod (dropped on street) and getting a find my notification only when I was already several blocks away. Went back, 30 mins had passed, nowhere to be found.

This is the kind of thing that makes it really clear how far away we actually are from 'real world' intelligence or maybe better described as common sense in our devices, in the detail.

Obviously, the intelligent thing to do there would have been to spam me with notifications the instant my devices noticed my airpods were separated by > 10 metres, one was moving away from the other, and the stationary one was in a street or at least some place that was not home.

But although AI can search really well, and all sorts of other interesting stuff, I think we all have to admit that it still seems really hard to imagine it taking 'initiative' so to speak even in that super simple situation and making a good decision and acting on it in the sensible way that any human would, unless it was specifically programmed to do so.

And that's the problem I think fundamentally, at least for now. There's just too much randomness and too many situations that can occur in the real world, and there's too many integration points for LLMs to deal with these, even supposing they would deal with them well.

In theory it seems like it could be done, but in practice it isn't being done even after years of the tech being available, and by the most well funded companies.

That's the kind of thing that makes me think the long tail of usefulness of LLMs on the ground is still really far away.