GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America.

To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.

Apple's problem might be they were right too early which is sometimes worse than being wrong. The original vision of Siri was substantively correct in how AI would supercharge our phones but huge parts of the vision got forgotten when Siri was acquired by Apple and the original founders left. The original technical choices around Siri constrained it from evolving into something useful.

A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.

In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.

But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.

Translation. If the said random person is interesting in any media from non-english speaking countries. Anime, manhwa, cultivation web novels.

But you specified America, so I guess no.

Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown..

Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.

> What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life?

Coding adjacent, but my small town's small businesses have all dramatically improved their websites with LLMs. Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to.

You can't easily articulate the way in which mRNA vaccines were possible by internet. But internet definitely played an important part.

Internet

- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet

- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet

- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet

Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.