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What is a way to use AI to actually help people? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 18 points 1 day ago (5 children)

One thing to be clear when asking this question. Are you asking about all AI or do you mean current LLMs? Those are two very different things and will get you very different answers.

AI - can be good, Google's alphafold worked on new medicine, there's defect recognition models running in factories that increase consumer safety, and so much more. All of these have existed for a while or are still in development.

LLMs - well, I'm yet to see any actual net good from them in any way shape or form.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    LLMs are pretty good for office jobs where you have huge amounts of documents to churn through, chunking them into a RAG, and then asking the documents questions about itself that you can then verify by getting the page and line number that it pulled the reference from is super handy.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    We've had tools for fuzzy searching files for ages. Didn't need to steal all human work and burn the planet to make search a tiny bit easier

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  • [–] 5 points 19 hours ago

    Local LLMs, or SLMs, are surprisingly efficient at document handling with vague inputs, which was a weakness of traditional search algorithms. You can use a mid tier GPU for that.

    When the bubble pops, that's where the research community will go.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago (1 child)

    You may be right, but the question was, "How do we use AI to help people?" Not, "Is AI ethical?"

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago

    But if using the AI perpetuates the worst side effects, then it's not actually helping people in the long run, it's making things the tiniest bit easier in the very moment at the expense of their future. Doesn't sound helpful to me

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