Oliver Reichenstein writing for iA: No feature

AI is a danger if you resign yourself to it and delegate all thinking to AI. AI is an opportunity if you use the extra processing power it can give us to think deeper, better, clearer.

I really appreciate iA and I believe they’re quite thoughtful about how they build their software. This of course means I’m encouraged by their take on what to do with LLMs and iA Writer. They haven’t announced their plans yet, but the linked post above is a first in a series where they’re building up to announcing what they’re adding.

The post is long and excellent, but I wanted to quote this above portion because I think it gets to crux of how I think about LLMs’ usefulness. Some people will say something like, “LLMs aren’t actually smart, so they’re not useful.” Others will say, “For it to be impressive, it has to do something that human beings can’t do themselves.” I don’t know, man, computers are ones and zeroes, which aren’t smart or do anything a person can’t do, but it turns out computers themselves are pretty damn useful.