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Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#21

Post by Sabinus »

eclectric wrote: post #9
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #3

Google search has become so poor, I now use copilot instead of it, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo. It’s almost like reliving the late 1990s with far more ads, more vanilla websites, and worse search engine quality.

Seems like an intentional move to get more people accustomed to Gemini (or the others)

It's so users run more searches and are exposed to more ads. Google used to firewall the Search development team from the Ads team. That changed, some managers were fired, and now the Ads team can tell the Search team to make changes to how search works to make more ad money. Happened before the current AI era.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#22

Post by paulcole »

> we were not able to do this before llms, but now we can

I’m in a leadership/operational role at a small marketing agency.

Pre-LLM I was writing a variety of scripts manually to automate and simplify processes. With LLMs, I’m still creating scripts but writing none of them. The complexity of processes that I’m able to automate has gone up significantly and the time it takes to write working scripts has gone from (at best) hours to minutes.

No longer am I limited by my knowledge of how to code. Now I’m limited by my ability to explain our business processes.

If LLMs weren’t a thing, I’d imagine I’d have hired at least 1 and probably 2 people to work on automations full-time.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#23

Post by Sabinus »

thrown-0825 wrote: post #8

chatgpt was acting like my dads therapist and was making him pretty depressed. this motivated us to get him a real therapist and have a long conversation about the dangers of humanizing ai

What was it telling him if you don't mind sharing?

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#25

Post by yodsanklai »

languages: I never used google translate, but I quite often ask language questions to chatgpt. For instance, "give me examples of sentences using expression XYZ", "fix grammar mistakes in this paragraph" and so on...

And of course coding. Use case 1: replace stack overflow. use case 2: coding agent -> "perform this task for me".

Not life changing but useful.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#26

Post by keiferski »

For me personally: as a way to answer specific questions and do research. I used to rely on /r/ask subreddits for these types of questions, and now I just ask ChatGPT.

For example:

- Recommend me some books on XYZ topic

- I have this idea X; can you tell me if someone has written about something similar?

- Evaluate my argument and suggest ways to improve it

...and so on.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#27

Post by Adrig »

skwee357 wrote: post #14

I basically no longer use Google search for fact checking, product suggestions, or research. Every time I want to get some information, I just prompt perplexity. When I need to find something, I do the same. I only use Google with queries for "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to get opinions of real people on a particular manner. Now, before you jump on me saying that AI is wrong, this is true. But at…

I finally made DDG my main search engine because I use Perplexity for anything substantial. It works quite well

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#28

Post by mattmanser »

skwee357 wrote: post #14

I basically no longer use Google search for fact checking, product suggestions, or research. Every time I want to get some information, I just prompt perplexity. When I need to find something, I do the same. I only use Google with queries for "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to get opinions of real people on a particular manner. Now, before you jump on me saying that AI is wrong, this is true. But at…

I don't even bother with the site: stuff, adding the site name like 'how to change a lightbulb reddit', 'tabs Vs spaces hacker news' seems to work just as well.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

#29

Post by atleastoptimal »

I used to get a deep sense of dread trying to write apps or code complex projects. I could always do well at LeetCode style programming challenges, but making full-blown web apps and managing all the set up, initialization issues and bug fixes was a headache that turned me off from software engineering.

However now all that is way easier with LLM's and stuff like Claude Code, I don't have that dread anymore because I can always just increase/decrease the amount I rely on LLM's and use them as a Hail Mary so I am not spending hours searching a super specific weird bug.

I know it means I may not be learning as much, but I see it as a worthwhile exchange because otherwise I probably would have not gone into making apps or doing anything ambitious in the first place.

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