Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using language models for location or time based things is not recommended, as this usually requires non-textual data. Better to use them for general knowledge questions, programming help, translation, or writing. Asking them to do any complex calculations (especially when they also require non-text raw data, like inflation in a given time period) is also futile.
> general knowledge questions, programming help, translation, or writing. They get all of these wrong too. It's like some AI-specific variant of the Gell-man amnesia effect. It's usually right in the first sentence, but if you really know the answer, it's often either very debatable or completely wrong by the halfway mark of the paragraph. Meanwhile, the associated brand authority is problematic.
For instance, I needed to write code to spawn a child process and communicate with it via stdin/stdout in C++. This is pretty easy in most modern languages but in C++ you have to call POSIX's dump process spawning dance pretty much with raw syscalls. fork, execve, etc.
Rather than googling all the syscalls I would need and how to arrange them I just asked ChatGPT to do it. I've done it before so it was much easier to verify than to start from scratch.
And it got it 90% right. The only bit it got wrong was to make a single pipe and connect it to both stdin and stdout, rather than one pipe for each. But that was easy to spot and fix.
AI - at least for programming - is an enormous time saver. Could easily increase productivity by 50% in some cases.
In 5 years I expect it to be as normal as using an IDE. There are still people that slow themselves down by using unintelligent editors, and they will probably continue to live in the 80s, but people that use tools to help them will expect to use Copilot or similar all the time.