This is an issue with many humans I’ve hired, though. Maybe they try to cut corners and do a shitty job, but I occasionally check, if they are bad at their job, I warn them, correct them, maybe eventually fire them. For lots of stuff, AI can be interacted with in a very similar way.
This is so similar to many people’s complaints with self driving cars. Sure, accidents will still be had, they are not perfect, but neither are human drivers. If we hold AI to some standard that is way beyond people then yes, it’s not there, but if we say it just needs to be better than people, then it is there for many applications, but more importantly, it is rapidly improving. Even if it was only as good as people at something, it is still way cheaper and faster. For some things, it’s worth it if it isn’t even as good as people yet.
I have very little issues with hallucinations anymore, when I use an LLM to get anything involving facts, I always tell it to give sources for everything, and i can have another agent independently verify the sources before i see them. Often times I provide the books or papers that I want it to specifically source from. Even if I am going to check all the sources myself after that, it is still way more efficient then if I did the whole thing myself. The thing is, with the setups I use, I literally never have it make up sources anymore. I remember that kind of thing happening back in the days when AI didn’t have internet access, and there really weren’t agents yet. I realize some people are still back there, but in the future(that many of us are in) its basically solved. There is still logic mistakes and such, that stuff can’t be 100% depended on, but if you have a team of agents going back and forth to find an answer, then you pass it to another team of agents to independently verify the answer, and have it cycle back if a flaw is found, many issues just go away. Maybe some mistakes make it through this whole process, but the same thing happens sometimes with people.
I don’t have the link on hand, but there have been studies done that show gpt3.5 working in agentic cycles perform as good or better than gpt4 out of the box. The article I saw that in was saying that basically there are already people using what gpt5 will most likely be just by using teams of agents with the latest models.
I think there may be some confusion about how much energy it takes to respond to a single query or generate boilerplate code. I can run Llama 3 on my computer and it can do those things no problem. My computer would use about 6kWh if I ran it for 24 hours, a person in comparison takes about half of that. If my computer spends 4 hours answering queries and making code then it would take 1kWh, and that would be a whole lot of code and answers. The whole thing about powering a small town is a one-time process when the model is made, so to determine if that it worth it or not it needs to be distributed over everyone who ends up using the model that is produced. The math for that would be a bit trickier.
When compared to the amount of energy it would take to produce a group of people that can do question answering and code writing, I’m very certain that the ai model method is considerably less. Hopefully, we don’t start making our decision about which one to produce based on energy efficiency. We may, though, if the people that choose the fate of the masses sees us like livestock, then we may end up having our numbers reduced in the name of efficiency. When cars were invented, horses didn’t end up all living in paradise. There were just a whole lot less of them around.