You need to sit down with an offline LLM and learn what they can actually do. It is not good at doing the work for you. It is excellent at helping you explore yourself in countless ways you can never access on your own. It can answer all of the questions you don’t quite understand as you try and navigate a new subject. It is easily able to amplify and accelerate the learning process. It can be abused like anything, but there is nothing new about that.

The articles and framing of AI as something bad is all coming from manipulation of the media by Altman and company. It is about trying to control the next tech monopoly that will dominate the next decade. It is already too late for that though. Open Source offline AI will beat what Open AI has tried to control. Yann LeCunn is the person to watch in this space. He is a Bell Labs alumni pushing open source AI as the head of Meta AI. If you know anything about the current digital age, that combination of someone from the old Bell Labs pushing open source to lead an industry without trying to monopolize it should mean a great deal.

AI is not really super capable like some kind of AGI. It is like Stack Overflow or old forum threads level helpful with complex tasks. It is also a mirror of both the datasets culture and person that creates the prompts. It is only as good as your vocabulary and ability to understand its idiosyncrasies while communicating on a level of openness that humans are not accustomed. This is an evolved tool. It is not AGI. It is not persistent. It can not learn on its own. There are very real limitations with how much information can be processed at once, and limitations for niche information. This is no time to be a Luddite. It is still an order of magnitude less capable than a human but offers access to tailored information on a level that has only been available to the super rich that hire tutors for their children any make major donations to institutions in the real “cheating” of the system you will never be able to object to.

I greatly value learning, so much so, that I jumped at the opportunity to have custom tailored learning the second I had the chance. It ended up being even better than I expected. There are scientific models and several ways to setup a model with your own documents where it can answer questions and cite sources.