I don’t know of any super high-quality ones that run well, but the Open Assistant project, (now archived) collected responses from voluntary participants (myself included) to build what is now considered a very high-quality dataset of chat conversation pairs, truly open source, and all voluntarily submitted instead of scraped.
The models are reasonable for fine-tuning, but aren’t very good compared to newer models from large companies.
I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren’t the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it’s a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it’s paraphrasing aren’t helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)
Oh yeah, it’s definitely useful for that!
Since LLMs are essentially just very complicated probabilistic links between words, it seems to be extremely good at picking the exact word or phrase that even a thesaurus couldn’t get me.
I primarily end up using LLMs through DuckDuckGo’s private frontend alongside a search, so if my current search doesn’t yield the correct answer to my question (i.e. I ask for something but those keywords only ever turn up search results on a different, but similar topic) then I go to the LLM and ask a more refined question, that otherwise doesn’t produce any relevant results in a traditional keyword search.
I also use integrated LLMs to format and distill my offhand notes, (and reformat arbitrary text based on specific criteria repeatedly for structured notes,) learn programming syntax more at my own pace and in my own way, and just generally get answers on more well-known topics a lot faster than I would scrolling past 5 pages of SEO-“optimized” garbage just designed to fill time for the ads to load before actually giving me a good answer.
I have never once found an “AI” feature integrated by a corporation useful.
I have only ever found “AI” useful when it’s unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don’t need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won’t solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.
I feel like this says more about these students’ schools, rather than the students themselves.
You will eat here, and you will be happy about it! 😡
I think we’ll probably see a phone comparable to at least 2022 specs in the coming years, since they seem to release a new model every 2-3 years, with pretty decent improvements each time. Especially with their growing partnerships with chip manufacturers, it might even be possible to keep prices more reasonable too.
I currently use a phone released in 2022, and it’s perfectly functional for all my needs. Would more performance be nice? Sure, but yeah, I don’t actually need more than that.
If Fairphone could reach that mark, I would consider my next replacement phone being a Fairphone, although the lack of GrapheneOS support is kind of a deal-breaker for any phone purchase for me right now.
Even if you buy a phone that isn’t a pixel, then you just end up giving money to a different privacy-invasive corporation that will continue to partner with Google for search deals and surveillance advertising.
Pixels have wide aftermarket repair parts available, relatively reasonable pricing, and the largest support from custom roms since they all test on Pixels as a standard device. (same with app developers)
Pixels often have longer update periods than other brands, and many custom roms provide extended security updates on top of that.
Android development is guaranteed to continue supporting at least the Pixel phones over all others, it’ll be easier to repair down the line, and the money Google makes from the sale is nothing compared to the money they’ll lose by having less power to surveil you.
And as much as I like Fairphone, the specs just aren’t worth the cost currently, although they are catching up as time goes on.
I personally use a Pixel with GrapheneOS, and it works better than any phone from Samsung I’ve owned in the past. (plus it’s usually a bit easier to unlock the bootloader)
Just make sure that, no matter what phone you buy, you don’t buy it through your carrier, as that will make your bootloader un-unlockable unless you pay off the full payment plan and have a carrier that supports unlocking the bootloader in the first place.
To counteract the somewhat clickbait-y title:
There’s still no indication it’s spreading between humans, and it doesn’t seem to be “raising anxiety,” at least not in any significant way. “This will be of enormous interest” - DR. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert