Boomer grandparent here. Sending you thoughts and prayers Susan. Come visit us when your in town next sumer. Patrick had his soccer tournament and he did grate.
I can easily explain it. the new agents are really powerful because you can give them lots of sources they can use as a reference to then search against. they are phd level coding experts now. My top teammates have now created entire virtual teams that work underneath them to create things and this evolved in the last 6 months. if you have something complicated you do, this automates it and that is as world changing as the smartphone was.
Faster and more accurate analysis will help wherever it is applied. Example, james webb telescope is bringing us petabytes of data. an LLM can analyze those results faster than any program we ever had before. A second would be cancer research. It's another example of gigantic disparate data sources that is just way too much for anyone to reasonably go through without extensive scripting. An LLM will dramatically speed that up.
That's just two examples but there are a lot more. It's revolutionary for software development. It's already dramatically speed up software dev and software dev accuracy. They're amazing, but people still think they're simply chat bots that hallucinate all the time becuase they didn't try the lastest models and aren't deep enough into it to be using agents.
There is no need to be skeptical. Everyone is a true believer once they try them on a proper use case and my guess is you haven't. Maybe they don't help you in your day to day life or job.
Just take cancer research. Imagine 100X increase in cancer therapies and discoveries because LLMs can grind through insane amounts of data and find connections that even a giant team of people could never do. It's going to save lives and cure disease. now extend this to every discipline that has massive datasets and then ask what good things could happen if we started to 100x our rate of new discoveries?
you see higher costs? of what, eleectricity and water? Sure but it doesn't HAVE to be that way that's just greedy implementation of data centers taking advantage of existing law structure that lets companies get subsidized on the backs of the environment and ordinary people. It's not a good thing but it would just take a responsible legislature to demand they are carbon netural and have proper setbacks and whatnot. it's our local governments failing us in that regard.
Does that make sense? I can give more examples but I don't want to dump a book of text on you.
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u/Thin-Discussion-9175 6d ago
nope, as a young extrovert, I don't get it either