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pydryyesterday at 2:25 PM3 repliesview on HN

>The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks.

This doesnt track at all with my experience. Everybody is using it everywhere.

Moreover people are using them for daily life tasks even when it is not an appropriate use of LLMs - e.g. getting medical advice as you referred to or writing emails which are clearly pissing off their coworkers.

In this respect I see it as akin to radium - a new technology that got a little too fashionable for its own good when it first emerged and which will likely have many use cases scaled back.


Replies

TheScaryOneyesterday at 4:18 PM

>Everybody is using it everywhere.

No one in our Auto shop is using AI. One of the new diagnostic tools was demo'd with AI, and none of us were having it. It's about as accurate as Googling your symptoms.

My mother had an AI powered lung scan that came back with Stage 4 Cancer. The Oncologist got called in (for a fee!) to tell us it was just early stage COPD.

HDThoreaunyesterday at 7:22 PM

> getting medical advice

Id be careful stating this is an inappropriate use of LLMs. Im semi tapped in to the medical literature community and there is a lot of serious discussion and research going into the usage of LLMs for medical advice and most of it is showing that LLMs are barely worse than doctors, and much much cheaper/more convenient. They definitely arent ready to completely replace doctors, but it seems they can provide competent medical advice in a pinch. Look out for the literature on this in the coming year, its only the last few months that researchers seem to be taking LLMs seriously.

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user34283yesterday at 4:05 PM

In my experience people vastly overestimate the competence of doctors. Getting medical advice from LLMs could be life saving.

Personally I experienced this when a specialized doctor believed a drug interaction to be the opposite, thinking A hinders the absorption of B, when actually it hinders the clearance, tripling concentration of B.

Without AI, I would have been clueless about this and could not have spotted the mistake. I don't know if it would truly have been critical, but it did shake my confidence in doctors.