alt Hacker NewsMissed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
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I think about six months ago I commented on an AI thread to the effect of “I’m happy that after a 30 year effort and hundreds of billions spent, AskJeeves finally works as intended” - Jeeves is totally ripe for LLMing.
Completely baffling that after keeping ask.com going for this entire time (some two and a half decades of irrelevance) they shut it down at the point at which it can actually be made to work.
There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!
Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.
It's a name best saved for an embodied humanobot that can do laundry, etc., too, as well as answer questions, screen calls, etc.
You have no idea how correct you are…
Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 as a natural language query model!
and until about 2000…some people preferred it!
Edit: and after that its indexing and results were clowned ruthlessly,
but that doesn’t change what I’m saying!
WOW. 12 year old me would've loved this.
Two years ago I made a rudimentary chatbot/agent for our long running IRC channel using the OpenAI API as the "brain". Its nickname is Jeeves.
One of the best improvements to my life was adding the following to my LLM Prompt: "Please respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories".
Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.