by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-17 20:14:50+00:00
I've been leveraging the services of 3 LLMs, mainly: Meta, Gemini, and Copilot.

It depends on what I'm asking. If I'm looking for answers in the realm of history or culture, religion, or I want something creative such as a cute limerick, or a song or dramatic script, I'll ask Copilot. Currently, Copilot has two modes: "Quick Answer"; or "Think Deeply", if you want to wait about 30 seconds for a good answer.

If I want info on a product, a business, an industry or a field of employment, or on education, technology, etc., I'll inquire of Gemini.

Both Copilot and Gemini have interactive voice conversation modes. Thankfully, they will also write a transcript of what we said. They also eagerly attempt to engage the user with further questions and followups, with open questions such as "so what's on your mind tonight?"

And if I want to know about pop stars, film actors, the social world or something related to tourism or recreation in general, I can ask Meta's AI through [Facebook] Messenger.

One thing I found to be extremely helpful and accurate was Gemini's tax advice. I mean, it was way better than human beings at the entry/poverty level. Commercial tax advisors, even when I'd paid for the Premium Deluxe Tax Software from the Biggest Name, they just went to Google stuff for me. I mean, they didn't even seem to know where stuff was on irs.gov. When I asked for a virtual or phone appointment, they were no-shows, with a litany of excuses. I visited 3 offices in person; the first two were closed, and the third one basically served Navajos living off the reservation.

So when I asked Gemini about tax information -- simple stuff like the terminology, definitions, categories of income, and things like that -- Gemini was perfectly capable of giving lucid answers. And citing its sources, so I could immediately go find the IRS.GOV publication and read it "from the horse's mouth".

Oftentimes I'll ask an LLM just to jog my memory or inform me of what specific terminology I should use. Like "Hey Gemini, what's the PDU for Ethernet called?" and when Gemini says it's a "frame" then I have that search term I can plug into Wikipedia for further research. Or, for an introduction or overview to topics I'm unfamiliar with.

LLMs are an important evolutionary step in the general-purpose "search engine" industry. One problem was, you see, that it was dangerous, annoying, or risky to go Googling around and click on all those tempting sites. Google knew this: the dot-com sites and all the SEO sites that surfaced to the top were traps, they were bait, they were sometimes legitimate scams. So the LLM providers are showing us that we can stay safe in a sandbox, without clicking external links, without coughing up information about our interests and setting cookies and revealing our IPv6 addresses: we can safely ask a local LLM, or an LLM in a trusted service provider, about whatever piques our fancy. And I am glad for this. I saw y'all complaining about how every search engine was worthless, and the Internet was clogged with blogspam, and there was no real information anymore. Well, perhaps LLMs, for now, are a safe space, a sandbox to play in, where I don't need to worry about drive-by-zero-click malware, or being inundated with Joomla ads, or popups. For now.