> For the latter, I normally have to roll out a quote I can't remember well enough to google, that's something along the lines of "your dog is juggling, filing taxes, and baking a cake, and rather than be impressed it can do any of those things, you're complaining it drops some balls, misses some figures, and the cake recipe leaves a lot to be desired".
Something can be very impressive without actually being useful, but that still doesn’t make it useful. There’s no market for a working dog that does a bad job of baking cakes and filing taxes, while dogs that can retrieve game birds or tackle fleeing suspects are in high demand.
This is the crux of most of modern AI. Nobody debates it's cool. Since 2014 or so there has been no shortage of amazing demos of computers doing stuff many thought wasn't possible or required human level intelligence. But there's not automatically a bridge from those demos to commercial relevance, no matter how amazing.
I'm certainly impressed by a man that can dig a tunnel with a spoon. But you're definitely right that it's not that useful.
But I disagree that half assed work is not useful. It's just lower usefulness. My laundry app isn't even half assed. The programmers couldn't even sort the room list (literal random order) or cache your most recent room. It's still better than the BS system they had before where I had to load a prepaid card and that machine was locked in a building that isn't open on weekends or after 6pm. I'm still immensely frustrated, but I don't want to go back to the old system.
Though I'll mention that my fear is that because so many people see LLMs as having far more utility than they offer, we'll get more shit like the above instead of higher quality stuff. Most issues are solved for me to be comfortable in my life, so I definitely value quality a lot more. Plus, reduces a lot of mental stress as I'm not thinking "how can the person that made this be so dumb? How do you learn how to program and not know what sort is?"
Something can be very impressive without actually being useful, but that still doesn’t make it useful. There’s no market for a working dog that does a bad job of baking cakes and filing taxes, while dogs that can retrieve game birds or tackle fleeing suspects are in high demand.