It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from:
- travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at <restaurant, city> garnished with coriander?"
- fitness, nutrition, accounting, therapy, medical, legal, immigration advice (sure it's not a real professional but you know what, it's pretty fucking close, and any capability gap is made up by having perfect two-way communication which you don't get when talking with a human)
- coding (work, side projects, personal tools, documentation & pricing questions, "review this code", etc).
- I start reading most articles with the prompt "Summarize this article: <url>". I just started a non-fiction book by pasting into Claude: "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?". It reduces the "activation energy" hump and screens if it's worth reading at all.
- I use the LLM in my Tesla for on-the-fly advice for parking and other things. You can simply ask "what's the best Boba place around here?" and it will give you a decent recommendation. You can also follow up with "does this place have ample parking?".
- I use the LLM in YouTube to summarize videos and ask specific questions and/or get timestamps to the parts I care about.
If your critical thinking skills are strong then LLM is a literal superpower.
I'm just barely old enough to have experienced a couple waves of technology being introduced and creating these sorts of life optimizations. It almost never actually improves quality of life. It just makes life more optimized, and since everyone else is doing the exact same optimization as you, that optimization goes from novel and fun to table stakes to a basic necessity to compete and function in society professionally, at which point it's really nothing but pure efficiency, not genuine improvement in relative happiness.
1. Do frontier lab LLMs make your rent cheaper? Groceries? Healthcare?
2. Do LLMs reduce the loneliness epidemic?
3. Do they reduce population aging in almost all counties around the world?
4. Do they reduce political polarization?
5. Do they bolster democracies?
6. Do they decelerate climate change and general environmental destruction?
7. Do they accelerate sustainability and the circular economy (not circular financing!)?
8. Do they reduce the workweek and give people more free time for family and hobbies?
Etc, etc.
I would hold off on calling anything a "superpower" unless it solves the hard problems in life. Heck, computers and even the internet barely score better than LLMs when measured against the important things in life.
Actually, you are right. We are working with different definitions of quality of life.
The QoL improvement from LLM is somewhere in the ballpark of going from dumb phones to smart phones for an average person (able-bodied, local to the area etc). It's nowhere near Haber-process or penicillin.
I'm talking statistically, not what happens for a lucky few.
Keynes was hoping that our workweek would be 20h/week by now, through technological advancement. Instead places like the US are thinking about adopting 9/9/6 and some US states are legalizing child labor again.
- travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at <restaurant, city> garnished with coriander?"
- fitness, nutrition, accounting, therapy, medical, legal, immigration advice (sure it's not a real professional but you know what, it's pretty fucking close, and any capability gap is made up by having perfect two-way communication which you don't get when talking with a human)
- coding (work, side projects, personal tools, documentation & pricing questions, "review this code", etc).
- I start reading most articles with the prompt "Summarize this article: <url>". I just started a non-fiction book by pasting into Claude: "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?". It reduces the "activation energy" hump and screens if it's worth reading at all.
- I use the LLM in my Tesla for on-the-fly advice for parking and other things. You can simply ask "what's the best Boba place around here?" and it will give you a decent recommendation. You can also follow up with "does this place have ample parking?".
- I use the LLM in YouTube to summarize videos and ask specific questions and/or get timestamps to the parts I care about.
If your critical thinking skills are strong then LLM is a literal superpower.