I could call myself sucker for good AI. The moment ChatGPT started making waves, I was pestering it with errors and demanding their solution. It worked, usually. I am also very conscious of the fact, that we do not have many AI companies (in the sense of LLM) in Europe. Except Mistral, which is great.
With my history of choosing to work for Russian company weeks before the full-scale invasion to Ukraine, I decided to stay informed on geopolitical current affairs. So, I wrote a script.
My script downloads RSS feeds from certain news sources, downloads it via asks Mistral to give them a score on how relevant it is to geopolitics and then choose 20 important articles to summarise and show to me every morning. I didn't bother with filtering duplicate content, so don't be surprised if one event is mentioned many times.
Simple, effective. I have no idea why it ranks any article in a particular way. I am unable to make sure that the summaries do not introduce information from outside the articles. Its inner working is magic to me. But it keeps me informed, and I wrote it in few hours, so I am happy.
Mistral recently introduced deep research. It works about the same as Perplexity (I have subscription via Revolut), although I have no idea how to evaluate the quality. What I know is that I do not trust the accuracy and use it more for ballparking than for precision. Why some people tend to quote Perplexity and ChatGPT result as a gospel of divine truth is beyond me.
On the coding side, I am probably going back to writing code in thonny and asking questions in the chat. I tried the whole VS code with Continue thing, but it's cumbersome and eats gigabytes of space on my drive.
Anyway, there are uses. I am not gonna lie, I am relying more and more on AI for combining ideas together and making ad-hoc comparisons. Even though there are shortcomings in accuracy and honesty (I think I read somewhere that customers are more satisfied if it agrees with them, so companies train the models to be agreeable). I just don't think it's helping me, just making me more impatient and dumber.