Saying something nice about Claude

I have been accused of being overly negative about AI, particularly large language models, and I have my share of issues with the technology. I do believe that we are pouring trillions of dollars into a bubble based on business models that can't possibly justify the investment and that the resulting crash will do great damage to the economy. I believe that the technology will never be capable of doing much of what has been promised and that much of what it is capable of (AI slop, disinformation, non-consensual sexualized images) is already doing a tremendous amount of social harm. All of that said, large language models are an impressive advance in the way we interact with computers and that tools based on LLMs, used properly, can be extremely helpful. Case in point, I have increasingly come to rely on Claude for advanced searches. I still use Google for the simple stuff, but for anything that would take me more than five minutes on the old platform, I turn to the chatbot. The key…