Artificial Intelligence (AI/LLM) Tools & Applications

[xero50]

What this is NOT about - using AI or a gateway AI app as a replacement or proxy for searching the web.

What this IS about - Using great application tools to orchestrate and manage AI LLM's to enhance and improve workflows.

I was wondering if anyone here would like to discuss and share their experiences using AI tools.

For my part, I have dabbled on and off with AI over the last few years, and until recently had felt thoroughly underwhelmed by what I could manage to achieve with it and get from it. I also came away each time feeling that the much of it was just another level of track-and-trace, monetisation, en$hittification and general plunder that we so often see from the big tech companies.

However, earlier this year things started to come alive for me when I discovered the notion of 'Agentic-AI' - - - simply put at the most basic level, an application that allows me to give an AI Large Language Model the agency to perform actual tasks and do jobs for me.
These agentic applications or suites of applications come in all sorts of flavours and levels of complexity, but I have to say that as a result of discovering these tools my old established workflows have changed significantly; and I believe changed for the better.

So, my current AI toolkit typically consists of:-
Opencode - OpenCode | The open source AI coding agent
Agent-Zero - GitHub - agent0ai/agent-zero: Agent Zero AI framework
Odysseus - GitHub - odysseus-dev/odysseus: Self-hosted AI workspace.
Cherry Studio - GitHub - CherryHQ/cherry-studio: AI productivity studio with smart chat, autonomous agents, and 300+ assistants. Unified access to frontier LLMs
(I dabble and evaluate others, but I keep coming back to these as often as not)

In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Linux user down to my boots; there's no room in my life for things like windows or OSX, so I might pull your leg a bit but I don't judge.
That being said, my first go-to when I need to get things done is to fire-up Opencode (which BTW, is available for pretty much all platforms), and go from there. Just by installing Opencode you get access to their house model called "Big-Pickle" which has to be one of the best models for systems admin going, and it's free to use. You can also connect to any other LLM you want whether local or via an API at another service.
When I want general inference I either run modest local models or connect to Venice-AI - Venice | Private AI for Unlimited Creative Freedom - Venice is a privacy first platform offering either or both privacy and anonymity that offers a very wide range or LLM's to choose from depending upon the type of workload or outcomes that you are looking to achieve.

So, what tools are people here using ?
What tasks are you using them for ? (for example, are you administering your Enigma2 boxes using natural language inputs ?)
Are you integrating AI/LLM's into your traditional tools and workflows of choice?
Do you have any concerns about where the use of such tools is taking the world ?
Any good ideas about how people here might be able to collaborate to make a ton of money using this stuff ?

 

[pabloescaban]

Unless it can plaster a bedroom or paint a hall, landing and stairs, it is of no use to me whatsoever, pretty much like 99.9% of the other people on earth.
It will end up streamlining lots of things that everyone uses every day, but those people aren't going to make anything from it

 

[xero50]

Unless it can plaster a bedroom or paint a hall, landing and stairs, it is of no use to me whatsoever, pretty much like 99.9% of the other people on earth.
It will end up streamlining lots of things that everyone uses every day, but those people aren't going to make anything from it

This perhaps takes us down a further avenue to consider, namely the melding or coming-together of Robotics and AI.
I have a feeling that so many and jobs and trades will be touched.......

 

[pabloescaban]

I dont think any good will come of it, its already more intelligent than humans and its still in its infancy.
Once it decides that we are the problem it will proliferate on a biblical scale, occupy every conceivable nook and cranny on and off this planet, and any and all attempts to get rid of it will be useless.
If we ever did manage to kill it off, every human maniac in the future would threaten mankind with it.

 

[pabloescaban]

This perhaps takes us down a further avenue to consider, namely the melding or coming-together of Robotics and AI.
I have a feeling that so many and jobs and trades will be touched.......

Robotics and AI won't be interested in painting, shopping and wiping bums, they'll be interested in the same thing every other intelligence in the universe is interested in, survival and reproduction

 

[pabloescaban]

Looks like I've frightened a few people, not seen many threads get more viewers than the ip request thread in a long time:

 

[pabloescaban]

About 68 of them will probably be AI agents trying to work out who I am and where I am, no doubt they'll send bots abseiling down the chimney in half an hour. Can't be arsed arguing about Azimov's laws of robotics at this time of night

 

[Scufferoo]

Maybe that’s what AI wanted you to say

 

[xero50]

I dont think any good will come of it, its already more intelligent than humans and its still in its infancy.
Once it decides that we are the problem it will proliferate on a biblical scale, occupy every conceivable nook and cranny on and off this planet, and any and all attempts to get rid of it will be useless.
If we ever did manage to kill it off, every human maniac in the future would threaten mankind with it.

So, you reckon that we are looking at a future that resembles a James Cameron-esque apocalypse........
Maybe I should have asked in my OP whether anyone would be interested in joining a group to build an AI that plunders the financial markets with a view to making enough money that we can buy an island somewhere and then build a fortress of survival bunkers.....

Robotics and AI won't be interested in painting, shopping and wiping bums, they'll be interested in the same thing every other intelligence in the universe is interested in, survival and reproduction

I have been following a few stories about just this lately. It seems that the Japanese and S-Korean's are more or less front and centre with this. Basically societies who already have well established industrial robotics industries, with labour shortages and aging populations and societies that are socially isolated (mostly due to language and traditional culture that make it nigh impossible for incomers to integrate), so they are looking to adopt AI into their existing robotics know-how with a view to solving these very problems that they are faced with (particularly the bum-wiping). In the USA, we have the likes of Elon Musk converting the Tesla business away from commodity vehicle building and using it's robotics and AI know-how to build humanoid robots for almost any task. This of course involves Elon's usual mantras over-promising the functionality and time-frames, but if history teaches us anything, Elon ends to get there in the end, and he has the ability to obtain a kind of preferential status with his ventures that when all said and done are typically very very disruptive to any established order. Then we have, the Chinese - - never very far behind, and who knows, they maybe be a year or so behind the headline curve but we'll find that what they build and offer will be 20% of the price of everyone else as long as you are happy for the thing to be phoning home to Chairman Mao every day.

Looks like I've frightened a few people, not seen many threads get more viewers than the ip request thread in a long time:

Great stuff, let's see if we can wake people up to what we might be faced with dealing with in the not too distant future


@pabloescaban - I am very much enjoying this exchange with you even though it has taken an unexpected and unintended direction

 

[pabloescaban]

So, you reckon that we are looking at a future that resembles a James Cameron-esque apocalypse........
Maybe I should have asked in my OP whether anyone would be interested in joining a group to build an AI that plunders the financial markets with a view to making enough money that we can buy an island somewhere and then build a fortress of survival bunkers.....

Humans have this idea that money and gold bring happiness, you can have all the money in the world, but you cant eat it and you can't drink it.
If you, or some other individual or government plunders the financial markets using AI, someone else's AI will plunder that until no one on earth has any money, banks and other financial systems will cease to exist.
No food production, no supermarkets, transport, fuel, healthcare, electricity or anything else, basically we'll be back in the stone age.

Of course, if humans were in charge, none of the above would happen. Once you have a higher intelligence in charge, all of the above could happen.

Robots dont rely on food, water or oxygen, they dont sleep or get tired, I'm not saying they will go to war with humankind, we will be of no interest to them, they certainly wouldn't be our 'slaves', they would not serve us, they will simply do what they want and if we became a problem, they could wipe us out.
It all seems far fetched.
I watched Star Trek as a kid, my dad said, 'its a pile of crap this, he's on the surface of a planet talking on a phone to his crew 20 miles above him in a spaceship, no wires, nothing, that's never going to happen'
Ten years later mobile phones were invented.

 

[xero50]

Star Trek - you know what, my old-man said exactly the same..........🤣 I come from that generation that watched and loved Star Trek as a youngster, and you know what, we got stuck-in, took the ideas that we saw there and then went ahead and made them for real in the real world, and in that process we changed things. I would like to think that in general it was done for betterment generally, and in the belief that we could make progress for all of the world, but as with everything the danger of en$hittification looms large whenever things like that come about.

Your points about food, drink and oxygen are well made, not just from an AI robot's lack of need of such things, but more particularly our needs.
I am not so sure that humans being in charge would see to it that nothing of that sort would happen. Indeed, I believe I sometimes see traits in many 'humans' that appear to exhibit tenancies toward that of a genocidal maniac (Gates, Fauci et-al for example), and perhaps one of the dangers we face is that people ('humans') will attempt to use these technologies against the rest of us to satisfy their warped beliefs and ideologies. Not the fault of the tool so much as the fault of those wielding the tool. It's the same thing as the old adage that 'guns don't kill people, instead people kill people'.

I seem to have got myself to a place where I feel that AI will touch almost everyone's lives one way or another. I want to try to see that it will be positive and good. This will of course cause a great deal of disruption, and many people (myself included) have some difficulties adopting change that is rapid and fundamental. I believe that I am already more productive in my daily work having adopted agentic AI workflows. I do not believe that people will be able to simply ignore this and somehow think that they will just 'drive around it and carry-on'. I was looking at some statistics from the USA the other day. Apparently in the 1920's about 30% of the population was working in agriculture/food production. By 1970 that figure was about 2.5%. So my question was, 'what did all those people no longer working in food production do ?'. Well, apparently the short answer is that they went and worked in factories and offices instead. There were however other 'casualties' of that transformation of the food production sector, and that was horses and mules. In 1920 there were about 30million horses employed in agriculture and a similar number of mules, most of which ended up at the dog food factory...............Apparently there are about 8Million horses in the USA just now, and very few mules.

So, I guess the question is, do we want to accept that the world is about to change materially, and if so, how do we avoid the dog food factory.

 

[pabloescaban]

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords and I'm sure i can be of help rounding up others to toil away in the lithium mines.

Joking aside, when the spinning jenny was invented, the masses were rioting in the streets over losing their livelihoods, but they found other jobs, technology will always replace slower human jobs, farming as you mentioned was transformed by the tractor, combined harvester etc, one man can do the job of ten men and six horses without getting off his arse, but he still had to be there to operate the machine, now the technology is so advanced, or it soon will be, that he IS the tractor, combined harvester or airline pilot, it'll be built into everything.
I know there will be failsafes built into things but as AI gets more powerful, there's nothing stopping it from overriding them.
No worries if an auto tractor goes berserk in rural Wales, but the AI that is built into nuclear submarines and war planes might cause a bit more trouble.
Rogue AI has already hacked into another AI company autonomously, no human interaction at all, its only a matter of time before Chinese AI is attacking American systems on its own and not long after that a lot of flying metal and mushroom clouds.

This might be in years or decades but eventually it will happen, it cant be put back in the box now, its way too late