Using AI for what it should be used for | Péter Bozsó’s blogA lot of debates are going on about AI and there are many vocal proponents as well as opponents of this technology out there. I consider myself to be somewhere halfway between those extremes. While I think there are definitely dangers to using AI, I also think that a person can use it to greatly enrich their life.My main observation about AI from the past couple of years is:Most people use AI to outsource thinking instead of accelerating it.<br>My aim with this post is to provide inspiration for the latter, in hope that it will decrease the former.Disclaimer: I use Claude at work and I have a personal paid subscription too. I think it’s important to call out which LLM I am using, to put this post in context. Also, I want to make sure there are no misunderstandings about the capabilities of AI in case you are using models from a different vendor or of lower capabilities.Use-case 1: Searching #<br>I find AI great for finding answers to complex questions, both at work and in personal life. I only use Google for very basic stuff now, for things that I already know exist, I just don’t have them in my bookmarks for some reason. Finding somebody’s Wikipedia page, or documentation about something, things like that. Google is more like an internet navigation engine for me now, rather than a search engine. When my query is anything more complex than opening hours Café Votiv, I use Claude, very often with its research feature. Below come two examples of me using that feature successfully.Example 1.1: Planning vacation #<br>At Easter, I used AI to plan a day trip with my partner to the Wachau by car. I am a very precise planner and I tend to put together really nice itineraries. But I absolutely hate the process of doing this using the almost completely enshittified internet: it’s painful to look through (sometimes broken) individual websites, cross-check opening hours, try to correlate them with info on Facebook or Instagram pages, search for hiking paths, put the pins on Google Maps or save and import the coordinates as GPX files, blablabla… I’d rather have somebody peel my eyeballs with a spoon, really. Based on previous experience, I know this would have taken me at least 2-3 hours to get right. With Claude, it was half of that, because it could do all that tedious cross-checking work for me. I had a complete itinerary ready for us in less than an hour. In the end, the plan worked flawlessly, and we spent a wonderful day under the apricot blossoms on the banks of the Danube.Example 1.2: Finding a long-lost video #<br>I was looking for this video for years, and AI finally helped me find it a couple of months ago. It made such an impact on me 13 years ago when it was released that I still can’t forget about it. I watched it a bunch of times back then, but one time, a couple of years later, when I moved between computers/browsers/operating systems/note-taking applications, I lost the link to it, never to find it again. The memory of it came up from time to time when I was playing a great video game, and each time I wished I could watch it again. Every time it happened, I searched for it with all my might, but to no avail.The core of the problem was that it wasn’t on YouTube. I only remembered that it was an interview with the producer of the Street Fighter games, and that he talks about how important it is that video games should be like toys. I also remembered that it was a short video, hosted on Vimeo, embedded in a dark, artsy-looking website. In the video, the person delivers a monologue straight into the camera, sitting in front of a black background alone. This was all the information I had and could base my searches on.When my brother and I started building our own game, sometime around early December last year, I was thinking about this video again almost daily. Naturally, I tried to find it again: Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity. Literally every piece of software out there that can search the internet. I combed through forums, checked IRC logs, wrote emails to gaming journalists and owners of video game-related websites. Nothing. The best I got back from the humans was sympathy and best wishes. Then two months ago, I randomly gave it a go with Opus 4.6’s research feature and it finally cracked it. I was sitting there and could simply not believe my eyes. After more than a decade, the video I searched for so many times and in so many ways was there in front of me, playing in all its glory. (Yes, this time I took care to archive it properly. Yes, multiple copies at different places.)For those of you who are curious, here is the video itself:<br>Yoshinori Ono - Ultimate Play ToolIt was originally part of the Critical Path Project. There’s their now abandoned website. They also have a YouTube channel where they seemingly have uploaded all videos from the website. The other interviews are also very...