2024-03-25
You can read my review of Phind, another LLM tool, here.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been using Claude Opus (the paid version of Anthropic’s ChatGPT competitor).
For the first time, I think ChatGPT has been outclassed.
For context, I use Claude for help coding (you can read about my process for coding with GPTs here), for understanding new-to-me technical concepts, and for marketing, business, and technical writing.
Here’s what I like about Claude:
- It feels smarter. I’m not sure exactly how to quantify this, except to say it’s like when you sync slightly better with one coworker than another. On coding projects, I notice fewer suggestions that lead me down a dead end or that add unnecessary scope.
- It has less of a heavy tone on writing. I feel like ChatGPT gives me decent feedback on my writing, but when I ask it to write for me, it feels like it has been written by ChatGPT (some hallmarks: excessive excitement, over explaining). This is fine in some cases, but in others, I end up having to remove the ChatGPT-ness of it.
With that said, Claude has some pretty big limitations:
- Just 5 images per chat is a crime. Screenshots of error messages is the default now.
- I really miss the context I’ve been able to add to my own customGPT for my coding project. It’s not a lot of extra information, but having the LLM know my basic directory structure saves a lot of extra messages.
- If there is a way to stop a message, edit it, and resend it, I haven’t found it yet in ~3 weeks of daily usage.
Despite all these limitations, given the choice between which one to work with, I am consistently choosing Claude. I wonder what this says about the stickiness of these tools?
Now for the ultimate test: have I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription yet?
No, but for an unexpected reason: the ChatGPT mobile app. I’ve been having voice conversations with ChatGPT mobile, both personally when there’s a topic I want to dig into, and increasingly with my daughter. We pick a topic she’s interested in (e.g., where do dinosaurs come from) and just riff on it. It’s perfect for a curious toddler — she can keep asking questions over and over again. I think this is what Tyler Cowen means when he says creators are competing with LLMs for attention.
We’ll see how long this lasts — I don’t expect that I will continue keeping two LLM subscriptions forever. Hurry up and add a mobile app, Claude team!
2024-03-12
HeyRecap is the next evolution of Recap Roswell, a project using LLMs to create easily readable summaries for the Roswell City Council.
I started this project with two main goals:
1. When I moved to Roswell, I wanted to get more involved with my local government, but figured I should learn about it before I got involved. To my surprise, despite the nearly $200M city budget, there was very little local news coverage to help me figure out what was happening locally.
2. I wanted to develop a better understanding for how LLMs can be used to solve everyday problems. My hypothesis here was that I could create a system that did a good enough job summarizing the meetings that it isn't worth sending a person to cover.
The first version of the project was a python script that created a summary which I copied and pasted into a Ghost newsletter. This was a great way to get started — to my surprise, ~150 others in Roswell were also interested in this — but it really limited my ability to customize the user experience and it was clear that it wasn't going to be able to scale beyond just my local city council. Plus the copying and pasting was tedious!
So this fall, I set out to build an end-to-end app, the result of which you can see at heyrecap.com. For users, there are two primary benefits to the new site:
- Full meeting transcripts - Easily search for the specific information behind the summary without having to watch the entire video.
- Customizable email preferences - Users can choose to get email updates for all recorded city meetings, not just city council meetings.
For me, this was a chance to build an app end-to-end with a real, if small, audience, while getting to know my city better. I used NextJS and hosted it on Render. Summaries are produced with transcripts from Deepgram. Clerk is providing me with user authentication services (love them) and Resend with email services. My UI components are provided by shad/cn UI. I have opinions about all of these and may write more about them in the future, but for now I'll just say that it's incredible to have so many services so easily stitched together at my fingertips. More often than not, someone else has done 90% of the hard, frustrating stuff so that you can just integrate it with your project. It's awesome.
Over the next several months, I hope to explore what it looks like to scale this some. I'm not sure there is a business here per se, but I'm interested in the idea that I can run a useful local news organization as a side project using AI. We'll see what comes form it!
2024-03-11
From D Magazine:
The standardization of the jalapeño was rapidly accelerated by the debut, about 20 years ago, of the TAM II jalapeño line, a reliably big, shiny, fleshy pepper that can grow up to six inches long—with little to no heat. TAM II peppers have become some of the most popular in the processing business.
The driver of the change was the desire for processors to have predictable levels of spiciness.
Hat tip to Mark for sharing this.
2024-02-23
To experience the region's Fish Fries. On Fridays during lent, various Catholic Churches (usually) host fish fries. Growing up, I sort of took these for granted, but now when I go back, I see them through different eyes. It reminds me of something like Basque Cider Season, a sort of cultural coming together that is specific to a place.