What AI tools have you found useful?
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Those that I find the most useful are those that I (and likely many others) tend to take for granted.
For example, fuzzy logic may very well be used in electronics that involve temperature control - fridge, aircon, rice cooker, water heater - under the hood.
Another one is CSP (constraint-satisfaction problems) solvers which tend to be used in scheduling softwares. A possible use case is public transportation.
There are probably lots more AIs working behind the scenes that benefit everyone, but don't get the coverage because they are just boring tech now. People may not even consider them AI!
I appreciate these AI for making my life so convenient.
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I know people dislike and complain about it, but I absolutely love Suno. LOVE IT. I’ve created what I think are some really cool songs. Will they ever be hits on the radio? Nope. Will anyone else listen to them besides me? Probably not. But boy, after tweaking, I’d rather listen to some of the songs I’ve created than the garbage on the radio!
Holy crow, that freaked me out. That's really impressive. Pretty uncanny valley, but I can definitely see the appeal.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
DeepL for translation. It’s not perfect but it feels so much better than those associated w/ search engines.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
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DeepL for translation. It’s not perfect but it feels so much better than those associated w/ search engines.
The technology used in modern LLMs was originally intended to translate from one language to another.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
LLMs can be useful in hyperfocused , contained environments where the models are trained on a specific data set to provide a service for a specific function only. So it won’t be able to answer random questions you throw at it, but it can be helpful on the only thing it’s trained to do.
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Copilot in VScode is something you'd have to tear out of my cold, dead hands. Pressing Tab to auto complete is so useful. I use the GPT 4.1 model or whatever it is called. I tried Gemini but for some reason it's complete ass when doing code. Android Studio Gemini is worse than the free tier on the website.
However, I've found the Gemini Pro model on the website is incredibly good for information assistance. To give an idea of my current uses, I have two chats pinned on it: fact checking and programming advice. I use the former for general research that would take more than a few minutes of Googling but need an answer now, and the latter for brainstorming code design or technical tutorials (recently had it help me set up a VM in WSL).
One tool I wish I could use is ElevenLabs. Had a friend on the free tier of it make some really cool and convincing voice lines (I forgot what character it was) a long time ago. Looks easy to use too. I can't justify spending money just to play with it but if I had a purpose for it, I would.
Just today I was tinkering with Continue.dev extension for VSCode. Locally running the models and not having sensitive proprietary source code sent over the wire to a 3rd party service was a big requirement for me to even consider bringing AI into my IDE.
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https://notebooklm.google.com/ is really handy for various things, you can throw a bunch of documents into it and then ask questions and chat interactively about their contents. I've got a notebook for a roleplaying campaign I'm running where I've thrown the various sourcebook PDFs, as well as the "setting bible" for my homebrew campaign, and even transcripts of the actual sessions. I can ask it what happened in previous episodes that I might have forgotten, or to come up with stats for whatever monster I might need off the cuff, or questions about how the rules work.
Copilot has been a fantastic programming buddy. For those going a little more in depth who don't want to spring for a full blown GitHub Copilot subscription and Visual Studio integration, there's https://voideditor.com/ - I've hooked it up to the free Gemini APIs and it works great, though it runs out of tokens pretty quickly if you use it heavily.
wrote last edited by [email protected]https://notebooklm.google.com/ is really handy for various things, you can throw a bunch of documents into it and then ask questions and chat interactively about their contents.
Nice, thanks! I've been looking for something I can stuff a bunch of technical manuals into and ask it to recite specifications or procedures. It even gave me the document and pages it got the information from so I could verify. That's really all I ever wanted from "AI".
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
I used GPT to help me plan a 2 week long road trip with my family. It was pretty fucking awesome at finding cool places to stop and activities for my kids to do.
It definitely made some stupid ass suggestions that would have routed us far off our course, or suggested stopping at places 15 minutes into our trip, but sifting through the slop was still a lot quicker than doing all of the research myself.
I also use GPT to make birthday cards. Have it generate an image of some kind of inside joke etc. I used to do these by hand, and this makes it way quicker.
I also use it at work for sending out communications and stuff. It can take the information I have and format it and professionalize it really quick.
I also use it for Powershell scripting here and there, but it does some really wacky stuff sometimes that I have to go in and fix. Or it halucinates entire modules that don't exist and when I point it out it's like "good catch! That doesn't exist!" and it always gives me a little chuckle. My rule with AI and Powershell is that I don't ask it to do things that I don't already know how to do. I like to learn things and be good at my job, but I don't mind using GPT to help with some of the busy work.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
wrote last edited by [email protected]I run LLMs locally for scripting, ADD brainstorming/organization, automation, pseudo editors and all sorts of stuff, as they’re crazy good for the size now.
I think my favorites are Nemotron 49B (for STEM), Qwen3 finetunes (for code), some esoteric 2.5 finetunes (for writing), and Jamba 52B (for analysis, RAG, chat, long context, this one is very underrated). They all fit in 24GB. And before anyone asks, I know they’re unreliable, yes. But they are self hosted and tools that work for me.
I could run GLM 4.5 offloaded with a bit more RAM…
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I know people dislike and complain about it, but I absolutely love Suno. LOVE IT. I’ve created what I think are some really cool songs. Will they ever be hits on the radio? Nope. Will anyone else listen to them besides me? Probably not. But boy, after tweaking, I’d rather listen to some of the songs I’ve created than the garbage on the radio!
There's also Udio.com and Producer.ai out there, and possibly some others - music generation is becoming fairly widespread. I didn't mention any of this in my list of recommendations though because OP specifically asked for LLMs.
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AI is great at helping me multitask. For example, with AI, I can generate misinformation and destroy the environment at the same time!
wrote last edited by [email protected]Not all AI are bad, there are types of AI that actually useful (in a good terms) for people. Don't refer AI as LLMs. LLM is just a branch of AI. SMH people..
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
I was testing a lot of tools for work (UX), but they all sucked. Basically I just use gpt, cursor for tab coding,l and image generation for various purposes (Leonardo).
Most apps work poorly and using a model directly works better.
I worked on a few apps that use ai without a chat bot, but we found users expected one, maybe that will change in the future.
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To be honest, this is the only thing Google did right about AI IMO.
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I'm running ollama and open-webui and some unsloth modified models for some general purpose stuff.
The https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-GGUF model has been pretty good. Beware it's a Chinese model so you can get some funny results if you ask about Tiananmen Square or if certain people resemble Winnie the Pooh. For making Linux configurations it works great.
Some gemma3 models are okay but it doesn't seem as good. Same for Phi4 models.
What are the minimum requirements?
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
wrote last edited by [email protected]I think I’ve found the one area where LLMs really excel: business books / self help literature. The real life examples in that genre are pretty awful and dragged out as it is, so you can’t really make it much worse, now can you? The information density is kept low to fluff up the page count, and oh boy, are LLMs good at that. So, if you want to become a self help guru, but can’t be bothered to write your own book about magical hotels, marriage advice, productivity tips and communication, LLMs can take care of that for you. Copilot has turned out to work well for projects like that.
If you raise the bar, you’re going to have to read and edit the text manually. You also need to keep track of what has already been mentioned elsewhere and avoid repeating them again, depending on the genre. In business books though, that’s not a problem at all.
BTW, if you wonder about the downvotes, it’s because [email protected] isn’t a safe space for AI related discussions. Consider posting somewhere else.
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LLMs can be useful in hyperfocused , contained environments where the models are trained on a specific data set to provide a service for a specific function only. So it won’t be able to answer random questions you throw at it, but it can be helpful on the only thing it’s trained to do.
Also known as “narrow AI”. You know like a traffic camera that can put a rectangle on every car in the picture, but nothing else. Those kinds of narrow applications have been around for decades already.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
wrote last edited by [email protected]I tried Whisper+ voice-to-text this week.
Uses a downloaded 250MB model from Hugging-Face, and processes voice completely offline.
The accuracy is 100% for known words, so far.
For transcribing texts, messages and diary entries.
* I'd be interested to know if it has a large power drain per use.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
I use ChatGPT every single day, and I find it both extremely useful and entertaining.
I mainly use it to help edit longer messages, bounce ideas around, and share random thoughts I know my friends wouldn’t be interested in. Honestly, it also has pretty much replaced Google for me.
I basically think of it as a friend who’s really knowledgeable across a wide range of topics, excellent at writing, and far more civil than most people I run into online - but who’s also a bit delusional at times and occasionally talks out of their ass, which is why I can’t ever fully trust it. That said, it’s still a great first stop when I’m trying to solve a problem.
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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.
What are fellow AI users using these tools for? Furthermore, what models are you using that find the most useful?
I've found LLMs in general helpful for coding specifically when I have to use tools or languages that I only have a passing familiarity with.
In my life I've used Gemini for some fitness coaching alongside other sources of information and it has been quite helpful and motivating.