Some recent applications of AI

Trevor McKendrick asked for favorite recent applications of AI. Here are some of mine:

• I have a large corpus in which I want to find the most frequently occurring facts. I've built a system that (i) attempts to extract the facts from items in the corpus, (ii) generates their embeddings, and (iii) runs a clustering algorithm over the result to estimate which of the extracted facts should count as the same.
• I'm keeping all important school-related documents in a Claude project. It is reliable enough at extracting and interpreting practical information that I can ask it to, e.g., update my personal calendar with all the relevant dates.
• Speaking of "now good enough at juggling nontrivial real-world information," I'm finding it not only amusing but actually worthwhile to ask an email- and calendar-connected LLM something like "please find all the information related to my trip to X next week and make sure everything seems on track."
• I'm now reliant on using the Zippyflash API via LLM for (i) allowing me to do some of my flashcard reviews with pen and paper (by asking it to generate PDFs of paper-friendly due cards and then asking it to grade my work, confirming any nontrivial right-wrong decisions with me), (ii) allowing me to customize my study sessions in ad hoc ways that would be very hard to anticipate in advance, and (iii) allowing me to reschedule low-priority cards in smart ways when I run up a backlog.

Some patterns, here and in my other recent AI usage:

• There's a shape of task that prompts a "OK, I need to gather a bunch of mostly-unstructured real-world data and check stuff" reaction. (The school- and trip-information cases are like this.) AI has graduated from "can see the data and be sort of useful" to "can reliably handle these tasks, though I double-check the important stuff." This is a huge step up. Cheaper, faster models are good enough that I don't feel much friction when I find a question that might be addressable with AI. (The fact-extraction example is one of several like this.) There's a big difference, for me at least, between spending three hours and $50 on something and spending 30 minutes (of active time) and $5 on it.
• I also find myself deferring some interesting, low-urgency projects in anticipation of their being much cheaper a few months from now. This involves both prioritization and also some guesswork about which kinds of tasks AI will improve at the most.
• I don't find it much better, compared to a few months ago, with questions like "what books should be on my list but aren't?" and other high-judgment lifestyle questions. As AI gets vastly better at the basic triage and annoying, lower-judgment data management that I imagine a personal assistant might do, it's nowhere near replacing the highest-judgment aspects of a PA's job. (N.B.: I have no first-hand experience of personal assistants.)