{"slug": "some-recent-applications-of-ai", "title": "Some recent applications of AI", "summary": "Trevor McKendrick asked for favorite recent applications of AI, and Nate Meyvis shared his own, including a system that extracts facts from a corpus, generates embeddings, and clusters them to find frequent facts; using Claude to manage school documents and update his calendar; and using the Zippyflash API via LLM for flashcard reviews. Meyvis notes that cheaper, faster models have made AI reliable for gathering and checking unstructured real-world data, though he still double-checks important items and finds AI lacking for high-judgment lifestyle questions.", "body_md": "[Trevor McKendrick asked](https://ckarchive.com/b/xmuph6hp4en3kurnppvnqc20gw8kranhd6g7) for favorite recent applications of AI. Here are some of mine:\n\n- 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.\n- I'm keeping all important school-related documents in a Claude project. It is\n[reliable enough](https://www.natemeyvis.com/civic-applications-of-generative-ai/) at extracting and interpreting practical information that I can ask it to, e.g., update my personal calendar with all the relevant dates.\n- 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\n*X* next week and make sure everything seems on track.\"\n- I'm now reliant on using the\n[Zippyflash](https://www.zippyflash.com/) 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.\n\nSome patterns, here and in my other recent AI usage:\n\n- 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.\n[Cheaper, faster models](https://www.natemeyvis.com/try-the-very-fast-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.\n- 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.\n- I\n*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.)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/some-recent-applications-of-ai", "canonical_source": "https://www.natemeyvis.com/some-recent-applications-of-ai/", "published_at": "2026-08-25 10:51:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-25 11:16:43.576751+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Trevor McKendrick", "Nate Meyvis", "Claude", "Zippyflash"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/some-recent-applications-of-ai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/some-recent-applications-of-ai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/some-recent-applications-of-ai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/some-recent-applications-of-ai.jsonld"}}