February 3rd, 2024

Going all in on AI (for a while at least)

Technology

I have been bearish on AI since it exploded with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Despite this, I’ve not written it off completely and have been dabbling with it more and more. I’ve been using Microsoft Copilot for work, fairly sparingly, but it’s still not instinctively something I’ve been going to in the first instance. For my limited use cases, such as checking code, or writing some of the wordier, or more repetitive scripts, it’s been pretty impressive I must say.

As we start moving through 2024, it sounds like it’s soon going to be even harder to avoid AI’s influence with my go to browser integrating it quite considerably and rumours of Apple going head on with it in iOS 18. It’s becoming so prevalent, in fact, that I feel I owe it to myself to go full on into it, at least for a while.

I like to think I’m very open minded with tech, and use the devices and software I do because they work best for me, not because they are made by any particularly company I have some strange allegiance to so the only way to truly understand if the AI-first search approaches Arc, and others, are focusing on is to give it a whirl! I recently pre-ordered a Rabbit R1, which came with a year of Perpexity Pro. This was recently added as a default search engine option for Arc Search, and Arc for macOS so it feels like this is a good place to start with some experimentation.

The Perplexity UI is clean, but fairly well featured
The Perplexity UI is clean, but fairly well featured

So, how well this experiment will go, I have no idea. Time will tell I guess. I’m not sure how easy it will be to share my experiences of this after a month or so, because the things we all search for will, obviously, vary greatly, so an individuals needs and experiences will very greatly, but for those that are interested keep an eye out and I will report back on how it goes, and how much I’ve had to revert back to good ol’ Bing. Let’s hope I don’t get too pumped so full of false info and bullshine!