Simon Willison’s Weblog

The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs. Drew Breunig introduces an interesting new framework for categorizing use cases of modern AI:

• Gods refers to the autonomous, human replacement applications - I see that as AGI stuff that's still effectively science fiction.
• Interns are supervised copilots. This is how I get most of the value out of LLMs at the moment, delegating tasks to them that I can then review, such as AI-assisted programming.
• Cogs are the smaller, more reliable components that you can build pipelines and automations on top of without needing to review everything they do - think Whisper for transcriptions or maybe some limited LLM subtasks such as structured data extraction.

Drew also considers Toys as a subcategory of Interns: things like image generators, “defined by their usage by non-experts. Toys have a high tolerance for errors because they’re not being relied on for much beyond entertainment.”