TheBrain has release the first beta (better to call it "pre-alpha" IMO) of TheBrain 14.

https://thebrain.com/products/thebrain/thebrain14

It's very very buggy. The company has gone all-in on the OpenAI version of "AI", betting their product will succeed with a strategy that assumes everyone wants to use "AI" to generate documents and answer questions.

I wonder if in a few short years we'll all look back at developer integrations with "AI" and say "wow, wonderful", or "wow, what a mistake".

As an aside, to your point about AI: While I certainly recognize the strenghts of the current crop of AI tech, it can also be surprisingly poor. Google Bard has now launched Gmail integration, so yesterday I asked Google Bard some very basic questions about emails in my inbox. Like so much else with LLMs, the responses were in the right direction but woefully flawed. A clear step down from simply searching directly within Gmail. LLMs are extremely powerful, but they are constructed in such a way that accuracy is unpredictable, which limits their utility for now when it comes to incorportating them into existing software.

Yesterday I asked Bard for a photo of upper 5th Avenue (NY) as it was in 1920. It replied "Here's a photo of upper 5th Avenue in 1920". It was a photo of Pasadena from this summer.

Google Lens is smarter than Bard.

The AI is functional in the current web version of TheBrain, and it is impressive. I haven't had a need to use it much, but I have experimented with it. Once they've integrated the tech into the desktop versions, I do expect to use it more often.

Steve

I have used The Brain on and off for years, and think it's a very impressive program. Unfortunately, the web version currently does not display the backlinks and mentions for an item. They are visible on the desktop versions, and for me an essential feature. For those of us who need the web version because we can't install the desktop program on our work computers, this can be a significant shortcoming.

The inclusion of AI in everything is definitely thought-provoking. Especially as generative AI is such an astonishingly fast-moving technology.

Two articles are worth reading:

First, Seth Godin's very practical musings on efficient use of AI as part of your working routine here: https://seths.blog/2023/09/chatgpt-for-you/

And second, Stephen Fry's very amusing thoughts after listening to a fake version of himself reading the Harry Potter books, here: https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/stephen-fry-ai-audiobook-ripoff-voice-1234906684/

I have major reservations about the inclusion of AI in apps, but then (despite all my Obsidian plug-ins) I tend to prefer the simple over the complex, hence prefer to keep my AI activity strictly separate from the apps on which my life depends. A useful adjunct, rather than an integral feature. In years to come, this approach may prove ineffectual. But I am also very wary of any single developer making me totally app-dependent because their AI function has become an indispensable part of my life...

Cheers!
Bill

Yes, that's a major issue. The desktop versions do a lot with linking, pretty impressively. I would expect them to make links work at some point in the web version.

exatty95 wrote:

I have used The Brain on and off for years, and think it's a very
impressive program. Unfortunately, the web version currently does not
display the backlinks and mentions for an item. They are visible on the
desktop versions, and for me an essential feature. For those of us who
need the web version because we can't install the desktop program on our
work computers, this can be a significant shortcoming.