How can I participate in the AI craze when I don't own a phone?
For a number of reasons, mostly privacy, I don't own a phone. But I noticed that pretty much all newer services require you to provide a phone number when you first sign up. While I sympathize with the idea of trying to make it harder for spammers and scammers, one implication of that is that I cannot sign up for most of these services. While there are internet services that offer throw away phone numbers that you could in theory use for the sign-up process, in practice you cannot use them when someone else already used the same phone number for their sign-up.
So, what to do?
You arent missing out on anything. In fact its a general rule these days that once the entire herd starts braying about how something is blowing their 3 inch minds, it is not worth paying attention too anymore. Social media algos and never ending novelty streams, program everyone to jump up and down over meaningless half baked shit. And current AI is half baked shit. And all the known fixes are half baked too which compounds the ever growing shit mountain. Add mentally bankrupt monopoly chasing financiers into the mix and you get a shit mountain range.
Have you considered open source LLMs?