Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They can be worse than worthless. They can sabotage your work if you let them making you spend even more time fixing it afterwards. I basically gave up on llms because i was spending more time figuring out what it did wrong than actually getting value. People without programming skill are still impressed by them. But they yet have to learn or deliver anything of value even with the help of chat bots.
I have twenty years of programming experience and LLMs give me a significant productivity boost for programming on a daily basis: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Sep/29/llms-podcast/#code-int...
ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
161–170 of 282 posts
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#162Not surprised. It's frighteningly good, and a perfect match for programming. I often ask GPT4 to write code for something, and try if it works, but I seldom copy and paste the code it writes - I rewrite it myself to fit into the context of the codebase. But it saves me a lot of time when I am unsure about how to do something. Other times I don't like the suggestion at all, but that's useful as well, as it often clari…
I gave it a nontrivial task I couldn’t google a solution for, and wasn’t sure it was even possible:
Given a python object, give me a list of functions that received this object as an argument. I cannot modify the existing code, only how the object is structured.
It gave me a few ideas that didn’t quite work (e.g modifying the functions or wrapping them in decorators, looking at the current stack trace to find such functions) and after some back and forth it came up with hijacking the python tracer to achieve this. And it actually worked.
The crazy thing is that I don’t believe it encountered anything like this in its training set, it was able to put pieces together which is near human level. When asked, it easily explained the shortcomings of this solution (e.g interfering with the debugger).
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have twenty years of programming experience and LLMs give me a significant productivity boost for programming on a daily basis: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Sep/29/llms-podcast/#code-int...
Sorry, I may have gotten something wrong by skimming over your link. Is this the "significant project" you have been assisted by LLMs? https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history
Here's the transcript (it pre-dates the ChatGPT share feature): https://gist.github.com/simonw/1aa4050f3f7d92b048ae414a40cdd...
I wrote more about it here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/15/sqlite-history/
Here's another one I built using AppleScript: https://github.com/dogsheep/apple-notes-to-sqlite - I wrote about that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha it's fun to dunk on management consultants but I think the magic is they are like pop music producers. Somehow they're able to make the C suite hoover up LLM shovelware the same way top producers can take super obvious music and sell I V vi IV but when we try the same chords it's uninspired and no one wants to listen to it
It’s insane that people think producing pop music is easy. Competing on the pop music market is a cutthroat business with a lot of competition and the good ones get their price back in gold. When Scorpions wanted to be resurrected they hired Desmond Child to produce them and he absolutely crushed. These people are very good at what they do and there are very few of them.
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#165LLMs are stunningly good at language tasks: almost all of what us old-timers called NLP is just crushed these days. Summarization, Q&A, sentiment, the list goes on and on. Truly remarkable stuff. And where there isn’t a bright line around “fact”, and where it doesn’t need to come together like a Pynchon novel, the generative stuff is smoking hot: short-form fiction, opinion pieces, product copy? Massive productivity…
Try asking it for specifically NLP-ized text and it does it very well... (but then tells you not to use it as it is "unethical")
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#166LLMs are stunningly good at language tasks: almost all of what us old-timers called NLP is just crushed these days. Summarization, Q&A, sentiment, the list goes on and on. Truly remarkable stuff. And where there isn’t a bright line around “fact”, and where it doesn’t need to come together like a Pynchon novel, the generative stuff is smoking hot: short-form fiction, opinion pieces, product copy? Massive productivity…
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your docs and PR descriptions can be generated off file diffs everyone's time could be better spent scanning the diff to come to the same conclusions. Consider using your PRs and docs to capture the answers to the usual why questions which LLM won't be able to do.
The why is largely in the ticket and the what in the pr.
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#168Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s insane that people think producing pop music is easy. Competing on the pop music market is a cutthroat business with a lot of competition and the good ones get their price back in gold. When Scorpions wanted to be resurrected they hired Desmond Child to produce them and he absolutely crushed. These people are very good at what they do and there are very few of them.
It’s also insane people think running a large business is easy, or that management consultants aren’t worth what they’re paid.
i.e. someone has been tasked with getting some consultants to come up with a suggestion, the key question however is what does THEIR boss want to hear. If you can work that out and give it to them then you've earned your 'worth'
Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants
#170LLMs are stunningly good at language tasks: almost all of what us old-timers called NLP is just crushed these days. Summarization, Q&A, sentiment, the list goes on and on. Truly remarkable stuff. And where there isn’t a bright line around “fact”, and where it doesn’t need to come together like a Pynchon novel, the generative stuff is smoking hot: short-form fiction, opinion pieces, product copy? Massive productivity…
I don't buy it. LLMs cannot do anything reliably, no matter how constrained the domain. Their outputs are of acceptable quality when back to a person who will use their human brain to paper over the cracks. People can recognize when the output is garbage, figure out minor ambiguities, and subconsciously correct minor factual or logical errors. But I would never feed LLM results directly into another computer program…
But they can do plenty of useful stuff reliably. It’s not “be generally intelligent”, which they are just nothing even remotely close to, but know you don’t dig the LLM hype from that comment? Yeah, they get that every time.