> There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire! I wish the author qualified this more. How…
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
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Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#242> There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire! I wish the author qualified this more. How…
Instead, think of an LLM as the equivalent of giving a human a menial task. You know that they're not 100% reliable, and so you give them only tasks that you can quickly verify and correct.
Abstract that out a bit further, and realize that most managers don't expect their reports to be 100% reliable.
Don't use LLMs where accuracy is paramount. Use it to automate away tedious stuff. Examples for me:
Cleaning up speech recognition. I use a traditional voice recognition tool to transcribe, and then have GPT clean it up. I've tried voice recognition tools for dictation on and off for over a decade, and always gave up because even a 95% accuracy is a pain to clean up. But now, I route the output to GPT automatically. It still has issues, but I now often go paragraphs before I have to correct anything. For personal notes, I mostly don't even bother checking its accuracy - I do it only when dictating things others will look at.
And then add embellishments to that. I was dictating out a recipe I needed to send to someone. I told GPT up front to write any number that appears next to an ingredient as a numeral (i.e. 3 instead of "three"). Did a great job - didn't need to correct anything.
And then there are always the "I could do this myself but I didn't have time so I gave it to GPT" category. I was giving a presentation that involved graphs (nodes, edges, etc). I was on a tight deadline and didn't want to figure out how to draw graphs. So I made a tabular representation of my graph, gave it to GPT, and asked it to write graphviz code to make that graph. It did it perfectly (correct nodes and edges, too!)
Sure, if I had time, I'd go learn graphviz myself. But I wouldn't have. The chances I'll need graphviz again in the next few years is virtually 0.
I've actually used LLMs to do quick reformatting of data a few times. You just have to be careful that you can verify the output quickly. If it's a long table, then don't use LLMs for this.
Another example: I have a custom note taking tool. It's just for me. For convenience, I also made an HTML export. Wouldn't it be great if it automatically made alt text for each image I have in my notes? I would just need to send it to the LLM and get the text. It's fractions of a cent per image! The current services are a lot more accurate at image recognition than I need them to be for this purpose!
Oh, and then of course, having it write Bash scripts and CSS for me :-) (not a frontend developer - I've learned CSS in the past, but it's quicker to verify whatever it throws at me than Google it).
Any time you have a task and lament "Oh, this is likely easy, but I just don't have the time" consider how you could make an LLM do it.
Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#243> There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire! I wish the author qualified this more. How…
When I started my career in 2010, google was a semi-serious skill. All of the little things that we know how to do now such as ignoring certain sites, lingering on others, and iteratively refining our search queries were not universally known at the time. Experienced engineers often relied on encyclopedic knowledge of their environment or by "reading the manual". In my experience, LLM tools are the same, you ask for…
* Most existing LLM interfaces are very bad at editing history, instead focusing entirely on appending to history. You can sort of ignore this for one-shot, and this can be properly fixed with additional custom tools, but ...
* By the time you refine your input enough to patch over all the errors in the LLM's output for your sensible input, you're bigger than the LLM can actually handle (much smaller than the alleged context window), so it starts randomly ignoring significant chunks of what you wrote (unlike context-window problems, the ignored parts can be anywhere in the input).
Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#244> There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire! I wish the author qualified this more. How…
It's amazing this is still an opinion in 2025. I now ask devs how they use AI as part of their workflows when I interview. It's a standard skill I expect my guys to have.
Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#245A small number of people with lots of power are essentially deciding to go all in on this technology presumably because significant gains will mean the long term reduction of human labor needs, and thus human labor power. As the article mentions, this also comes at huge expenditure and environmental impact, which is already a very important domain in crisis that we've neglected. The whole thing especially becomes laughable when you consider that many people are still using these tools to perform tasks that could be preformed with a margin of more effort using existing deterministic tools. Instead we are now opting for a computationally more expensive solution that has a higher margin of error.
I get that making technical progress in this area is interesting, but I really think the lower level workers and researchers exploring the space need to be more emphatic about thinking about socioeconomic impact. Some will argue that this is analogous to any other technological change and markets will adjust to account for new tool use, but I am not so sure about this one. If the technology is really as groundbreaking as everyone wants us to believe then logically we might be facing a situation that isn't as easy to adapt to, and I guarantee those with power will not "give a little back" to the disenfranchised masses out of the goodness of their hearts.
This doesn't even raise all the problems these tools create when it comes to establishing coherent viewpoints and truth in ostensibly democratic societies, which is another massive can of worms.
Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#246Look, when are these models going to not just talk to me, but do stuff for me? If they're so clever, why can't I tell one to buy chocolates and send them to my wife? Meanwhile, they can allegedly solve frontier maths problems. What's the holdup to models that go online and perform simple tasks?
I'm pretty sure that's been possible for a while. There was an example where Claude's computer use feature ordered pizza for the dev team through DoorDash: https://x.com/alexalbert__/status/1848777260503077146?lang=e...
I don't think the released version of the feature can do it, but it should be possible with today's tech.
Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#247Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#248Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#249About "people still thinking LLMs are quite useless", I still believe that the problem is that most people are exposed to ChatGPT 4o that at this point for my use case (programming / design partner) is basically a useless toy. And I guess that in tech many folks try LLMs for the same use cases. Try Claude Sonnet 3.5 (not Haiku!) and tell me if, while still flawed, is not helpful. But there is more: a key thing with L…
> Try Claude Sonnet 3.5 (not Haiku!) and tell me if, while still flawed, is not helpful. It's not as helpful as Google was ten years ago. It's more helpful than Google today, because Google search has slowly been corrupted by garbage SEO and other LLM spam, including their own suggestions.
Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
#250About "people still thinking LLMs are quite useless", I still believe that the problem is that most people are exposed to ChatGPT 4o that at this point for my use case (programming / design partner) is basically a useless toy. And I guess that in tech many folks try LLMs for the same use cases. Try Claude Sonnet 3.5 (not Haiku!) and tell me if, while still flawed, is not helpful. But there is more: a key thing with L…
I'm surprised at the description that it's "useless" as a programming / design partner. Even if it doesn't make "elegant" code (whatever that means), it's the difference between an app existing at all, or not. I built and shipped a Swift app to the App Store, currently generating $10,200 in MRR, exclusively using LLMs. I wouldn't describe myself as a programmer, and didn't plan to ever build an app, mostly because in…