Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Post by Obscurity4340 » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

lumost wrote: post #214

dartos wrote: post #198

> 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…

Post by cruffle_duffle » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 2:45 AM UTC

o11c wrote: post #243

lumost wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problems with that skill is that: * 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…

Post by cj » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 2:52 AM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #394

cj wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not original commenter) “Staff” engineer is typically one of the most senior and highest paid engineer titles in very large tech company. “Staff plus” is implying they are the best of the best.

Staff plus just means staff or higher. Staff, senior staff, principal, mega ultra principal etc…

Post by tucnak » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 2:54 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #353

cbeach wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software "has agency"? That is, I can entrust it to carry out the task I've described, to completion, without telling it how to perform the task?

That's one of the more common definitions people use - especially people who aren't directly building agents, since the builders tend to get more hung up on "LLM with access to tools" or similar. My problem is when people use that definition (or any other) without clarifying, because they assume it's THE obvious definition.

Post by mvdtnz » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 3:03 AM UTC

ninth_ant wrote: post #99

antirez wrote: post #54

About "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 think a lot of the confusion is in how we approach LLMs. Perhaps stemming from the over-broad term “AI”. There are certain classes of problems that LLMs are good at. Accurately regurgitating all accumulated world knowledge ever is not one, so don’t ask a language model to diagnose your medical condition or choose a political candidate. But do ask them to perform suitable tasks for a language model! Every day by aut…