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I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

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Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#31

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

MostlyStable wrote: post #4

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

> LLMs are almost perfect for this. It's generally faster than me looking up syntax/documentation, when it's wrong it's easy to tell and correct.

Exactly this.

I once had a function that would generate several .csv reports. I wanted these reports to then be uploaded to s3://my_bucket/reports/{timestamp}/.csv

I asked ChatGPT "Write a function that moves all .csv files in the current directory to and old_reports directory, calls a create_reports function, then uploads all the csv files in the current directory to s3://my_bucket/reports/{timestamp}/.csv with the timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD format""

And it created the code perfectly. I knew what the correct code would look like, I just couldn't be fucked to look up the exact calls to boto3, whether moving files was os.move or os.rename or something from shutil, and the exact way to format a datetime object.

It created the code far faster that I would have.

Like, I certainly wouldn't use it to write a whole app, or even a whole class, but individual blocks like this, it's great.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#33

Post by nonchalantsui »

MostlyStable wrote: post #19
bluefirebrand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

I don't know what you are doing or why it's failed. Maybe my primary use cases really are in the top whatever percentile for AI usefulness, but it doesn't feel like it. All I know is that frontier models have already been good enough for more than a year to increase my productivity by a fair bit.

Your use case is in fact in the top whatever percentile for AI usefulness. Short simple scripting that won't have to be relied on due to never being widely deployed. No large codebase it has to comb through, no need for thorough maintenance and update management, no need for efficient (and potentially rare) solutions.

The only use case that would beat yours is the type of office worker that cannot write professional sounding emails but has to send them out regularly manually.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#34

Post by kilolima »

saaaaaam wrote: post #26

I’ve used Claude today to: Write code to pull down a significant amount of public data using an open API. (That took about 30 seconds - I just gave it the swagger file and said “here’s what I want”) Get the data (an hour or so), clean the data (barely any time, gave it some samples, it wrote the code), used the cleaned data to query another API, combined the data sources, pulled down a bunch of PDFs relating to the d…

Yuck. Do your users know that they are reading recycled LLM content? Is this long winded post generated by an LLM?

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#35

Post by belter »

"Yes, I have tried Gemini, and actually it was even worse in that it frequently refuses to even search for a source and instead gives me instructions for how to do it myself. Stopped using it for that reason."

Thank you Sabine. Every time I have mentioned Gemini is the worst, and not even worth of consideration, I have been bombarded with downvotes, and told I am using it wrong.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#36

Post by throwawa14223 »

My experience mirrors hers. Asking questions is worthless because the answers are either 404 links, telling me how to use a search engine, or just flat out wrong and the code generated compiles maybe one time out of ten and when it does the implementation is usually poor.

When I evaluate against areas I possess professional expertise I become convinced LLMs produce the Gell Mann amnesia effect for any area I don't know.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#37

Post by zeroonetwothree »

latemedium wrote: post #5

My experience is starkly different. Today I used LLMs to: 1. Write python code for a new type of loss function I was considering 2. Perform lots of annoying CSV munging ("split this CSV into 4 equal parts", "convert paths in this column into absolute paths", "combine these and then split into 4 distinct subsets based on this field.." - they're great for that) 3. Expedite some basic shell operations like "generate sof…

That’s fair but it’s totally different use cases than the linked post discusses.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#38

Post by [deleted] »

MostlyStable wrote: post #4

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

[deleted]

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#39

Post by [deleted] »

MostlyStable wrote: post #4

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

[deleted]

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#40

Post by islewis »

> I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs.

I don't believe OP's thesis is properly backed by the rest of his tweet, which seems to boil down to "LLM's can't properly cite links".

If LLM's performing poorly on an arbitrary small-scoped test case makes you bearish on the whole field, I don't think that falls on the LLM's.

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