Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 1001 posts

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

#41

Post by runjake »

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…

More often than not, when I inquire deeper, I often find their prompting isn't very good at all.

"Garbage in, garbage out" as the law says.

Of course, it took a lot of trial and error for me to get to my current level of effectiveness with LLMs. It's probably our responsibility to teach these who are willing.

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

#42

Post by crazygringo »

If there's one common thread across LLM criticisms, it's that they're not perfect.

These critics don't seem to have learned the lesson that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I use ChatGPT all the time for academic research. Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time. But has it pointed me to important research papers I might never have found otherwise? Absolutely.

The rate of inaccuracies and falsehoods doesn't matter. What matters is, is it saving you time and increasing your productivity. Verifying the accuracy of its statements is easy. While finding the knowledge it spits out in the first place is hard. The net balance is a huge positive.

People are bullish on LLM's because they can save you days' worth of work, like every day. My research productivity has gone way up with ChatGPT -- asking it to explain ideas, related concepts, relevant papers, and so forth. It's amazing.

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

#43

Post by Paratoner »

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…

Did you also do that while mewing and listening to an AI abridged audiobook version of the laws of power in chinese? Don't forget your morning ice face dunks.

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

#44

Post by ajkdhcb2 »

turtletontine wrote: post #30
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 literally had a developer of an open source package I’m working with tell me “yeah that’s a known problem, I gave up on trying to fix it. You should just ask ChatGPT to fix it, I bet it will immediately know the answer.” Annoying response of course. But I’d never used an LLM to debug before, so I figured I’d give it a try. First: it regurgitated a bunch of documentation and basic debugging tips, which might have ac…

My experiences have all been like this too. I am puzzled by how some people say it works for them

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

#45

Post by Ferret7446 »

Panzer04 wrote: post #25
sidewndr46 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every time someone brings up "Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases" I like to point at that such code is not likely to be used for anything that matters

Is such code hard to write in the first place? Automating the easy 80% sounds useful, but in practice I'm not convinced that's all that helpful. Reading and putting together code you didn't write is hard enough to begin with.

It's not hard, but it's time consuming.

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

#46

Post by rufus_foreman »

harrall wrote: post #29

I am neither bullish or bearish. LLM is a tool. It's a hammer -- sometimes it works well. It summarizes the user reviews on a site... cool, not perfect, but useful. And like every tool, it is useless for 90% of life's situations. And I know when it's useful because I've already tried a hammer on 1000 things and have figured out what I should be using a hammer on.

>> I am neither bullish or bearish. LLM is a tool...It's a hammer

If someone says, "This new type of hammer will increase productivity in the construction industry by 25%", it's something else in addition to being a tool. It's either a lie, or it's an incredible advance in technology.

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

#47

Post by cool_dude85 »

runjake wrote: post #41
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…

More often than not, when I inquire deeper, I often find their prompting isn't very good at all. "Garbage in, garbage out" as the law says. Of course, it took a lot of trial and error for me to get to my current level of effectiveness with LLMs. It's probably our responsibility to teach these who are willing.

It seems hard to be bullish on LLMs as a generally useful tool if the solution to problems people have is "use trial and error to improve how you write your prompts, no, it's not obvious how to do so, yes, it depends heavily on the exact model you use."

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

#48

Post by simonw »

The most interesting thing about this post is how it reinforces how terrible the usability of LLMs still is today:

"I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist."

To experienced LLM users that's not surprising at all - providing citations, sources for quotes, useful URLs are all things that they are demonstrably terrible at.

But it's a computer! Telling people "this advanced computer system cannot reliably look up facts" goes against everything computers have been good at for the last 40+ years.

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

#49

Post by sdenton4 »

turtletontine wrote: post #30
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 literally had a developer of an open source package I’m working with tell me “yeah that’s a known problem, I gave up on trying to fix it. You should just ask ChatGPT to fix it, I bet it will immediately know the answer.” Annoying response of course. But I’d never used an LLM to debug before, so I figured I’d give it a try. First: it regurgitated a bunch of documentation and basic debugging tips, which might have ac…

This morning I was using an LLM to develop some SQL queries against a database it had never seen before. I gave it a starting point, and outlined what I wanted to do. It proposed a solution, which was a bit wrong, mostly because I hadn't given it the full schema to work with. Small nudges and corrections, and we had something that worked. From there, I iterated and added more features to the outputs.

At many points, the code would have an error; to deal with this, I just supply the error message, as-is to the LLM, and it proposes a fix. Sometimes the fix works, and sometimes I have to intervene to push the fix in the right direction. It's OK - the whole process took a couple hours, and probably would have been a whole day if I were doing it on my own, since I usually only need to remember anything about SQL syntax once every year or three.

A key part of the workflow, imo, was that we were working in the medium of the actual code. If the code is broken, we get an error, and can iterate. Asking for opinions doesn't really help...

Post reply on HN