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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

#71

Post by Hikikomori »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #24
retrac wrote: post #3

You're using them wrong. Everyone is though I can't fault you specifically. Chatbot is like the worst possible application of these technologies. Of late, deaf tech forums are taken over by language model debates over which works best for speech transcription. (Multimodal language models are the the state of the art in machine transcription. Everyone seems to forget that when complaining they can't cite sources for s…

If the goal is to layoff all the customer support and trap the customer in a tarpit with no exit, LLMs are likely the best choice.

US can have fun with that. In EU well likely get laws that force companies to let us talk to a human if it gets bad enough.

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

#72

Post by puppycodes »

krapp wrote: post #67
puppycodes wrote: post #53

Here's one simple reason: I have a very specific esoteric question like: "What material is both electrically conductive and good at blocking sound?" I could type this into google and sift through the titles and short descriptions of websites and eventually maybe find an answer, or I can put the question to the LLM and instantly get an answer that I can then research further to confirm. This is significantly faster, m…

I mean, the first link I got when I pasted that in is probably the Stack Exchange thread you would use to research further, along with other sources, which do seem relevant to the query. I don't see how an LLM is significantly faster or more informative, since you still have to do the legwork to validate the answer. I guess if you're google-phobic (which a lot of people seem to be, especially on HN) then I can see ho…

Its just an example and you can "well actually" until the cows come home, but your missing the point. I'm sure there are things you have found hard to google. Also you are most likely (as your commenting on hacker news) not a good representation of the majority of the world.

idk if you have noticed, but google is clearly using LLM technology in conjunction with its search results, so the assumption they are just using traditional tech and not LLM's to inform or modify its result set I think is unlikely.

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

#73

Post by bbor »

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…

  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.
Perfectly put, IMO.

I know arguments from authority aren't primary, but I think this point highlights some important context: Dr. Hossenfelder has gained international renown by publishing clickbait-y YouTube videos that ostensibly debunk scientific and technological advances of all kinds. She's clearly educated and thoughtful (not to mention otherwise gainfully employed), but her whole public persona kinda relies on assuming the exclusively-critical standpoint you mention.

I doubt she necessarily feels indebted to her large audience expecting this take (it's not new...), but that certainly does seem like a hard cognitive habit to break.

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

#74

Post by kriro »

She's a scientist. In that area LLMs are quite useful in my opinion and part of my daily workflow. Quick scripts that use APIs to get data, cleaning the data and converting it. Quickly working with polar data frames. Dumb daily stuff like "take this data from my CSV file and turn it into a Latex table"...but most importantly freeing up time from tedious administrative tasks (let's not go into detail here).

Also great for brainstorming and quick drafting grant proposals. Anything prototyping and quickly glued together I'll go for LLMs (or LLM agents). They are no substitute for your own brain though.

I'm also curious about the hallucinated sources. I've recently read some papers on using LLM-agents to conduct structured literature reviews and they do it quite well and fairly reproducible. I'm quite willing to build some LLM-agents to reproduce my literature review process in the near future since it's fairly algorithmic. Check for surveys and reviews on the topic, scan for interesting papers within, check sources of sources, go through A tier conference proceedings for the last X years and find relevant papers. Rinse, repeat.

I'm mostly bullish because of LLM-agents, not because of using stock models with the default chat interface.

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

#75

Post by azemetre »

retrac wrote: post #3

You're using them wrong. Everyone is though I can't fault you specifically. Chatbot is like the worst possible application of these technologies. Of late, deaf tech forums are taken over by language model debates over which works best for speech transcription. (Multimodal language models are the the state of the art in machine transcription. Everyone seems to forget that when complaining they can't cite sources for s…

What is the best open source live machine transcription tools would you say? Know of any guides that make it easy to setup locally if so?

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

#76

Post by cjf101 »

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…

It's a weird circle with these things. If you _can't_ do the task you are using the LLM for, you probably shouldn't.

But if you can do the task well enough to at least recognize likely-to-be-correct output, then you can get a lot done in less time than you would do it without their assistance.

Is that worth the second order effects we're seeing? I'm not convinced, but it's definitely changed the way we do work.

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

#77

Post by marcuschong »

The key for LLM productivity, it seems to me, is grounding. Let me give you my last example, from something I've been working on.

I just updated my company commercial PPT. ChatGPT helped me with: - Deep Research great examples and references of such presentations. - Restructure my argument and slides according to some articles I found on the previous step, and thought were pretty good. - Come up with copy for each slide. - Iterate new ideas as I was progressing.

Now, without proper context and grounding, LLMs wouldn't be so helpful at this task, because they don't know my company, clients, product and strategy, and would be generic at best. The key: I provided it with my support portal documentation and a brain dump I recorded to text on ChatGPT with key strategic information about my company. Those are two bits of info I keep always around, so ChatGPT can help me with many tasks in the company.

From that grounding to the final PPT, it's pretty much a trivial and boring transformation task that would have cost me many, many hours to do.

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

#78

Post by puppycodes »

krapp wrote: post #67
puppycodes wrote: post #53

Here's one simple reason: I have a very specific esoteric question like: "What material is both electrically conductive and good at blocking sound?" I could type this into google and sift through the titles and short descriptions of websites and eventually maybe find an answer, or I can put the question to the LLM and instantly get an answer that I can then research further to confirm. This is significantly faster, m…

I mean, the first link I got when I pasted that in is probably the Stack Exchange thread you would use to research further, along with other sources, which do seem relevant to the query. I don't see how an LLM is significantly faster or more informative, since you still have to do the legwork to validate the answer. I guess if you're google-phobic (which a lot of people seem to be, especially on HN) then I can see ho…

you can boil it down to this, whats easier for most people? looking through websites and search engine results for answers or speaking in plain language? The answer is pretty obvious.

The validity of the answers is not 1:1 with its potential profitability.

Like James Baldwin said "people love answers, but hate questions."

getting an answer faster is exponentially better than getting the more precise, more right, more nuanced answer for most people every time. Doing the due dilligence is smart but its also after the fact.

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

#79

Post by nonchalantsui »

brulard wrote: post #27
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

Oh, but it is. I can have code that does something nice to have, needs not to be 100% correct etc. For example, I want a background for my playful webpage. Maybe a WebGL shader. It might not be exactly what I asked for, but I can have it in few minutes up and running. Or some non-critical internal tools - like scraper for lunch menus from restaurants around office. Or simple parking spot sharing app. Or any kind of p…

There is a cost burden to not being 100% correct when it comes to programming. You simply have chosen to ignore that burden, but it still exists for others. Whether it's for example a percent of your users now getting stalled pages due to the webgl shader, or your lunch scraper ddosing local restaurants. They aren't actually forgiving regarding correctness.

Which is fine for actual testing you're doing internally, since that cost burden is then remedied by you fixing those issues. However, no feature is as free as you're making it sound, not even the "nice to have" additions that seem so insignificant.

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

#80

Post by asdev »

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…

all fun and games until your AI generated script deletes the production database. I think that's the point, fault tolerance in academic and financial settings is too high for LLMs to be useful
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