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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

#81

Post by zeitgeistcowboy »

simonw wrote: post #64
cool_dude85 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

You could say that about any power tool. A Mitre Saw is an amazing thing to have in a woodshop, but if you don't learn how to use it you're probably going to cut off a finger. The problem is that LLMs are power tools that are sold as being so easy to use that you don't need to invest any effort in learning them at all. That's extremely misleading.

So is using an LLM to write SQL for you like using a mitre saw instead of a table saw? I guess the crux is that you still need to do work either way.

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

#82

Post by minimaxir »

Shank wrote: post #6
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…

> You're using them wrong. Everyone is though I can't fault you specifically. If everyone is using them wrong, I would argue that says something more about them than the users. Chat-based interfaces are the thing that kicked LLMs into the mainstream consciousness and started the cycle/trajectory we’re on now. If this is the wrong use case, everything the author said is still true. There are still applications made be…

LLM providers actually have an incentive not to write literature on how to use LLM optimally, as that causes friction which means less engagement/money spent on the provider. There's also the typical tin-foil hat explanation of "it's bad so you'll keep retrying it to get the LLM to work which means more money for us."

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

#83

Post by bluefirebrand »

sdenton4 wrote: post #49
turtletontine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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

If you have any reasonable understanding of SQL, I guarantee you could brush up on it and write it yourself in less than a couple of hours unless you're trying to do something very complex

SQL is absolutely trivial to write by hand

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

#84

Post by bluefirebrand »

dale_glass wrote: post #63
turtletontine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, when it works it's darn near magic. I spent like a week trying to figure out why a livecd image I was working on wasn't initializing devices correctly. Read the docs, read source code, tried strace, looked at the logs, found forums of people with the same problem but no solution, you know the drill. In desperation I asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT said "Use udevadm trigger". I did. Things started working. F…

Honestly this says more about how bad Google has become than about how good GPT is

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

#85

Post by zeitgeistcowboy »

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…

So much about this seems inauthentic. The post itself. The experience. The content produced. I wouldn’t like to be on the other end of the production of this content.

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

#86

Post by mystified5016 »

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…

The biggest thing I've found is that if you give any hint at all as to what you think the problem is, the LLM will immediately and enthusiastically agree, no matter how wildly incorrect your suggestion is.

If I give it all my information and add "I think the problem might be X, but I'm not sure", the LLM always agrees that the problem is X and will reinterpret everything else I've said to 'prove' me right.

Then the conversation is forever poisoned and I have to restart an entirely new chat from scratch.

98% of the utility I've found in LLMs is getting it to generate something nearly correct, but which contains just enough information for me to go and Google the actual answer. Not a single one of the LLMs I've tried have been any practical use editing or debugging code. All I've ever managed is to get it to point me towards a real solution, none of them have been able to actually independently solve any kind of problem without spending the same amount of time and effort to do it myself.

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

#87

Post by satisfice »

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…

I want to sit next to you and stop you every time you use your LLM and say, “Let me just carefully check this output.” I bet you wouldn’t like that. But when I want to do high quality work, I MUST take that time and carefully review and test.

What I am seeing is fanboys who offer me examples of things working well that fail any close scrutiny— with the occasional example that comes out actually working well.

I agree that for prototyping unimportant code LLMs do work well. I definitely get to unimportant point B from point A much more quickly when trying to write something unfamiliar.

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

#88

Post by roxolotl »

simonw wrote: post #48

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, sourc…

One of the things that’s hard about these discussions is that behind them is an obscene amount of money and hype. She’s not responding to realists like you. She’s responding to the bulls. The people saying these tools will be able to run the world by the end of this year, maybe next.

And that’s honestly unfair to you since you do awesome realistic and level headed work with LLM.

But I think it’s important when having discussions to understand the context within which they are occurring.

Without the bulls she might very well be saying what you are in your last paragraph. But because of the bulls the conversation becomes this insane stratified nonsense.

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

#89

Post by prawn »

MostlyStable wrote: post #15
CrossVR wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that given the current valuations, being good at a bunch of narrow use cases is just not good enough. It needs to be able to replace humans in every role where the primary output is text or speech to meet expectations.

I don't think that "replacing humans in every role" is the line for "being bullish on AI models". I think they could stop development exactly where they are, and they would still make pretty dramatic improvements to productivity in a lot of places. For me at least, their value already exceeds the $20/month I'm paying, and I'm pretty sure that way more than covers inference costs.

Completely agree. As is, Cursor and ChatGPT and even Bing Image Create (for free generation of shoddy ideas, styles, concepts, etc) are very useful to me. In fact, it would suit me if everything stalled at this point rather than improve to the point that everyone can catch up in how they use AI.

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

#90

Post by signatoremo »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #37
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.

The click baited title is “I genuinely don’t understand how some people are still bullish about LLM”.

I guess the author can understand now?

When something was impossible only 3 years ago, barely worked 2 years ago, but works well now, there are very good reasons to be bullish, I suppose?

The hypes cut both way.

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