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

121–130 of 1001 posts

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

#121

Post by gilbetron »

jryan49 wrote: post #114
gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

It would be fine if it were sold that way, but there is so much hype. We're told that it's going to replace all of us and put us all out our jobs. They set the expectations so high. Like remember OpenAI showing a video of it doing your taxes for you? Predictions that super-intelligent AI is going to radically transform society faster than we can keep up? I think that's where most of the backlash is coming from.

I mean, it's been like 3 years. 3 years after the web came out was barely anything. 3 years after the first GPU was cool, but not that cool. The past three years in LLMs? Insane.

Things could stall out and we'll have bumps and delays ... I hope. If this thing progresses at the same pace, or speeds up, well ... reality will change.

Or not. Even as they are, we can build some cool stuff with them.

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

#122

Post by regularjack »

gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

There are legitimate concerns to have in regards to LLMs, it's not all a sea of roses.

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

#123

Post by 01100011 »

meowface wrote: post #110
gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

A lot of software developers have an initial bad experience and assume it's terrible and give up on it. I feel bad for people who haven't yet experienced how useful these models are for programming. Some also just prefer manually entering everything. Those people I will never understand.

how much time do I need to devote to see anything but garbage?

For reference, I program systems code in C/C++ in a large, proprietary codebase.

My experiences with OpenAI(a year ago or more), and more recently, Cursor, Grok-v3 and Deepseek-r1, were all failures. The later two started out OK and got worse over time.

What I haven't done is asked "AI" to whip up a more standard application. I have some ideas(an ncurses frontend to p4 written in python similar to tig, for instance), but haven't gotten around to it.

I want this stuff to work, but so far it hasn't. Now I don't think "programming" a computer in english is a very good idea anyway, but I want a competent AI assistant to pair program with. To the degree that people are getting results, to me it seems they are leveraging very high-level APIs/libraries of code which are not written by AI and solving well-solved, "common" problems(simple games, simple web or phone apps). Sort of like how people gloss over the heavy lifting done by language itself when they praise the results from LLMs in other fields.

I know it eventually will work. I just don't know when. I also get annoyed by the hype of folks who think they can become software engineers because they can talk to an LLM. Most of my job isn't programming. Most of my job is thinking about what the solution should be, talking to other people like me in meetings, understanding what customers really want beyond what they are saying, and tracking what I'm doing in various forms(which is something I really do want AI to help me with).

Vibe coding is aptly named because it's sort of the VB6 of the modern era. Holy cow! I wrote a Windows GUI App!!!. It's letting non-programmers and semi-programmers(the "I write glue code in Python to munge data and API ins/outs" crowd) create usable things. Cool! So did spreadsheets. So did Hypercard. Andrej tweeting that he made a phone app was kinda cool but also kinda sad. If this is what the hundreds of billions spent on AI(and my bank account thanks you for that) delivers then the bubble is going to pop soon.

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

#124

Post by zozbot234 »

gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

> I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out.

If you're lucky it figures it out. If you aren't, it makes stuff up in a way that seems almost purposefully calculated to fool you into assuming that it's figured everything out. That's the real problem with LLM's: they fundamentally cannot be trusted because they're just a glorified autocomplete; they don't come with any inbuilt sense of when they might be getting things wrong.

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

#126

Post by hatthew »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #46
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.

The claims are a lie. The tool is still useful. Even if the hammer doesn't increase productivity by 25%, if it feels more comfortable to hold and I can use it for longer, I'm going to be happy with it, independent from any marketing.

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

#127

Post by sothatsit »

ffsm8 wrote: post #117
gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

It's definitely a tech that's here to stay, unlike block chain/nfts But I mirror the confusion why people are still bullish on it. The current valuation for it is because the market thinks that it's able to write code like a senior engineer and have AGI, because that's how they're marketed by the LLM providers. I'm not even certain if they'll be ubiquitous after the venture capital investments are gone and the servic…

I am more than happy to pay for access to LLMs, and models continue to get smaller and cheaper. I would be very surprised if they are not far more widely used in 5 or 10 years time than they are today.

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

#128

Post by lucyjojo »

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…

i started (re)using AI recently. it/i mostly failed until i decided on a rule.

if it's "dumb and annoying" i ask the AI, else i do it myself.

since that AI has been saving me a lot of time on dumb and annoying things.

also a few models are pretty good for basic physics/modeling stuff (get basic formulas, fetching constants, do some calculations). these are also pretty useful. i recently used it for ventilation/co2 related stuff in my room and the calculations matched observed values pretty well, then it pumped me a broken desmos syntax formula, and i fixed that by hand and we were good to go!

---

(dumb and annoying thing -> time-consuming to generate with no "deep thought" involved, easy to check)

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

#129

Post by jryan49 »

gilbetron wrote: post #116
panarky wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how useful it is, there will always be naysayers who can't see it, or who refuse to see it. That's okay. It's not my responsibility to convince or convert them. I prefer to just let them be and not engage.

I hear you, I'm tired of getting people that don't care to care. It's the people that should know how cool this stuff is and don't - they frustrate me!

You people frustrate me because you don't listen that I've tried to use AI to do help with my job and it fails horribly in every way. I see that it is useful to you, and that's great, but that doesn't make it useful for everybody... I don't understand why you must have everyone agree with you, and that it's "tires" you out to hear other people's contracting opinions. It feels like a religion.

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

#130

Post by tombert »

meowface wrote: post #110
gilbetron wrote: post #109

I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me…

A lot of software developers have an initial bad experience and assume it's terrible and give up on it. I feel bad for people who haven't yet experienced how useful these models are for programming. Some also just prefer manually entering everything. Those people I will never understand.

I use ChatGPT all the time. I really like it. It's not perfect; how I've described it (and I doubt that I'm unique in this): it's like having a really smart and eager intern at your disposal.

I say "intern" in the sense that its error-prone and kind of inexperienced, but also generally useful. I can ask it to automatically create a lot of the bootstrapping or tedious code that I always dread writing so that I can focus on the fun stuff, which is often the stuff that's pawned off onto interns and junior-level engineers. I think for the most part, when you treat it like that, it lives up to and sometimes even surpasses expectations.

I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but whenever I begin a new project, a large percentage of the first ~3 hours is simply copying and pasting and editing from documentation, either an API I have to call or some bootstrapping code from a framework or just some cruft to make built-in libraries work how you want. I hate doing all that, it actively makes me not want to start a new project. Being able to get ChatGPT to give me stuff that I need to actually get started on my project has made coding a lot more fun for me again. At this point, you can take my LLM from my cold dead hands.

I do think it will keep getting better, but I'm also at a point where even if it never improves I will still keep using it.

Post reply on HN