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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

#131

Post by gilbetron »

regularjack wrote: post #122
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.

As far as capabilities? Meh. It will improve, or not, but we'll figure out really cool things regardless.

As far as breaking our reality and society? Absolutely :(

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

#132

Post by codr7 »

tempestn wrote: post #120
jryan49 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it won't do your taxes for you, but it can sure help you do them yourself. Probably won't put you out of your job either, but it might help you accomplish more. Of course, one result of people accomplishing more in less time is that you need fewer people to do the same amount of work - so some jobs could be lost. But it's also possible that for the most part instead, more will be accomplished overall.

People frame that like it's something we gain, efficiency, as if before we were wasting time by thinking for ourselves. I get that they can do certain things better, I'm not sure that delegating to them is free of charge. We're paying something, losing something. Probably learning and fulfillment. We become increasingly dependent on machines to do anything.

Something important happened when we turned the tables around, I don't feel it gets the credit it should. It used to be humans telling machines what to do. Now we're doing the opposite.

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

#133

Post by mechagodzilla »

sothatsit wrote: post #127
ffsm8 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of that means that the current companies will be profitable or that their valuations are anywhere close to justified though. The future could easily be "Open-weight models are moderately useful for some niches, no-name cloud providers charge slightly higher than the cost of electricity to use them at low profit margins".

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

#134

Post by sothatsit »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
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 autocom…

I see this complaint a lot, and frankly, it just doesn't matter.

What matters is speeding up how fast I can find information. Not only will LLMs sometimes answer my obscure questions perfectly themselves, but they also help to point me to the jargon I need to use to find that information online. In many areas this has been hugely valuble to me.

Sometimes you do just have to cut your losses. I've given up on asking LLMs for help with Zig, for example. It is just too obscure a language I guess, because the hallucination rate is too high to be useful. But for webdev, Python, matplotlib, or bash help? It is invaluable to me, even though it makes mistakes every now and then.

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

#137

Post by poobear22 »

I like them but I still feel like I am employing a bunch of over confident narcissist engineers and if I ask them to do something, I am never really comfortable the result is correct. What I want is a work force where I can pass off a request and go home in confidence that the results were correctly implemented.

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

#138

Post by layoric »

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 agree, they are an amazing piece of technology, but the investment and hype doesn't match the reality. This might age like milk, but I don't think OpenAI is going to make it. They burnt $9B to lose $5B in 2024, trying to raise money like their life depends on it.. because their life depends on it. From what I can tell, none of the AI model produces are profiting from their model usage at this point, except maybe Deepseek. This will be a market, they are useful, astonishing impressive even, but IMO they are either going to become waaayy more expensive to use and/or/combo of market/investment will greatly shrink to be sustainable.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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