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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

#161

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…

> Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience!

No, that's not my problem with it. My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative.

Sure, sometimes it produces useful code. And often, it'll simply call the "doTheHardPart()" method. I've even caught it literally writing the wrong algorithm when asked to implement a specific and well known algorithm. For example, asking it "write a selection sort" and watching it write a bubble sort instead. No amount of re-prompts pushes it to the right algorithm in those cases either, instead it'll regenerate the same wrong algorithm over and over.

Outside of programming, this is much worse. I've both seen online and heard people quote LLM output as if it were authoritative. That to me is the bigger danger of LLMs to society. People just don't understand that LLMs aren't high powered attorneys, or world renown doctors. And, unfortunately, the incorrect perception of LLMs is being hyped both by LLM companies and by "journalists" who are all to ready to simply run with and discuss the press releases from said LLM companies.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

By the time the capital runs out, I suspect we'll be able to get open models at the level of current frontier and companies will buy a server ready to run it for internal use and reasonable pricing. It will be useful but a complete commodity.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 LL…

[dead]

We're talking about getting work done here, not some purity dance about how you find your information the "right way" by looking in books in libraries or something. Or wait, do you use the internet? How very impure of you. You should know, people post misinformation on there!

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

#164

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…

Humans also get things wrong surprisingly large percentage of the time.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Dot-com boom/bubble all over again. A whole bunch of the current leaders will go bust. A new generation of companies will take over, actually focused on specific customer problems and growing out of profitable niches.

The technology is useful, for some people, in some situations. It will get more useful for more people in more situations as it improves.

Current valuations are too high (Gartner hype cycle), after they collapse valuations will be too low (again, hype cycle), then it'll settle down and the real work happens.

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

#166
post #153

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…

Look man, and I'm saying this not to you but to everyone who is in this boat; you've got to understand that after a while, the novelty wears off. We get it. It's miraculous that some gigabytes of matrices can possibly interpret and generate text, images, and sound. It's fascinating, it really is. Sometimes, it's borderline terrifying. But, if you spend too much time fawning over how impressive these things are, you m…

> dumping out yet another UI that does the same thing we've done 1,000,000 times before isn't exactly novel

As a yet that's exactly what people get paid to do every day. And if it saves them time, they won't exactly get bored of that feature.

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

#167

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…

Love the pragmatic and varied use. Nice one and thanks for some ideas.

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

#168

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 think the tech would have landed better with more people if it wasn't branded as "artificial intelligence."

I don't have a proposal for what a better name would have been, naming things is hard, but AI carries quite a bit of baggage and expectations with it.

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

#169

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…

> Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience! No, that's not my problem with it. My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. Sure, sometimes it produces useful code. And often, it'll simply call the "doTheHardPart()" method. I've even caught it literally writing the wrong algor…

Humans bullshit and hallucinate and claim authority without citation or knowledge. They will believe all manner of things. They frequently misunderstand.

The LLM doesn’t need to be perfect. Just needs to beat a typical human.

LLM opponents aren’t wrong about the limits of LLMs. They vastly overestimate humans.

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

#170

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 is an amazing technology and like crypto/blockchain it is nerdy to understand how it works and play with it. I think there are two things at stake here:

1. Some people are just uncomfortable with it because it “could” replace their jobs.

2. Some people are warning that the ecosystem bubble is significantly out of proportions. They are right and having the whole stock market, companies and US economy attached to LLMs is just down right irresponsible.

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