I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by cyanydeez » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:15 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #169

cogman10 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

ok, but people are building determinative software _on top of them_. It's like saying "it's ok, people make mistakes, but lets build infrastructure on some brain in a vat". It's just inherently not at the point that you can make it the foundation of anything but a pet that helps you slop out code, or whatever visual or textual project you have.

It's one of those "quantities is so fascisnating, lets ignore how we got here in the first place"

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

#182

Post by bigbuppo » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:16 AM UTC

Well you see, there are lots of people that are dependent on bullshitting their way through life, and don't actually contribute anything new of novel to the world. For these people, LLMs are great because they can generate more bullshit than they ever could before. For those that are actually trying to do new and interesting things, well, an LLM is only as good as what it has seen before, and you're doing something new and exciting. Congratulations, you beat the machine until they steal your work and feed it to the LLM.

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

#183

Post by relaxing » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:16 AM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #140

can we stop using such a confusing word as "bullish" please? saying "why are people bullish" only to continue with bullying does not add any clarity to this world

maybe you can ask an llm to explain it.

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

#184

Post by bigbuppo » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:19 AM UTC

slackfan wrote: post #111

LLMs are like any tool, you get what you put in. If you are frustrated with the results, maybe you need to think about what you're doing. 300/5290 functions decompiled and analyzed in less than three hours off of a huge codebase. By next weekend, a binary that had lost source code will have tests running on a platform it wasn't designed for.

What is this product so I can avoid it?

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

#185

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #170

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 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 LL…

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

What jobs are seriously at risk of being totally replaced by LLM's? Even in things like copywriting and natural language translation, which is somewhat of a natural "best case" for the underlying tech, their output is quite sub par compared to the average human's.

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

#186

Post by nopinsight » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

Can our brains recall precise citations to tens of papers we read a while ago? For the vast majority, no. LLMs function somewhat similarly to our brains in many ways, as opposed to classical computers.

Their strengths and flaws differ from our brains, to be sure, but some of these flaws are being mitigated and improved on by the month. Similarly, unaided humans cannot operate successfully in many situations. We build tools, teams, and institutions to help us deal with them.

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

#187

Post by garciasn » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

jasonjayr wrote: post #179

MattGaiser wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLM's can't be held accountable. And many, many companies are proposing and implementing uses for LLM's to intentionally obscure that accountability. If a person makes up something, innocently or maliciously, and someone believes it and ends up getting harmed, that person can have some liability for the harm. If a LLM hallucinates something, that somone believes and they end up getting harmed, there's no accountabili…

[flagged]

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

#188

Post by jasondigitized » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:21 AM UTC

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…

Anyone who doesn't understand this either isn't required to use to utility it provides or has no idea how to prompt it correctly. My wife is a bookkeeper. There are some tasks that are a pain in the ass without writing some custom code. In her case, we just saved her about 2 hours by asking Claude to do it. It wrote the code, applied the code to a CSV we uploadrd and gave us exactly what we needed in 2 minutes.

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

#189

Post by timewizard » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:21 AM UTC

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…

Is your testing adversarial or merely anecdotal curiosity? If you don't actively look for it why would you expect to find it?

It's bad technology because it wastes a lot of labor, electricity, and bandwidth in a struggle to achieve what most human beings can with minimal effort. It's also a blatant thief of copyrighted materials.

If you want to like it, guess what, you'll find a way to like it. If you try to view it from another persons use case you might see why they don't like it.

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

#190

Post by krustyburger » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:21 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #169

cogman10 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You’re moving the goalposts. LLMs are masquerading as superb reference tools and as sources of expertise on all things, not as mere “typical humans.” If they were presented accurately as being about as fallible as a typical human, typical humans (users) wouldn’t be nearly as trusting or excited about using them, and they wouldn’t seem nearly as futuristic.