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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

#211

Post by School-Cotton »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #22
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…

every time someone brings up "Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases" I like to point at that such code is not likely to be used for anything that matters

You never write code to automate something in your personal environment, or to analyze some one-off data, rather than to actually go into production?

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

#212

Post by icelancer »

Animats wrote: post #178
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…

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

Not sure. We haven't figured it out for humans yet.

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

#213

Post by billy99k »

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 love using it to boilerplate code for a new API I want to integrate. Much better than having to manually search. In the near future, not knowing how to effectively use AI to enhance productivity will be a disadvantage to potential employers.

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

#215

Post by Devorlon »

collingreen wrote: post #173
CamperBob2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it had access to my books, a current-gen frontier LLM most certainly could do my taxes. I don't understand that entire line of reasoning.

And it might even be right and not get you in legal trouble! Not that you'd know (until audit day) unless you went back and did them as a verification though.

And if I did my own taxes, I wouldn't know if I were in legal trouble until audit day as well!

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

#216

Post by kasey_junk »

jasondigitized wrote: post #188
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.

Honest question, how do you validate it?

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

#217

Post by Nevermark »

amrocha wrote: post #177
intrasight wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah but if your accountant bullshits when doing your taxes, you can sue them.

> Yeah but if your accountant bullshits when doing your taxes, you can sue them.

What is the point of limiting delegation to such an extreme dichotomy? As apposed to getting more things done?

The vast majority of useful things we delegate, or do for others ourselves, are not as well specified, or as legally liable for any imperfections, as an accountant doing accounting.

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

#218

Post by vladms »

Animats wrote: post #178
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…

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

I have seen many people not saying "don't know" when appropriate. If you believe whomever without some double-checking you will have (bad) surprises.

To make another parallel: that's why we have automated testing in software (long before LLMs). Because you can't trust without checking.

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

#219

Post by dcchambers »

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…

> And people just sit around, unimpressed, and complain that ... what ... it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly?

IMO there are two distinct reasons for this:

1. You've got the Sam Altman's of the world claiming that LLMs are or nearly are AGI and that ASI is right around the corner. It's obvious this isn't true even if LLMs are still incredibly powerful and useful. But Sam doing the whole "is it AGI?" dance gets old really quick.

2. LLMs are an existential threat to basically every knowledge worker job on the planet. Peoples' natural response to threats is to become defensive.

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

#220

Post by genidoi »

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…

Blockchain is here to stay, this is way past the point of "believing in the tech" - recently an wss:// order book exchange (Hyperliquid) crossed $1T volume traded, and they started in 2023.

Blockchains are becoming real-time data structures where everyone has admin level read-only access to everyone.

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