LLMs are useful for bolting slop together and wasting electricity. blind leading the blind taking on a new skin
I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#232I haven't met any developers in real life who are hyped about LLMs. The only people who seem excited are managers and others who don't really know how to program.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#233I 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 see a difference between seeing them as valuable in their current state vs being "bullish about LLMs" in the stock market sense. The big problem with being bullish in the stock market sense is that OpenAI isn't selling the LLMs that currently exist to their investors, they're selling AGI. Their pitch to investors is more or less this: > If we accomplish our goal we (and you) will have infinite money. So the expecte…
I think that people who don't believe LLMs to be AGI are not very good at Venn diagrams. Because they certainly are artificial, general, and intelligent according to any dictionary.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#234I 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 absurd. The research and learning power is currently right now a miracle.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#235The most interesting thing about this post is how it reinforces how terrible the usability of LLMs still is today: "I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist." To experienced LLM users that's not surprising at all - providing citations, sourc…
One of the things that’s hard about these discussions is that behind them is an obscene amount of money and hype. She’s not responding to realists like you. She’s responding to the bulls. The people saying these tools will be able to run the world by the end of this year, maybe next. And that’s honestly unfair to you since you do awesome realistic and level headed work with LLM. But I think it’s important when having…
Possibly a reaction to Bill Gates recent statements that it will begin replacing doctors and teachers. It's ridiculous to say LLMs are incredibly useful and valuable. It's highly dubious to think they can be trusted with actual critical tasks without careful supervision.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Sure we have. We don't have a perfect solution but it's miles better than what we have for LLMs.
If a lawyer consistently makes stuff up on legal filings, in the worst cases they can lose their license (though they'll most likely end up getting fines).
If a doctor really sucks, they become uninsurable and ultimately could lose their medical license.
Devs that don't double check their work will cause havoc with the product and, not only will they earn low opinions from their colleges, they could face termination.
Again, not perfect, but also not unfigured out.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#237I 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 t…
> LLMs are an existential threat to basically every knowledge worker job on the planet.
Given the typical problems of LLMs they are not. You still need them to check the results. It’s like FSD, impressive when it works, bad if not, scary because you never known beforehand when it’s failing
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#238Earlier 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".
Which companies? Google and Microsoft are only up a little over the past several years, and I doubt much of their valuation is coming from LLM hype. Most of the discussions about x.com say it's worth substantially less than some years ago.
I feel like a lot of people mean that OpenAI is burning through venture capital money. It's debatable, but it's a huge jump to go from that to thinking it's going to crash the stock market (OpenAI isn't even publicly traded).
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#239I 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 don't see it as a bigger leap than the internet itself. I recall needing books on my desk or a road trip to the local bookshop to find out coding answers. Stack Overflow beats AI most days, but the LLMs are another nice tool.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They really don’t. People say this all the time, but you give any project a little time and it evolves into a special unique snowflake every single time.
That’s why every low code solution and boilerplate generator for the last 30 years failed to deliver on the promises they made.