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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

#241

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

cogman10 wrote: post #203
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 opponents aren’t wrong about the limits of LLMs. They vastly overestimate humans. On the contrary. Humans can earn trust, learn, and can admit to being wrong or not knowing something. Further, humans are capable of independent research to figure out what it is they don't know. My problem isn't that humans are doing similar things to LLMs, my problem is that humans can understand consequences of bullshitting at…

Your second point directly contradicts your first point.

In fact we do know how good doctors and lawyers are at their jobs, and the answer is "not very." Medical negligence claims are a huge problem. Claims agains lawyers are harder to win - for obvious reasons - but there is plenty of evidence that lawyers cannot be presumed competent.

As for coding, it took a friend of mine three days to go from a cold start with zero dev experience to creating a usable PDF editor with a basic GUI for a specific small set of features she needed for ebook design.

No external help, just conversations with ChatGPT and some Googling.

Obviously LLMs have issues, but if we're now in the "Beginners can program their own custom apps" phase of the cycle, the potential is huge.

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

#242

Post by sarchertech »

lostmsu wrote: post #233
lolinder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not how language works.

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

#243

Post by dyauspitr »

simonw wrote: post #48

The 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…

I’ve never had it give me bullshit citations when I specifically say look it up. It just gives me a clickable link.

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

#244

Post by rayiner »

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 asked Grok to describe a picture I took of me and my kid at Hilton Head island. Based on the plant life it guesses it was a southeast barrier island in Georgia or the Carolinas. It guessed my age and my son’s age. LLMs are completely insane tech for a 90s kid. The first fundamental advance in tech I’ve seen in my lifetime—like what it must’ve been like for people who used a telephone for the first time, or watched a television.

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

#245

Post by sensanaty »

I mean the answer is simple, money. There's a bajillion dollars getting shoved into this crap, and most of the bulls are themselves pushing some AI thing. Look at YC, pretty much everything they're funding has some mention of AI. It's a massive bubble with people trying to cash in on the hype. Plus the managerial class being the scum they are, they're bullish because they keep getting sold on the idea that they can replace swathes of workers.

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

#246

Post by jchw »

viraptor wrote: post #166
jchw wrote: post #153

Earlier 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.

If your job can be hallowed out into >90% entering prompts into AI text editors, you won't have to worry about continuing to be paid to do it every day for very long.

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

#248

Post by Ologn »

People have different opinions about this, but I think one problem is there are different questions.

One is - Google, Facebook, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek etc. have put a lot of capital expenditure into train frontier large language models, and are continuing to do so. There is a current bet that growing the size of LLMs, with more or maybe even synthetic data, with some minor breakthroughs (nothing as big as the Alexnet deep learning breakthrough, or transformers), will have a payoff for at least the leading frontier model. Similar to Moore's law for ICs, the bet is that more data and more parameters will yield a more powerful LLM - without that much more innovation needed. So the question for this is whether the capital expenditure for this bet will pay off.

Then there's the question of how useful current LLMs are, whether we expect to see breakthroughs at the level of Alexnet or transformers in the coming decades, whether non-LLM neural networks will become useful - text-to-image, image-to-text, text-to-video, video-to-text, image-to-video, text-to-audio and so on.

So there's the business side question, of whether the bet that spending a lot of capital expenditure training a frontier model will be worth it for the winner in the next few years - with the method being an increase in data, perhaps synthetic data, and increasing the parameter numbers - without much major innovation expected. Then there's every other question around this. All questions may seem important but the first one is what seems important to business, and is connected to a lot of the capital spending being done on all of this.

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

#249

Post by Lich »

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…

Really? I just get garbage. Both Claude and CoPilot kept insisting that it was ok to use react hooks outside of function components. There have been many other situations where it gave me some code and even after refining the prompt it just gave me wrong or non working code. I’m not expecting perfection, but at least don’t waste my time with hallucinations or just flat out stuff that doesn’t work.

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

#250

Post by yodsanklai »

I used to be skeptical of the hype but it's hard to deny that they are incredible tools. For coding, they save me a few hours a week and this is just the beginning. A few months ago I would use them to generate simple pieces of code, but now they can handle refactoring across several files. Even if LLMs don't get smarter, the tooling around them will improve and they'll be even more useful. We'll also learn to use them better.

Also my gf who's not particularly tech savvy relies heavily on ChatGPT for her work. It's very useful for a variety of text (translation, summaries, answering some emails).

Maybe Sabine Hossenfelder tries to use them for things they can't do well and she's not aware that they work for other use cases.

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