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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#141

Post by kgeist »

We recently started using LLMs at our company, and the first job I had was to transcribe 20k customer calls and extract the following info:

1) what products we're usually compared to

2) what problems users have with our software

3) what use cases users mention most often

What used to take weeks of research took just a couple of hours. It helped us form a new strategy and brought real business value.

I see LLMs as just a natural language processing engine, and they're great at that. Some people overhype it, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that it's been genuinely useful for our cases. Not sure what's up with all those "LLM bad" articles. If it doesn't work for you, just move on. Why should anyone have to prove anything to anyone? It's just a tool.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#142

Post by KerrAvon »

tiahura wrote: post #36

Everything? As a lawyer, I’m producing 2x - with fewer errors. Admittedly, law is a field that mostly involves shuffling words around so it may be the best case scenario, but much of the skepticism comes off as cope.

uh

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116823/how-ai-i...

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hallucinating-law-legal-mistak...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...

There are more of these stories every week. Are you using AI in a way that doesn’t allow you to be entrapped by this sort of thing?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#143

Post by [deleted] »

98eb1d0ff7fb96 wrote: post #90
garciasn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way. I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that…

See, your comment is a good example of what's going wrong. The OP specifically mentioned "mission critical things" - My interpretation of that would be things that are not allowed to break, because otherwise people might die, in the worst case - and you were talking about just SOMETHING that got "done" faster. No mention about anything critical. Of course, I was playing around with claude code, too, and I was fascina…

[deleted]

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#144

Post by flextheruler »

abletonlive wrote: post #132
dgfitz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will thank God every day I don’t work with you or for you. How toxic.

im glad I don’t have to work with you too lol. It’s not toxic for me to expect someone to get their work done in a reasonable amount of time with the tools available to them. If you’re an accountant and you take 5X the time to do something because you have beef with excel you’re the problem. It’s not toxicity to tell you that you are a bad accountant

You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion?

My apologies but that does not sound like good leadership to me. It actually sounds like you may have deficiencies in your skills as it relates to leadership. Perhaps in a few years we will have an LLM who can provide better leadership.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#145

Post by hx8 »

kgeist wrote: post #141

We recently started using LLMs at our company, and the first job I had was to transcribe 20k customer calls and extract the following info: 1) what products we're usually compared to 2) what problems users have with our software 3) what use cases users mention most often What used to take weeks of research took just a couple of hours. It helped us form a new strategy and brought real business value. I see LLMs as jus…

I think you are underestimating the negative impacts that overhype cause. It's distorting the market, causing over investment, preemptively slashing departments, and creating an expectation that will never be meet. These articles are important for cooling expectations. When people sell LLMs, they usually aren't talking about summarizing customer support calls, they are trying to sell the idea of firing customer support staff.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#146

Post by standardUser »

> Like most skeptics and critics, I use these tools daily. And 50% of the time they work 50% of the time.

I use LLMs nearly every day for my job as of about a year ago and they solve my issues about 90% of the time. I have a very hard time deciphering if these types of complaints about AI/LLMs should be taken seriously, or written off as irrational use patterns by some users. For example, I have never fed an LLM a codebase and expected it to work magic. I ask direct, specific questions at the edge of my understanding (not beyond it) and apply the solutions in a deliberate and testable manner.

if you're taking a different approach and complaining about LLMs, I'm inclined to think you're doing it wrong. And missing out on the actual magic, which is small, useful and fairly consistent.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#147

Post by ibaikov »

CharlesW wrote: post #112
ibaikov wrote: post #79

Crypto and NFT situation happened because of our society, media and vc/startup landscape who hype things up a lot for their own reasons. We treat massive technologies as new brands of bottled water. Or, actually, as a new hype toy as fidget spinners or pop it toys. This tech is massively more complex and you have to invest time to learn about its abilities, limitations and potential developments. Almost nobody actual…

It makes no sense to compare the current AI hype to the tulip mania of crypto/NFTs. A much better parallel is to cloud computing hype in 2009.

I think it does. Startups, VCs and media still provoke hype trains. People cherry pick and extrapolate everything in AI as well.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#148

Post by DebtDeflation »

hx8 wrote: post #145
kgeist wrote: post #141

We recently started using LLMs at our company, and the first job I had was to transcribe 20k customer calls and extract the following info: 1) what products we're usually compared to 2) what problems users have with our software 3) what use cases users mention most often What used to take weeks of research took just a couple of hours. It helped us form a new strategy and brought real business value. I see LLMs as jus…

I think you are underestimating the negative impacts that overhype cause. It's distorting the market, causing over investment, preemptively slashing departments, and creating an expectation that will never be meet. These articles are important for cooling expectations. When people sell LLMs, they usually aren't talking about summarizing customer support calls, they are trying to sell the idea of firing customer suppo…

If anything, the LLM overhype is starting to die down........to make way for the AI Agent hype which is on trajectory to be 1000X worse. People are writing articles and making videos about how AI Agents will replace SaaS. What?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#149

Post by doug_durham »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…

How much of the communication and meetings are because traditionally code was very expensive and slow to create? How many of those meetings might be streamlined or entirely disappear in the future? In my experience there is are a lot of process around making sure that software on schedule track and that it's doing what it is supposed to do. I think that the software lifecycle is about to be reinvented.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#150

Post by [deleted] »

labrador wrote: post #19

I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…

[deleted]
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