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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

#251

Post by edg5000 »

fleebee wrote: post #104
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…

I tried the "thinking partner" approach for a while and for a moment I thought it worked well, but at some point the cracks started to show and I called the bluff. LLMs are extremely good at creating an illusion that they know things and are capable of reasoning, but they really don't do a good job of cultivating intellectual conversation. I think it's dangerously easy to get misled when trying to prod LLMs for knowl…

Mostly agree. What works better is seeing the AI as a "high level to low level converter", in the same way Java is converted to machine code when it's ran. You describe exactly what you want it to report or do, and steer it whenever there are ambiguities. It does "grunt work" for you. With the bar of what grunt work means being moved up. Grunt work used to be doing the dishes or calculating numbers by hand on a paper spreasheet. Decades ago we automated those these. Now we've automated searching for information, summarization, implementing fully specified technical desings for software, the list goes on.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#252

Post by orbital-decay »

troupo wrote: post #248
orbital-decay wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So, what is your point and forest? That there exists some non-deterministic accurate LLM with a 100% correct training set which will always produce the same answer if you ask it 2x2 (where asking is somehow different from prompting)? As I already said: modern LLMs mainly map a single input idea to a single output idea. They might express it in slightly different ways, but it's either correct or incorrect, you can't…

I still fail to see your point. Here's what you started with: "The point about non-determinism is moot if you understand how it works." When challenged you're now quite literally saying "oh yeah, they are all non-deterministic, will produce varying results, it's impossible to control the outcome, and there's some ideal non-existent LLM that will not have these issues" So what's your point and forest again?

I feel like we're walking in circles and not sure if you're doing this on purpose...

>Here's what you started with: "The point about non-determinism is moot if you understand how it works."

Yes, the authors' point about non-determinism is moot because he draws this conclusion from LLMs being non-deterministic: "what works now may not work even 1 minute from now". This is largely untrue, because determinism and correctness are orthogonal to each other. It's silly to read that as "LLMs are deterministic".

>When challenged you're now quite literally saying "oh yeah, they are all non-deterministic, will produce varying results, it's impossible to control the outcome, and there's some ideal non-existent LLM that will not have these issues"

That's not what I'm saying. Better LLMs would be even less deterministic than current ones, but even that would not be a problem.

>So what's your point and forest again?

Point: "Determinism and correctness are orthogonal to each other".

Forest: there's much more going on in LLMs than statistical closeness. At the same time, you can totally say that it's due to statistical closeness and not be wrong, of course.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#253

Post by edg5000 »

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…

If you have absolutely no idea what the code is doing, something is wrong. Imagine someone with no engineering experience telling an engineer to build a jet engine "make it spin fast". Presented with the designs, he has no idea wether it's good. Obviously that is not workable. Rather, the one in charge for guiding, say, the design of a jet engine, would know the intricacies of the jet engine himself perfectly. It just would be too tedious to design all the little parts of it, and verify all the little characteristics by one person.

When developing with an LLM, you first figure out how you want to do it, and essentially start imagining the code. But rather than writing and testing, you tell the LLM enough to unambiguously implement what you have in mind, and how to test it/the expected behavour/scenarios you have in mind that it will support. Then you review the code; modern claude will not present you with buggy code, it will go through iterations itself to have something that works. The feedback than usually is something more about code style, consistency, or taking into account future expansions of the code.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#254

Post by sciencejerk »

farts_mckensy wrote: post #241
goatlover wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was agency in policies promoting automobile adoption over rail travel. People who act like market forces are inevitable trends in nature tend to forget the political part where companies convince politicians to make policies in their favor, while bombarding the public with advertising. Like fossil fuel companies for example. Continued climate change wasn't inevitable. It was a choice humans with lots of money a…

And that's what's going to happen now. No amount of complaining about it online is going to stop it. They literally just passed a bill that prevents regulating AI. Rich people and their puppets in congress have some degree of agency. We don't. Sorry.

I heard the AI clause didn't make it into the final version of the bill that was passed (?)

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#255

Post by TeMPOraL »

m4rtink wrote: post #58
CharlesW wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools. Claude Max is $200/month, or ~2% of the salary of an average software engineer.

Does anyone actually know what the real cost for the customers will be once the free AI money no longer floods those companies?

Too cheap to meter? Inference is cheap and there's no long-term or even mid-term moat here.

As long as the courts don't shut down Meta over IP issues with LLama training data, that is.

I can't stress that enough: "open source" models are what can stop the "real costs" for the customers from growing. Despite popular belief, inference isn't that expensive. This isn't Uber - stopping isn't going to make LLMs infeasible; at worst, it's just going to make people pay API prices instead of subscription prices. As long as there are "open source" models that are legally available and track SOTA, anyone with access to some cloud GPUs can provide "SOTA of 6-12 months ago" for the price of inference, which puts a hard limit on how high OpenAI, et al. can hike the prices.

But that's only as long as there are open models. If Meta loses and LLama goes away, the chilling effect will just let OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Google to set whatever prices they want.

EDIT:

I mean LLama legally going away. Of course the cat is now out of the bag, the Pandora's box has been opened; the weights are out there and you can't untrain or uninvent them. But keeping the commercial LLM offerings' prices down requires a steady supply of improved open models, and the ability for smaller companies to make a legal business out of hosting them.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#256

Post by eviks »

ghuntley wrote: post #117
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…

Canva has seen a 30% productivity uplift - https://fortune.com/2025/06/25/canva-cto-encourages-all-5000... AI is the new uplift. Embrace and adapt, as a rift is forming (see my talk at https://ghuntley.com/six-month-recap/ ), in what employers seek in terms of skills from employees. I'm happy to answer any questions folks may have. Currently AFK [2] vibecoding a brand new programming language [1]. [1] https://x.com/G…

> The productivity for software engineers is at around 30%

That would be a 70% descent?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#257

Post by troupo »

orbital-decay wrote: post #252
troupo wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still fail to see your point. Here's what you started with: "The point about non-determinism is moot if you understand how it works." When challenged you're now quite literally saying "oh yeah, they are all non-deterministic, will produce varying results, it's impossible to control the outcome, and there's some ideal non-existent LLM that will not have these issues" So what's your point and forest again?

I feel like we're walking in circles and not sure if you're doing this on purpose... >Here's what you started with: "The point about non-determinism is moot if you understand how it works." Yes, the authors' point about non-determinism is moot because he draws this conclusion from LLMs being non-deterministic: "what works now may not work even 1 minute from now". This is largely untrue, because determinism and correc…

Ah, I see your point now (and I'm the author :) )

I agree with you after this explanation.

I think (especially in the current offerings) non-determinism and incorrectness are so tightly intertwined that it's hard to say where one starts and the other one ends. Which makes the problem worse/more intricate.

And yeah, prompting is useless: https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#258

Post by atemerev »

harel wrote: post #4
atemerev wrote: post #2

"It's crypto all over again" Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death. As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of…

Can you elaborate on your situation? Which country are you in? How is crypto used there?

I am a Russian immigrant in Switzerland. As of right now, all Swiss banks block all Russian bank accounts until their owners can provide a valid physical residence permit card, due to sweeping sanctions (meanwhile, Russian-owned companies continue to freely trade crude oil from here, as they use Swiss nominal directors — the hypocrisy is through the roof). My residence permit is on renewal now and the case is being dragged for 7 months already — so, no bank account.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#259

Post by bobbob27 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #255
m4rtink wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone actually know what the real cost for the customers will be once the free AI money no longer floods those companies?

Too cheap to meter? Inference is cheap and there's no long-term or even mid-term moat here. As long as the courts don't shut down Meta over IP issues with LLama training data , that is. I can't stress that enough: "open source" models are what can stop the "real costs" for the customers from growing. Despite popular belief, inference isn't that expensive. This isn't Uber - stopping isn't going to make LLMs infeasible…

You can't just take cost of training out of the equation...

If these companies plan to stay afloat, they have to actually pay for the tens of billions they've spent at some point. That's what the parent comment meant by "free AI"

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#260

Post by atemerev »

foobarchu wrote: post #53
atemerev wrote: post #2

"It's crypto all over again" Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death. As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of…

I don't think you actually disagree with the authors quip. You seem to want to use crypto as a currency, while OP was most likely referring to the grifting around crypto as an investment. If you're using it as a currency, then the people trying to pump and dump coins and use it for a money making vehicle are your adversaries. You are best served if it's stable instead of a rollercoaster of booms and busts.

Stablecoins are a thing. But yes, I hate the current state of affairs, with "memecoins" and whatsnot. Particularly the government push from one particular country. We created crypto to be independent from governments, not to enable them.
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