Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

dank.systems

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 647 posts

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#581

Post by BeetleB »

derpyzza wrote: post #394
yshklarov wrote: post #209

Great article, but the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read. Apologies if this comment is off-topic, but it really is quite egregious, and since the article was submitted by the author I presume they are open to the feedback.

huh i didn't even notice, that's how i write all my blog posts too. it looks nicer to me and i don't have to bother checking for "proper" capitalization if everything's just lowercase anyway. didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point

It sucks.

(So does not adding a period at the end of a sentence)

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#582

Post by hi_im_greg_h »

antupis wrote: post #243
randomImmigrant wrote: post #11

I think bearish on LLMs for automation, and bullish for LLM+human experts in specific fields, is about the right expectation for current architectures. Apart from issues with task generalization, or perhaps related to it, is the fact that LLMs have real trouble with timekeeping, and cannot estimate the real world time it will take them to do things very well. This plus the memory issues make dreams of long horizon ag…

I think automation is coming but it will be way more gnarly than frontier labs want public to believe. Value is just too big, when you can automate most of eg customer support it will create huge savings and same time customer satisfaction will get better.

> same time customer satisfaction will get better.

This part just can't be true though, right?

We have all been in numerous customer service scenarios where all we want to do is talk to a real human and that is denied to us, and it's a terrible customer experience!

Sure, using an LLM would be better than some of the sort of "menu option" style customer service calls. But there is no way it's better than talking to an actual human being

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#583

Post by wavemode »

autoexec wrote: post #571
moron4hire wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. Same story every 4 months and yet still no breakout, winning products. I've been hearing "the AI is good now" and "it 10x's my productivity" for a over a year now. If it were true, why aren't the all-in-AI using companies 10-15 years ahead of their competition yet? Why is it still all buggy, poorly designed…

Right now AI hasn't even managed to replace all the human workers taking orders at the fast food drive thru. That's a job often performed by literal children and companies are still waiting for AI to get good enough for even that. Maybe one day it will be good enough, maybe one day it will outperform humans at such a basic task, but that day is not today. If the hype were anything close to reality, we'd see it everyw…

Funny you mention this - a fast food restaurant in my town now has an LLM taking drive-thru orders.

Though I highly doubt it has taken anyone's job, since most of the work is still in making, packing and handing over the food. (In fact, given the area I live in, I partially feel like the advantage they saw in it was that the LLM can speak Spanish.)

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#584

Post by poncho_romero »

reedlaw wrote: post #559
openfront wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fear is that softwaring engineering becomes a low-skill profession. If the models get good enough you won't need years of experience to be a decent programmer.

Expectations around software quality will rise in tandem with gains in productivity so that the same experience curve continues to apply.

I don't think that's been true over the last decade though.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#585

Post by entropicdrifter »

zffr wrote: post #555
openfront wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fear is that softwaring engineering becomes a low-skill profession. If the models get good enough you won't need years of experience to be a decent programmer.

IMO the fear is that software engineering becomes a _high_-skill profession. If the models get good enough to solve all of the low-skill problems, then we only need to keep around the people who are highly skilled. That means a fewer number of software engineers, and a difficult path to becoming someone who is highly skilled.

It's already a fairly high skill profession in general. The seemingly-lower-skilled roles tend to be the ones with higher design/creative requirements on the programmers.

Agreed about the barrier to entry raising though, we're already seeing that in the glut of CS grads who can't actually get a programming job right now. Personally I suspect that this is a cultural issue more than an economic one, though. Companies need to alter their expectation about entry-level engineers and develop a culture of mentorship/apprenticeship so that advanced analysis, architectural, code review, and AI management skills are all passed down successfully.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#586

Post by topaz0 »

thelaxiankey wrote: post #469
thelaxiankey wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "researchers" are less informed on LLM chess than random internet bloggers. The situation is much more interesting https://dynomight.net/chess/

Forgot to add the amazing follow up https://dynomight.net/more-chess/

From your linked post: "LLMs sometimes struggle to give legal moves. In these experiments, I try 10 times and if there’s still no legal move, I just pick one at random."

Which sounds a lot like what that paper was about

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#587

Post by malcolmgreaves »

jaykru wrote: post #479
yshklarov wrote: post #209

Great article, but the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read. Apologies if this comment is off-topic, but it really is quite egregious, and since the article was submitted by the author I presume they are open to the feedback.

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look. I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!

The biggest improvement to readability is to capitalize the beginning of sentences. There’s no need for a toggle. Don’t default to making your writing unreadable, please.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#588

Post by freejazz »

pixl97 wrote: post #542
freejazz wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what since then?

This has the smell of "Why don't I have a faster horse". Why no flying cars. Because objects have mass and inertia and people are incredibly stupid. Making a flying car has been done. Making a flying car not be a weapon of mass destruction is very, very hard. Also: https://www.txdot.gov/about/newsroom/statewide/air-taxi-test...

You're making my point for me, surprised you don't realize that...

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#589

Post by legulere »

bhelkey wrote: post #503
sobellian wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested both myself and a weak bot against Astra xhigh, https://lichess.org/study/27lCQqDa . It's still pretty bad at chess, though it takes longer to devolve into illegal moves.

It looks like it played a fully legal game of chess with one exception, it said "rxd1+" (Rook takes D1 with check) instead of "rd1+" (Rook to D1 with check) on move 29. I would say this did a really good job of playing chess. It moved the pieces consistently and traded pieces when required. This is worlds away from the frontier ~1 year ago where models would hallucinate pieces into existence.

Would you tell a human that just tried doing an illegal move that they did "a really good job of playing chess"? The probability for such mistakes is greatly reduced but still far from negligible, which proves the point that guardrails are needed.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#590

Post by derpyzza »

looki wrote: post #459
derpyzza wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh i didn't even notice, that's how i write all my blog posts too. it looks nicer to me and i don't have to bother checking for "proper" capitalization if everything's just lowercase anyway. didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point

I'm sort of wondering why you think we capitalize the beginning of sentences if not to help the reader.

i just figured it was mainly stylistic tbh. something that may have been a relic of some past limitation that we kept around just because it was "how it's always done". didn't really realize it actually helps people with reading, it's never really bothered me
Post reply on HN