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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

#191

Post by School-Cotton »

deadbabe wrote: post #148
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…

Here’s when we can start getting excited about LLMs: when they start making new and valid scientific discoveries that can radically change our world. When an AI can say “Here’s how you make better, smaller, more powerful batteries, follow these plans”, then we will have a reason to worship AI. When AI can bring us wonders like room temperature semiconductors, fast interstellar travel, anti-gravity tech, solutions to…

Google was fantastically impressive when it first came out.

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

#193

Post by frontfor »

jasonjayr wrote: post #179
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's can't be held accountable. And many, many companies are proposing and implementing uses for LLM's to intentionally obscure that accountability. If a person makes up something, innocently or maliciously, and someone believes it and ends up getting harmed, that person can have some liability for the harm. If a LLM hallucinates something, that somone believes and they end up getting harmed, there's no accountabili…

This is correct. On top of that, the failure modes of AI system are unpredictable and incomprehensible. Present day AI systems can fail on/be fooled by inputs in surprising ways that no humans would.

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

#194

Post by garfield_light »

bluebarbet wrote: post #106

Perhaps attitudes to this new phenomenon are correlated with propensity to skepticism in general. I will cite myself as Exhibit A. I am the sort of person who takes almost nothing at face value. To me, physiotherapy, and oenology, and musicology, and bed marketing, and mineral-water benefits, and very many other such things, are all obviously pseudoscience, worthy of no more attention than horoscopes. If I saw a ghos…

Not related to the post, but you don't believe in physiotherapy? You know, the "help grandma to go from wheelchair to a walker after a fall thorough controlled exercise" people. You don't mean chiropractors, right? Terms do get weird country to country, so maybe in the US it's more woe adjacent.

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

#196

Post by mablopoule »

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…

For me, LLMs are a bit like if you were shown a talking dog with the education and knowledge of a first grad student: a talking dog is amazing in itself, and a truly impressive technical feat, that said you wouldn't make the dog file your taxes or represent you in court.

To quote Joel Spolsky, "When you’re working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else’s code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time.", and that's the state we end up if we believe in the hype and use LLMs willy-nilly.

That's why people are annoyed, not because LLMs cannot code like a senior engineer, but because lots of content marketing a company valuation is dependent on making people believe it's the case.

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

#197

Post by timewizard »

nopinsight wrote: post #186

Can our brains recall precise citations to tens of papers we read a while ago? For the vast majority, no. LLMs function somewhat similarly to our brains in many ways, as opposed to classical computers. Their strengths and flaws differ from our brains, to be sure, but some of these flaws are being mitigated and improved on by the month. Similarly, unaided humans cannot operate successfully in many situations. We build…

> LLMs function somewhat similarly to our brains in many ways,

Including the arrogance to confidently deliver a wrong answer. Which is the opposite of the reasons we use computers in the first place. Why this is worth billions of dollars is utterly beyond me.

> unaided humans cannot operate successfully in many situations

Absolute nonsense driven by a total lack of historical perspective or knowledge.

> We build tools, teams, and institutions to help us deal with them.

And when they lie to us we immediately correct that problem or disband them recognizing that they are more trouble than they could be worth.

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

#199

Post by tkgally »

Nevermark wrote: post #159

So many people putting expectations up to knock down about models. Infinite reasons to critique them. Please dispense with anyone's "expectations" when critiquing things! (Expectations are not a fault or property of the object of the expectations.) Today's models (1) do things that are unprecedented. Their generality of knowledge, and ability to weave completely disparate subjects together sensibly, in real time (and…

> Their generality of knowledge, and ability to weave completely disparate subjects together sensibly, is beyond any other artifact in existence

Very well said. That’s perhaps the area where I have found LLMs most useful lately. For several years, I have been trying to find a solution to a complex and unique problem involving the laws of two countries, financial issues, and my particular individual situation. No amount of Googling could find an answer, and I was unable to find a professional consultant whose expertise spans the various domains. I explained the problem in detail to OpenAI’s Deep Research, and six minutes later it produced a 20-page report—with references that all checked out—clearly explaining my possible options, the arguments for and against each, and why one of those options was probably best. It probably saved me thousands of dollars.

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

#200

Post by dougb5 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #117
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…

It's definitely a tech that's here to stay, unlike block chain/nfts But I mirror the confusion why people are still bullish on it. The current valuation for it is because the market thinks that it's able to write code like a senior engineer and have AGI, because that's how they're marketed by the LLM providers. I'm not even certain if they'll be ubiquitous after the venture capital investments are gone and the servic…

Even if the VC-backed companies jacked up their prices, the models that I can run on my own laptop for "free" now are magical compared to the state of the art from 2 years ago. Ubiquity may come from everyone running these on their own hardware.
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