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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

#271

Post by mplanchard »

sothatsit wrote: post #149
01100011 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much time do I need to devote to see anything but garbage? For reference, I program systems code in C/C++ in a large, proprietary codebase. My experiences with OpenAI(a year ago or more), and more recently, Cursor, Grok-v3 and Deepseek-r1, were all failures. The later two started out OK and got worse over time. What I haven't done is asked "AI" to whip up a more standard application. I have some ideas(an ncurses…

I think there is a big problem of expectations. People are told that it is great for software development, so they try to use it on big existing software projects, and it sucks. Usually that's because of context: LLMs are not very good at understanding a very large amount of context, but if you don't give LLMs enough context, they can't magically figure it out on their own. This relegates AI to only really being usef…

Serious question as someone who has also tried these things out and not found them very useful in the context of working on a large, complex codebase in not python not javascript: when I imagine the amount of time it would take me to select some test cases, copy and paste them, and then think of a todo list or prompt to generate another case, even assuming the output is perfect, I feel like I’m getting close to the amount of time and mental effort it would take me to just write the test. In a way, having to ask in english for what I want in code for me adds an additional barrier: rather than just doing the thing I have to also think of a promptable description. Is that not a problem? Is it just fast enough that it doesn’t matter? What’s the deal?

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

#272

Post by crazygringo »

MisterKent wrote: post #265
sc68cal wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time And you don't have concerns about that? What kind of damage is that doing to our society, long term, if we have a system that _everyone_ uses and it's just accepted that a third of the time it is just making shit up?

This. 100% this. LLMs will spit out responses with zero backing with 100% conviction. People see citations and assume it's correct. We're conditioned for it thanks to....everything ever in history. Rarely do I need to check a wikipedia entry's source. So why do people not understand that: this is absolutely going to pour jet fuel on misinformation in the world. And we as a society are allowed to hold a bar higher for…

> People see citations and assume it's correct.

The solution is to set expectations, not to throw away one of the most valuable tools ever created.

If you read a supermarket tabloid, do you think the stories about aliens are true? No, because you've been taught that tabloids are sensationalist. When you listen to campaign ads, do you think they're true? When you ask a buddy about geography halfway across the world, do you assume every answer they give is right?

It's just about having realistic expectations. And people tend to learn those fast.

> Rarely do I need to check a wikipedia entry's source.

I suggest you start. Wikipedia is full of citations that don't back up the text of the article. And that's when there are even citations to begin with. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to verify something on Wikipedia, and there either wasn't a citation, or there was one related to the topic but that didn't have anything related to the specific assertion being made.

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

#273

Post by 42772827 »

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…

There seems to be a widely held misconception that company valuations have any basis in the underlying fundamentals of what the companies do. This is not and has not been the case for several years. The US stock market’s darlings are Kardashians, they are valuable for being valuable the way the Kardashians are famous for being famous.

In markets, perception is reality, and the perception is that these companies are innovative. That’s it.

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

#274

Post by ryandrake »

satisfice wrote: post #87
MostlyStable wrote: post #4

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

I want to sit next to you and stop you every time you use your LLM and say, “Let me just carefully check this output.” I bet you wouldn’t like that. But when I want to do high quality work, I MUST take that time and carefully review and test. What I am seeing is fanboys who offer me examples of things working well that fail any close scrutiny— with the occasional example that comes out actually working well. I agree…

What's also scary is that we know LLMs do fail, but nobody (even the people who wrote the LLM) can tell you how often it will fail at any particular task. Not even an order of magnitude. Will it fail 0.2%, 2%, or 20% of the time? Nobody knows! A computer that will randomly produce an incorrect result to my calculation is useless to me because now I have to separately validate the correctness of every result. If I need to ask an LLM to explain to me some fact, how do I know if this time it's hallucinating? There is no "LLM just guessed" flag in the output. It might seem to people to be "miraculous" that it will summarize a random scientific paper down to 5 bullet points, but how do you know if it's output is correct? No LLM proponent seems to want to answer this question.

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

#275

Post by moralestapia »

Sabine is on my blocklist as she very often puts out really ignorant and short-sighted perspectives.

LLMs are the most impactful technology we've had since the internet, that is why people are bullish on them, anyone who fails to see that cannot probably tie its own shoes without a "peer-reviewed" mechanism, lol.

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

#276

Post by Xelynega »

saaaaaam wrote: post #97
zeitgeistcowboy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much about this seems inauthentic. The post itself. The experience. The content produced. I wouldn’t like to be on the other end of the production of this content.

Great! You’re not the audience for it.

Who is?

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

#277

Post by fumufumufumu »

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 go back and forth. I share your amazement. I used Gemini Deep Research the other day and was blown away. It claimed to go read 20 websites, I showed its "thinking" and steps. Its conclusions at each step. Then it wrote a large summary (several pages)

On the other hand, I saw github recently added Copilot as a code reviewer. For fun I let it review my latest pull request. I hated its suggestions but could imagine a not too distant future where I'm required by upper management to satisfy the LLM before I'm allowed to commit. Similarly, I've asked ChatGPT questions and it's been programmed to only give answers that Silicon Valley workers have declared "correct".

The thing I always find frustrating about the naysayers is that they seem to think how it works today is the end if it. Like I recently listened to an episode of Econtalk interviewing someone on AI and education. See lives in the UK and used Tesla FSD as an example of how bad AI is. Yet I live in California and see Waymo mostly working today and lots of people using it. I believe she wouldn't have used the Tesla FSD example, and would possibly have changed her world view at least a little, if she'd updated on seeing self driving work.

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

#279

Post by swatcoder »

mountainriver wrote: post #263
ffsm8 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It makes engineers a hell of a lot more efficient and opens up software to a whole new class of people. There is plenty of data to back this up. Based on that alone it’s worth quite a lot.

Are you sure about that?

We're several years in now, and have lots of A:B comparisons to study across orgs that allowed and prohibited AI assistants. Is one of those groups running away with massive productivity gains?

Because I don't think anybody's noticed that yet. We see layoffs that makes sense on their own after a boom, and cut across AI-friendly and -unfriendly orgs. But we don't seem to see anybody suddenly breaking out with 2x or 5x or 10x productivity gains on actual deliverables. In contrast, the enshittening just seems to be continuing as it has for years and the pace of new products and features is holding steady. No?

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

#280

Post by abletonlive »

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…

> 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.

No it's not. If it was valued for that it'd be at least 10X what it is now.

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