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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

#321

Post by geuis »

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'm a senior engineer with 20 years of experience and mostly find all of the AI bs for the last couple of years to be occasionally helpful for general stuff but absolutely incompetent when I need help mildly complicated tasks.

I did have a eureka moment the other day with deepseek and a very obscure bug I was trying to tackle. One api query was having a very weird, unrelated side effect. I loaded up cursor with a very extensive prompt and it actually figured out the call path I hadn't been able to track down.

Today, I had a very simple task that eventually only took me half an hour to manually track. But I started with cursor using very similar context as the first example. It just kept repeatedly dreaming up non-existent files in the PR and making suggestions to fix code that doesn't exist.

So what's the worth to my company of my very expensive time? Should I spend 10,20,50 percent of my time trying to get answers from a chatbot, or should I just use my 20 years of experience to get the job done?

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

#322

Post by adastra22 »

42772827 wrote: post #273
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…

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 i…

Until there is a correction, which inevitably does happen.

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

#323

Post by sarchertech »

viraptor wrote: post #288
sarchertech wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really don’t. People say this all the time, but you give any project a little time and it evolves into a special unique snowflake every single time. That’s why every low code solution and boilerplate generator for the last 30 years failed to deliver on the promises they made.

I agree some will evolve into more, but lots of them won't. That's why shopify, WordPress and others exist - most commercial websites are just online business cards or small shops. Designers and devs are hired to work on them all the time.

If you’re hiring a dev to work on your Shopify site, it’s most likely because you want to do something non-standard. By the time the dev gets done with it, it will be a special unique snowflake.

If your site has users, it will evolve. I’ve seen users take what was a simple trucking job posting form and repurpose an unused “trailer type” field to track the status of the job req.

Every single app that starts out as a low code/no code solution given enough time and users will evolve beyond that low code solution. They may keep using it, but they’ll move beyond being able to maintain it exclusively through a low code interface.

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

#324

Post by [deleted] »

jchw wrote: post #153
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…

Look man, and I'm saying this not to you but to everyone who is in this boat; you've got to understand that after a while, the novelty wears off. We get it. It's miraculous that some gigabytes of matrices can possibly interpret and generate text, images, and sound. It's fascinating, it really is. Sometimes, it's borderline terrifying. But, if you spend too much time fawning over how impressive these things are, you m…

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by senordevnyc »

42772827 wrote: post #273
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…

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 i…

You seem to be under the misconception that this is a new phenomenon.

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

- Benjamin Graham, 1949

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

#326

Post by adastra22 »

111111101101 wrote: post #269
genidoi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is here to stay, this is way past the point of "believing in the tech" - recently an wss:// order book exchange (Hyperliquid) crossed $1T volume traded, and they started in 2023. Blockchains are becoming real-time data structures where everyone has admin level read-only access to everyone.

HN doesn't like blockchain. They had the chance to get in very early and now they're salty. I first heard about bitcoin on HN, before Silk Road made headlines.

I got involved with bitcoin in 2010. I co-founded a bitcoin unicorn. It is exactly because of this experience that I’m salty on blockchain.

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

#327

Post by anon291 »

Animats wrote: post #178
cogman10 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience! No, that's not my problem with it. My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. Sure, sometimes it produces useful code. And often, it'll simply call the "doTheHardPart()" method. I've even caught it literally writing the wrong algor…

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

How many companies train on data that contains 'i don't know' responses. Have you ever talked with a toddler / young child? You need to explicitly teach children to not bull shit. At least I needed to teach mine.

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

#328

Post by nemothekid »

jasondigitized wrote: post #188
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…

Anyone who doesn't understand this either isn't required to use to utility it provides or has no idea how to prompt it correctly. My wife is a bookkeeper. There are some tasks that are a pain in the ass without writing some custom code. In her case, we just saved her about 2 hours by asking Claude to do it. It wrote the code, applied the code to a CSV we uploadrd and gave us exactly what we needed in 2 minutes.

>Anyone who doesn't understand this either isn't required to use to utility it provides or has no idea how to prompt it correctly.

Almost every counter-criticism of LLMs almost boil down to

1. you're holding it wrong

2. Well, I use it $DAYJOB and it works great for me! (And $DAYJOB is software engineering).

I'm glad your wife was able to save 2 hours of work, but forgive me if that doesn't translate to the trillion dollar valuation OpenAI is claiming. It's strange you don't see the inherent irony in your post. Instead of your wife just directly uploading the dataset and a prompt, she first has to prompt it to write code. There are clear limitations and it looks like LLMs are stuck at some sort of wall.

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

#329

Post by prawn »

RobotCaleb wrote: post #312
prawn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even outside of work. Two personal examples, out of dozens this week: 1. Asked ChatGPT for a table showing monthly daily max temp, rainfall in mm and numbers of rain days, for Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. And colour coded based on the temperatures. Then suggest two times of year, and a route direction, to hit the best conditions on a multi-week trip. It took a couple of seconds, and it helpfully split Vietnam at H…

Yes, of course they did that. These things happily do whatever you ask them to. But did it spit out correct information?

Yeah, it did. And uncovered a local timber supply place I wasn't aware of, with decent pricing. I'm not expecting a final quote, but quick ways to compare and consider variations. I've used it in the same way to compare cladding costs/work for lining a building.

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

#330

Post by joegibbs »

jongjong wrote: post #7

People who don't work in tech have no idea how hard it is to do certain things at scale. Skilled tech people are severely underappreciated. From a sub-tweet: >> no LLM should ever output a url that gives a 404 error. How hard can it be? As a developer, I'm just imagining a server having to call up all the URLs to check that they still exist (and the extra costs/latency incurred there)... And if any URLs are missing,…

I think it could be possible if you're using thinking tokens or via function calls - decide all URLs that will be mentioned while thinking (don't display this to the user), delay for a few seconds to test they exist, push that into the prompt history and then output what the user sees. But it's a bit of an edge case really and would probably annoy users with the extra latency.
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