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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

#331

Post by kerkeslager »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #14
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…

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

It's worse than that.

I see people say, "Look how great this is," and show me an example, and the example they show me is just not great. We're literally looking at the same thing, and they're excited that this LLM can do a college grads's job to the level of a third grader, and I'm just not excited about that.

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

#332

Post by lostmsu »

mplanchard wrote: post #260
lostmsu wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people who don't believe LLMs to be AGI are not very good at Venn diagrams. Because they certainly are artificial, general, and intelligent according to any dictionary.

By this argument the DEA is the FBI because they are also a federal bureau that does investigations.

You're funny, but "the DEA" is "a FBI", not "the FBI", as you said yourself.

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

#333

Post by protocolture »

"Bullish" I like these tools and they give me great power and flexibility.

vs

"Bullish" The LLM is going to revolutionise human behaviour and thought and bring about a new golden age.

Former is justifiable, the latter is just reinforcing the bubble.

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

#334

Post by lostmsu »

sarchertech wrote: post #242
lostmsu wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people who don't believe LLMs to be AGI are not very good at Venn diagrams. Because they certainly are artificial, general, and intelligent according to any dictionary.

That’s not how language works.

That's precisely how language works in most cases, and there does not seem to be any reason to think it is different in this one.

Although if you look at the trajectory of goalposts since https://web.archive.org/web/20140327014303/https://en.wikipe... , I could concede the point, that people discarded the obvious definition in the light of recent events.

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

#335

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

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…

The fact that people call them Markov chains when they clearly haven't used the early chat bots that were dumb Markov chains pisses me off.

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

#336

Post by senordevnyc »

cogman10 wrote: post #161
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…

> 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…

It's always perplexing when people talk about LLMs as "it", as if there's only one model out there, and they're all equally accurate.

FWIW, here's 4o writing a selection sort: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e60f66-aacc-800c-9e1d-303982f54d...

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

#337

Post by bradfox2 »

simonw wrote: post #48

The most interesting thing about this post is how it reinforces how terrible the usability of LLMs still is today: "I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist." To experienced LLM users that's not surprising at all - providing citations, sourc…

It's wikipedia in the 00s all over again being preached by roughly the same age and social demographic.

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

#338

Post by jpdb »

This article seems to focus on the shortcomings of LLMs being wrong, but fails to consider the value LLMs provide and just how large of an opportunity that value presents.

If you look at any company on earth, especially large ones, they all share the same line item as their biggest expense: labor. Any technology that can reduce that cost represents an overwhelmingly huge opportunity.

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

#339

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

adastra22 wrote: post #317
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 really depends on the task. Like Sabine, I’m operating on the very frontier of a scientific domain that is extremely niche. Every single LLM out there is worse than useless in this domain. It spits out incomprehensible garbage. But ask it to solve some leet code and it’s brilliant.

Surely you understand why an LLM that has no knowledge of your niche wouldn't be useful right?

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

#340

Post by IncreasePosts »

ANighRaisin wrote: post #155
simonw wrote: post #48

The most interesting thing about this post is how it reinforces how terrible the usability of LLMs still is today: "I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist." To experienced LLM users that's not surprising at all - providing citations, sourc…

This isn't really a problem in tool-assisted LLMs. Use google AI studio with search grounding. Provides correct links and citations every time. Other companies have similar search modes, but you have to enable those settings if you want good results.

Okay, but it's weird there is a "don't lie to me" button.
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