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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

#351

Post by skissane »

lostmsu wrote: post #334
sarchertech wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that a lot of established words have a meaning different from the mere sum of their parts.

For example, “homophobia” literally means “same-fear” - are homophobes afraid of sameness? Do they have an unusual need for variety and novelty?

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

#353

Post by starchild3001 »

I have a bunch of friends who don't get along well with each other, but I tend to get along with all of them. I believe this is about focusing on the good in people, and being able to ignore the bad. I think it's the same with tools. To me AI is an out-of-this-world, OP tool. Is it perfect? No. But it's amazing! The good I get out of it far surpasses its mistakes. Almost like people. People "hallucinate" and say wrong things all the time. But that doesn't make them useless or bad. So, whoever is having issues with AIs is probably having an issue dealing with people as well :) Learn how to deal with people, and learn how to deal with AI -- the single biggest skill you'll need in 21st century.

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

#354

Post by GolDDranks »

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 am so confused too. I hold these beliefs at the same time, and I don't feel they don't contradict each other, but apparently for many people some of these do:

- LLMs are a miraculous technology that are capable of tasks far beyond what we believed would be achievable with AI/ML in the near future. Playing with them makes me constantly feel like "this is like sci-fi, this shouldn't be possible with 2025's technology".

- LLMs are fairly clueless for many tasks that are easy enough for humans, and they are nowhere near AGI. It's also unclear whether they scale up towards that goal. They are also worse programmers than people make them to be. (At least I'm not happy with their results.)

- Achieving AGI doesn't seem impossibly unlikely any more, and doing so is likely to be an existentially disastrous event for humanity, and the worst fodder of my nightmares. (Also in the sense of an existential doomsday scenario, but even just the tought of becoming... irrelevant is depressing.)

Having one of these beliefs makes me the "AI hyper" stereotype, another makes me the "AI naysayer" stereotype and yet another makes me the "AI doomer" stereotype. So I guess I'm all of those!

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

#355

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

> What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. … I've both seen online and heard people quote LLM output as if it were authoritative.

Thats not an LLM problem. But indeed quite bothersome. Dont tell me what Chatgpt told you. Tell me what you know. Maybe you got it from ChatGPT and verified it. Great. But my jaw kind of drops when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct.

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

#356

Post by csallen »

chamomeal wrote: post #350
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…

Couldn’t agree more! When I saw GPT-3 in action in 2023, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I was being tricked somehow. I’d seen ads for “AI-powered” services and it was always the same unimpressive stuff. Then I saw GPT-3 and within minutes I knew it was completely different. It was the first thing I’d ever seen that felt like AI. That was only a few years ago. Now I can run something on my 8GB MacBook Air that…

> I use them constantly and I can still hardly believe they exist!!

Exactly how I feel. I probably write 50 prompts/day, and a few times a week I still think, "I can't believe this is real tech."

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

#357

Post by crazygringo »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #345
crazygringo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't. Because I know it does and it's incredibly easy to type something into Google Scholar and see if a reference exists. Like, I can ask a friend and they'll mistakenly make up a reference. "Yeah, didn't so-and-so write a paper on that? Oh they didn't? Oh never mind, I must have been thinking of something else." Does that mean I should never ask my friend about anything ever again? Nobody should be using the…

No, that doesn't mean you should never ask your friend things again if they make that mistake. But, if 30% of all their references are made up then you might start to question everything your friend says. And looking up references to every claim you're reading is not a productive use of time.

If my friend has a million times more knowledge than the average human being, then I'm willing to put up with a 30% error rate on references.

And I'm talking about references when doing deep academic research. Looking them up is absolutely a productive use of time -- I'm asking for the references so I can read them. I'm not asking for them for fun.

Remember, it's hundreds of times easier to verify information than it is to find it in the first place. That's the basic principle of what makes LLM's so incredibly valuable.

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

#359

Post by sarchertech »

lostmsu wrote: post #334
sarchertech wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once a group of words becomes a compound noun, you can’t necessarily look at the individual component words to derive the definition.

A paste made of a ground up tooth is clearly tooth paste because it is both a tooth and paste.

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

#360

Post by threeseed »

senordevnyc wrote: post #336
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…

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...

I don't understand the point of that share. There are likely thousands of implementations of selection sort on the internet and so being able to recreate one isn't impressive in the slightest.

And all the models are identical in not being able to discern what is real or something it just made up.

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