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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

#381

Post by financypants »

worthless-trash wrote: post #366
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…

I saw someone saying 80% of doctors believe that LLM's are trustworthy consultation partners. Code created by LLM's doesnt compile, hallucinated API's.. invalid syntax and completely broken logic, why would you trust it with someones life !

luckily us being programmers can fix things like syntax errors.

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

#382

Post by jasonjmcghee »

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…

Many people have only tried the free version of ChatGPT, which is a completely different experience than the two most recent sonnet models.

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

#384

Post by beezle »

This is just the beginning - and it need not be nation states. Imagine instead of Russian disinfo, it is oil companies doing the same thing with positive takes on oil, climate change is a hoax, etc. Or pushing a narrative against a group they are against.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/27/russian-propaganda-ne...

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

#385

Post by financypants »

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…

Takes like yours are just crazy given the pace of things. We can argue all day if people are "too bullish" or literally on the market size of enterprise AI, but truly, absolutely no one knows how good these things will get and the problems they'll overcome in the next 5 years. You saying "I am confused on why people are still bullish" is implicitly building in some huge assumptions about the near future.

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

#386

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

Sabine is lex Friedman for women. Stay in your lane about quantum physics and stop trying to opine on LLMs. I’m tired of seeing the huge amount of FUD from her.

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

#387

Post by skydhash »

anxoo wrote: post #368
Animats wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

would you rather the LLM make up something that sounds right when it doesn't know, or would you like it to claim "i don't know" for tasks it actually can figure out? because presumably both happen at some rate, and if it hallucinates an answer i can at least check what that answer is or accept it with a grain of salt. nobody freaks out when humans make mistakes, but we assume our nascent AIs, being machines, should a…

> but we assume our nascent AIs, being machines, should always function correctly all the time

A tool that does not function is a defective tool. When I issue a command, it better does it correctly or it will be replaced.

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

#388

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

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.

I don't doubt the first part, but how true is the second?

Is there a shortage of React apps out there that companies are desperate for?

I'm not having a go at you--this is a genuine inquiry.

How many average people are feeling like they're missing some software that they're able to prompt into existence?

I think if anything, the last few years have revealed the opposite, that there's a large/huge surplus of people in the greater software business at large that don't meet the demand when money isn't cheap.

I think anyone in the "average" range of skill looking for a job can attest to the difficulties in finding a new/any job.

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

#389

Post by Marsymars »

retrac wrote: post #3

You're using them wrong. Everyone is though I can't fault you specifically. Chatbot is like the worst possible application of these technologies. Of late, deaf tech forums are taken over by language model debates over which works best for speech transcription. (Multimodal language models are the the state of the art in machine transcription. Everyone seems to forget that when complaining they can't cite sources for s…

I’ve had the exact same vibes around chatbots as an application of LLMs. But other than translation/transcription, what else is there?

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

#390

Post by adastra22 »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #339
adastra22 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hallucinating incorrect information is worse than useless. It is actively harmful.

I wonder how much this affects our fundraising, for example. No VC understands the science here, so they turn to advisors (which is great!) or to LLMs… which has us starting off on the wrong foot.

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