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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

#391

Post by patrick451 »

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 frustration of using an LLM is greater than the frustration of doing it myself. If it's going to be a tool, it needs to work. Otherwise, it's just a research a toy.

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

#392

Post by yalogin »

This is interesting. I have replaced google search with ChatGPT and meta’s AI. They more than deliver. Thinking about my use cases, I use google to recollect things or to give me a starting point for further research. LLMs are great for that and so I am never going back to google. However I am curious about how the cases where the OP sees this great gap and failures

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

#393

Post by Davidzheng »

tootie wrote: post #235
roxolotl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that’s hard about these discussions is that behind them is an obscene amount of money and hype. She’s not responding to realists like you. She’s responding to the bulls. The people saying these tools will be able to run the world by the end of this year, maybe next. And that’s honestly unfair to you since you do awesome realistic and level headed work with LLM. But I think it’s important when having…

Possibly a reaction to Bill Gates recent statements that it will begin replacing doctors and teachers. It's ridiculous to say LLMs are incredibly useful and valuable. It's highly dubious to think they can be trusted with actual critical tasks without careful supervision.

Capability today and next year will probably be very different in reliability

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

#394

Post by adastra22 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #386
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.

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.

What she is saying is correct about the utility of LLMs in scientific research though.

When your user says that your product doesn’t work for them, saying they’re using it wrong is not an excuse.

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

#395

Post by dvsfish »

threeseed wrote: post #360
senordevnyc wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess the point is that op was pretty adamant that LLMs refuse to write selection sorts?

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

#396

Post by Davidzheng »

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 sort of concrete verifiable hallucinations can be trained out and probably will be soon

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

#397

Post by Davidzheng »

sc68cal wrote: post #208
crazygringo wrote: post #42

If there's one common thread across LLM criticisms, it's that they're not perfect. These critics don't seem to have learned the lesson that the perfect is the enemy of the good . I use ChatGPT all the time for academic research. Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time. But has it pointed me to important research papers I might never have found otherwise? Absolutely . The rate of inac…

> 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?

I think a third of facts i say are false as stated and I do not think I'm worse than 30th percentile in humans at truthfulness

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

#398

Post by agentultra »

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 not that impressive to me, as a programmer.

The crisis in programming hasn’t been writing code. It has been developing languages and tools so that we can write less of it that is easy to verify as correct. These tools generate more code. More than you can read and more than you will want to before you get bored and decide to trust the output. It is trained on the most average code available that could be sucked up and ripped off the Internet. It will regurgitate the most subtle errors that humans are not good at finding. It only saves you time if you don’t bother reading and understanding what it outputs.

I don’t want to think about the potential. It may never materialize. And much of what was promised even a few years ago hasn’t come to fruition. It’s always a few years away. Always another funding round.

Instead we have massive amounts of new demand for liquid methane, infrastructure struggling to keep up, billions of gallons of fresh water wasted, all so that rich kids can vibe code their way to easy money and realize three months later they’ve been hacked and they don’t know what to do. The context window has been lost and they ran out of API credits. Welcome to the future.

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

#399

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

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…

People need time to adapt to llms capacity to spit out nonsense. It’ll take time but I’m sure they will.

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

#400

Post by Marsymars »

puppycodes wrote: post #72
krapp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the first link I got when I pasted that in is probably the Stack Exchange thread you would use to research further, along with other sources, which do seem relevant to the query. I don't see how an LLM is significantly faster or more informative, since you still have to do the legwork to validate the answer. I guess if you're google-phobic (which a lot of people seem to be, especially on HN) then I can see ho…

Its just an example and you can "well actually" until the cows come home, but your missing the point. I'm sure there are things you have found hard to google. Also you are most likely (as your commenting on hacker news) not a good representation of the majority of the world. idk if you have noticed, but google is clearly using LLM technology in conjunction with its search results, so the assumption they are just usin…

> I'm sure there are things you have found hard to google.

There are, but I haven’t found LLMs to be useful for them either.

Today, I had the question of “where can I buy firewood within a ten minute drive from my house, and what’s the cost at each place?”

There’d no real way to get that info without going for a drive, or calling every potential location to ask.

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