I love when people spend a ton of time spouting takes like this.
I just hope they keep feeling that way and avoid LLMs. Less competition for those of us who are using them to make our jobs/lives easier every day.
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
#402I 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.
At non-extremely niche tasks they fail as well.
I should start collecting examples, if only for threads like this. Recently I tried to llm a tsserver plugin that treats lines ending with "//del" as empty. You can only imagine all the sneaky failures in the chat and the total uselessness of these results.
Anything that is not literally millions (billions?) of times in the training set is doomed to be fantasized about by an LLM. In various ways, tones, etc. After many such threads I came to conclusion that people who find it mostly useful are simply treading water as they probably have done most of their career. Their average product is a react form with a crud endpoint and excitement about it. I can't explain their success reports otherwise, cause it rarely works on anything beyond that.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> But my jaw kind of drops when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct. Yes but they're literally told by allegedly authoritative sources that it's going to change everything and eliminate intellectual labor, so is it totally their fault? They've heard about the uncountable sums of money spent on creating such software, why would they assume it was anything short of advertised?
> Yes but they're literally told by allegedly authoritative sources that it's going to change everything and eliminate intellectual labor
Why does this imply that they’re always correct? I’m always genuinely confused when people pretend like hallucinations are some secret that AI companies are hiding. Literally every chat interface says something like “LLMs are not always accurate”.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#404Earlier 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?
I have seen many people not saying "don't know" when appropriate. If you believe whomever without some double-checking you will have (bad) surprises. To make another parallel: that's why we have automated testing in software (long before LLMs). Because you can't trust without checking.
I think you are discounting the fact that you can weed out people who make a habit of that, but you can't do that with LLMs if they are all doing that.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#405LLMs are like any tool, you get what you put in. If you are frustrated with the results, maybe you need to think about what you're doing. 300/5290 functions decompiled and analyzed in less than three hours off of a huge codebase. By next weekend, a binary that had lost source code will have tests running on a platform it wasn't designed for.
Need source.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#406I 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…
The superficial view: „they hallucinate“
The underlying cause: 3rd order ignorance:
3rd Order Ignorance (3OI)—Lack of Process. I have 3OI when I don't know a suitably efficient way to find out I don't know that I don't know something. This is lack of process, and it presents me with a major problem: If I have 3OI, I don't know of a way to find out there are things I don't know that I don't know.
—- not from an llm
My process: use llms and see what I can do with them while taking their Output with a grain of salt.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 !
Because LLM’s, with like 20% hallucination rate, are more reliable than overworked, tired doctors that can spend only one ounce of their brainpower on the patient they’re currently helping?
Yeah, I'm gonna need really strong evidence for that claim before I entrust my life to an AI.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#408I 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…
Have you talked to a non-artificial intelligence lately? I’ve got some news for you…
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#409I 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.
The fact that you don't know what Markov chain means and get angry over others over that pisses me off.
Both are Markov chains, that you used to erroneously think Markov chain is a way to make a chatbot rather than a general mathematical process is on you not them.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#410I think many people are just not really good at dealing with "imperfect" tools. Different tools can have different success probability, let's call that probability p here. People typically use tool that have p=100%, or at least very close to it. But LLM is a tool that is far from that, so making use of it takes different approach. Imagine there is an probabilistic oracle that can answer any question with a yes/no wit…
One of the magic things about engineering is that I can make usefulness out of unreliability. Voltage can fluctuate and I can transmit 1s and 0s, lines can fizz, machines can die, and I can reliably send video from one end to the other.
Unreliability is something we live in. It is the world. Controlling error, increasing signal over noise, extracting energy from the fluctuations. This is life, man. This is what we are.
I can use LLMs very effectively. I can use search engines very effectively. I can use computers.
Many others can’t. Imagine the sheer fortune to be born in the era where I was meant to be: tools transformative and powerful in my hands; useless in others’.
I must be blessed by God.