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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

#411

Post by dcow »

gonzobonzo wrote: post #259
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…

> 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. The same is true about the internet, and people even used to use these arguments to try to dissuade people from getting their information online (back when Wikipedia was considered a running joke, and journalists mocked blogs). But today it would be considered sill…

I have decided it must be attached to a sort of superiority complex. These types of people believe they are capable of deciphering fact from fiction but the general population isn’t so LLMs scare them because someone might hear something wrong and believe it. It almost seems delusional. You have to be incredibly self aggrandizing in your mind to think this way. If LLMs were actually causing “a problem” then there would be countless examples of humans making critical mistakes because of bad LLM responses, and that is decidedly not happening. Instead we’re just having fun ghiblifying the last 20 years of the internet.

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

#412

Post by NetOpWibby »

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'll keep bringing up this example whenever people dismiss LLMs.

I can ask Claude the most inane programming question and got an answer. If I were to do that on StackOverflow, I'd get downvoted, rude comments, and my question closed for being off-topic. I don't have to be super knowledgeable about the thing I'm asking about with Claude (or any LLM for that matter).

Even if you ignore the rudeness and elitism of power-users of certain platforms, there's no more waiting for someone to respond to your esoteric questions. Even if the LLM spews bullshit, you can ask it clarifying questions or rephrase until you see something that makes sense.

I love LLMs, I don't care what people say. Even when I'm just spitballing ideas[1], the output is great.

---

[1]: https://blog.webb.page/2025-03-27-spitball-with-claude.txt

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

#413

Post by didibus »

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…

Tesla is valued based on the hope that it'll be the first to full self-driving cars. I don't think stock markets need to make sense, you invest in things that if true, could have huge growth, that's why LLM is being invested in, because alternatives will make you some ROI, but if LLM do break through major disruption in even a handful of large markets, your ROI will be huge.

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

#414

Post by skydhash »

rayiner wrote: post #244
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 asked Grok to describe a picture I took of me and my kid at Hilton Head island. Based on the plant life it guesses it was a southeast barrier island in Georgia or the Carolinas. It guessed my age and my son’s age. LLMs are completely insane tech for a 90s kid. The first fundamental advance in tech I’ve seen in my lifetime—like what it must’ve been like for people who used a telephone for the first time, or watched…

Flat TVs, digital audio players (the iPod), the smartphone, laptops, the smartwatches,... You have a very selective definition of advance in tech. Compare today (minus LLMs) with any movies depicting life in the nineties and you can see how much tech have developed.

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

#415

Post by BenFranklin100 »

The author of the tweet is a physicist. Her work is at the edge of the boundary of human knowledge. LLM’s are useless in this domain, at last when applied directly.

When I use LLM’s to explore applications of cutting edge nonlinear optics, I too am appalled about the quality of the output. When I use an LLM to implement a React program, something that has been done hundreds of times before by others, I find it performs well.

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

#416

Post by TZubiri »

Animats wrote: post #178
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…

> 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 always see this, and I always answer the same.

This exists, each next token has a probability assigned to it. High probability means "it knows", if there's two or more tokens of similar probability, or the prob of the first token is low in general, then you are less confident about that datum.

Of course there's areas where there's more than one possible answer, but both possibilities are very consistent. I feel LLMs (chatgpt) do this fine.

Also can we stop pretending with the generic name for ChatGPT? It's like calling Viagra sildenafil instead of viagra, cut it out, there's the real deal and there's imitations.

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

#417

Post by fumeux_fume »

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…

Wicked, selfish children!Only the real power users understand it generates really cool images and talks just like a person.

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

#418

Post by jppope »

inopinatus wrote: post #290
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?

Unfortunately they are trained first and foremost as plausibility engines. The central dogma is that plausibility will (with continuing progress & scale) converge towards correctness, or "faithfulness" as it's sometimes called in the literature. This remains very far from proven. The null hypothesis that would be necessary to reject, therefore, is a most unfortunate one, viz. that by training for plausibility we are…

As a sort of related anecdote... if you remember the days before google, people sitting around your dinner table arguing about stuff used to spew all sorts of bullshit then drop that they have a degree from XYZ university and they won the argument... when google/wikipedia came around turned out that those people were in fact just spewing bullshit. I'm sure there was some damage but it feels like a similar thing. Our "bullshit-radar" seems to be able to adapt to these sorts of things.

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

#419

Post by pesus »

saaaaaam wrote: post #101
pesus wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a lot of actions without any verification that the LLM didn't misinterpret things or just make something up.

Well the API calls worked perfectly. The LLM didn’t misinterpret that. The data extraction via tesseract worked too. The whisper transcript was pretty good. Not perfect, but when you do this daily you are easily able to work around things. The summaries of the calls were very useful. I could easily verify those because I was on the calls. The interview - again, transcript is great. The bulleted narrative was guided -…

How do you know a summary of a podcast you haven't listened to is accurate?

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

#420

Post by cratermoon »

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…

People were impressed by Eliza in 1964.
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