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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

#431

Post by simoncion »

gilbetron wrote: post #281
Terr_ wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like computer graphics and VR: Amazing advances over the years, very impressive, fun, cool, and by no means a temporary fad... ... But I do not believe we're on the cusp of a Lawnmower-Man future where someone's Metaverse eats all the retail-conference-halls and movie-theaters and retail-stores across the entire globe in an unbridled orgy of mind-shattering investor returns . Similarly, LLMs are neat and have so…

Ah yes, the "computer graphics, which has generated billions upon billions of revenue and change are just a fad" argument. What next, "This Internet thing was just a fad" or "The industrial age was a fad"?

We find this thing you said:

> Ah yes, the "computer graphics, which has generated billions upon billions of revenue and change are just a fad" argument.

in reference to this thing that OP said:

> It's like computer graphics and VR: Amazing advances over the years, very impressive, fun, cool, and by no means a temporary fad...

Either you, yourself are an LLM, or you need to slow the fuck down and read.

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

#432

Post by riku_iki »

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.

what makes you more productive, say C++ compiler + IDE or LLM? Do C++ compilers and IDE have similar valuation?

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

#433

Post by skydhash »

School-Cotton wrote: post #211
sidewndr46 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every time someone brings up "Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases" I like to point at that such code is not likely to be used for anything that matters

You never write code to automate something in your personal environment, or to analyze some one-off data, rather than to actually go into production?

Not GP, but more often than not I reach out to tools I already know (sed,awk,python) or read the docs which don't take that much time if you know how to get to the sections you need.

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

#434

Post by kristopolous »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #14
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…

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

They're sophisticated tools at much as any other software.

About 2 weeks ago I started on a streaming markdown parser for the terminal because none really existed. I've switched to human coding now but the first version was basically all llm prompting and a bunch of the code is still llm generated (maybe 80%). It's a parser, those are hard. There's stacks, states, lookaheads, look behinds, feature flags, color spaces, support for things like links and syntax highlighting... all forward streaming. Not easy

https://github.com/kristopolous/Streamdown

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

#435

Post by riku_iki »

didibus wrote: post #413
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…

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.

Waymo is already full self-driving cars, doesn't look like people buy google stocks on this sentiment.

I personally think Tesla is positioned well for EV first world compared to other brands. But Chinese companies are catching up.

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

#436

Post by croes »

aetherson wrote: post #291
snitty wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks really over index when an LLM is very good for their use case. And most of the folks here are coders, at which they're already good and getting better. For some tasks they're still next to useless, and people who do those tasks understandably don't get the hype. Tell a lab biologist or chemist to use an LLM to help them with their work and they'll get very little useful out of it. Ask an attorney to use it and…

I know at least two attorneys who use LLMs productively. As with all LLM usage right now, it's a tool and not fit for every purpose. But it has legit uses for some attorney tasks.

The problem it‘s marketed as a general tool that at least in the future will work near perfectly if we just provide enough data and computing power.

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

#437

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

Same

And people keep forgetting how new this stuff is

This is like trashing video games in 1980 because Pong has awful graphics

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

#438

Post by riku_iki »

no_wizard wrote: post #268
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…

Most “AI” companies are simply wrapping the ChatGPT API in some form. You can tell from the job posts. They aren’t building anything themselves. I find this to be disingenuous as best, and is a sign to me of bubble attribution. I also think that re-branding Machine Learning as AI to also be disingenuous. These technologies of course have their use cases and excel in some things, but this isn’t the ushering of actual,…

their value proposition to VC is market capture, its marketing companies and they outsource tech heavy lifting to OpenAI and others.

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

#439

Post by john2x »

puppycodes wrote: post #53

Here's one simple reason: I have a very specific esoteric question like: "What material is both electrically conductive and good at blocking sound?" I could type this into google and sift through the titles and short descriptions of websites and eventually maybe find an answer, or I can put the question to the LLM and instantly get an answer that I can then research further to confirm. This is significantly faster, m…

Until they pull the rug and make you read through 10 paragraphs of ads first before getting to your answer.

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

#440

Post by zetazzed »

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 feel like LLMs are the same as the leap from "world before web search" to "world after web search." Yeah, in google, you get crap links for sure, and you have to wade through salesy links and random blogs. But in the pre-web-search world, your options were generally "ask a friend who seems smart" or "go to the library for quite a while," AND BOTH OF THOSE OPTIONS HAD PLENTY OF ISSUES. I found a random part in an old arduino kit I bought years ago, and GPT-4o correctly identified it and explained exactly how to hook it up and code for it to me. That is frickin awesome, and it saves me a ton of time and leads me to reuse the part. I used DeepResearch to research car options that fit my exact needs, and it was 100% spot on - multiple people have suggested models that DeepReearch did not identify that would be a fit, but every time I dig in, I find that DeepResearch was right and the alternative actually had some dealbreaker I had specified. Etc., etc.

In the 90s, Robert Metcalfe infamously wrote "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." I feel like we are just hearing LLM versions of this quote over and over now, but they will prove to be equally accurate.

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