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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

#441

Post by MichaelRo »

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?

>> We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

Heh. Easiest answer in the world. To be able to say "don't know", one has first to be able to "know". And we ain't there yet, by large. Not even flying by a million miles of it.

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

#442

Post by prawn »

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 !

I wonder if the exact phrasing has varied from the source, but even then if "consultation partners" is doing the heavy lifting there. If it was something like "useful consultation partners", I can absolutely see value as an extra opinion that is easy to override. "Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that option - I'll look into it further."

I imagine we're talking about it as an extra resource rather than trusting it as final in a life or death decision.

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

#443

Post by croes »

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…

> invented references that just don't exist"...all I can say is "press X to doubt

This doesn’t include lying and cheating which LLMs can’t.

On the other hand AI is used to solve problems that are already solved. I just recently got an ad about a software for process modeling where one claim was you don’t need always to start from the ground up but can say the AI give me the customer order process to start from that point. That is basically what templates are for with much less energy consumption.

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

#445

Post by sagarpatil »

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’ve been playing with Gemini 2.5 pro throwing all kinds of problems that will help me with personal productivity and it’s mostly one shoting them. I’m still in disbelief tbh. A lot of people who don’t understand how to use LLM effectively will be at an economic disadvantage.

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

#446

Post by ncallaway »

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…

> 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?

The latter option every single time

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

#447

Post by abenga »

MattGaiser wrote: post #169
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…

Humans bullshit and hallucinate and claim authority without citation or knowledge. They will believe all manner of things. They frequently misunderstand. The LLM doesn’t need to be perfect. Just needs to beat a typical human. LLM opponents aren’t wrong about the limits of LLMs. They vastly overestimate humans.

I never ask a typical human for help with my work, why should that be my benchmark for using an information tool? Afaik, most people do not write about what they don't know, and if one made a habit of it, they would be found and filtered out of authoritative sources of information.

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

#448

Post by throw234234234 »

snitty wrote: post #286
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…

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…

My view is that it will be some time before they can as well because of the success in the software domain - not because LLM's aren't capable as a tech but because data owners and practitioners in other domains will resist the change. From the SWE experience, news reports, financial magazines, etc many are preparing accordingly, even if it is a subconscious thing. People don't like change, and don't want to be threatened when it is them at risk - no one wants what happened to artists and now SWE's to happen to their profession. They are happy for other professions to "democratize/commoditize" as long as it isn't them - after all this increases their purchasing power. Don't open source knowledge/products, don't let AI near your vertical domain, continue to command a premium for as long as you can - I've heard variations of this in many AI conversations. Much easier in oligopoly and monopoly like domains and/or domains where knowledge was known to be a moat even when mixed with software as you have more trust competitors won't do the same.

For many industries/people work is a means to earn, not something to be passionate in for its own sake. Its a means to provide for other things in life you are actually passionate about (e.g. family, lifestyle, etc). In the end AI may get your job eventually but if it gets you much later vs other industries/domains you win from a capital perspective as other goods get cheaper and you still command your pre-AI scarcity premium. This makes it easier for them to acquire more assets from the early disrupted industries and shield them from eventual AI taking over.

I'm seeing this directly in software. Less new frameworks/libraries/etc outside the AI domain being published IMO, more apprehension from companies to open source their work and/or expose what they do, etc. Attracting talent is also no longer as strong of a reason to showcase what you do to prospective employees - economic conditions and/or AI make that less necessary as well.

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

#449

Post by 1shooner »

Shank wrote: post #6
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…

> You're using them wrong. Everyone is though I can't fault you specifically. If everyone is using them wrong, I would argue that says something more about them than the users. Chat-based interfaces are the thing that kicked LLMs into the mainstream consciousness and started the cycle/trajectory we’re on now. If this is the wrong use case, everything the author said is still true. There are still applications made be…

Isn't this more a product of the hype though? At worst you're describing a product marketing mistake, not some fundamental shortcoming of the tech. As you say "chat" isn't a use case, it's a language-based interface. The use case is language prediction, not an encyclopedic storage and recall of facts and specific quotes. If you are trying to get specific facts out of an LLM, you'd better be using it as an interface that accesses some other persistent knowledge store, which has been incorporated into all the major 'chat' products by now.

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

#450

Post by rglover »

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…

> And people are like, "Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience!"

Except this isn't true. The code quality varies dramatically depending on what you're doing, the length of the chat/context, etc. It's an incredible productivity booster, but even earlier today, I wasted time debugging hallucinated code because the LLM mixed up methods in a library.

The problem isn't so much that it's not an amazing technology, it's how it's being sold. The people who stand to benefit are speaking as though they've invented a god and are scaring the crap out of people making them think everyone will be techno-serfs in a few years. That's incredibly careless, especially when as a technical person, you understand how the underlying system works and know, definitively, that these things aren't "intelligent" the way they're being sold.

Like the startups of the 2010s, everyone is rushing, lying, and huffing hopium deluding themselves that we're minutes away from the singularity.

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