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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

#461
I don't actually like LLMs that much or find them useful, but its clear there are some things they are good at and some things they are bad at, and this post is all about things they are weak at.

LLMs are a little bit magical but they are still a square peg. The fact they don't fit in a round hole is uninteresting. The interesting thing to debate is how useful they are at the things they are good at, not at the things they are bad at.

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

#462
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…

blockchain is here to stay, dont kid yourself

Of course. You can also still buy new pogs, and they have a subreddit.

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

You are not a trusted authority relied on by millions and expected to make decisions for them, and you could choose not to say something you aren't sure that you know.

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

#464

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?

How many companies train on data that contains 'i don't know' responses. Have you ever talked with a toddler / young child? You need to explicitly teach children to not bull shit. At least I needed to teach mine.

Never mind toddlers, have you ever hired people? A far smaller proportion of professional adults will say “I don’t know” than a lot of people here seem to believe.

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

#465
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wou…

> that is decidedly not happening

Regardless of anything else it’s extremely too early to make such claims. We have to wait until people start allowing “AI agents” to make autonomous blackbox decision with minimal supervision since nobody has any clue what’s happening.

Even if we tone down the SciFi dystopia angle not that many people really use LMMs in non superficial ways yet. What I’m most afraid of would be the next generation growing without the ability to critically synthesize information on their own.

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

#466
I genuinely don't understand why some people are so critical of LLMs. This is new tech, we don't really understand the emergent effects of attention and transformers within these LLMs at all. It is very possible that, with some further theoretical development, LLMs which are currently just 'regurgitating and hallucinating' can be made to be significantly more performant indeed. In fact, reasoning models - when combined with whatever Google is doing with the 1M+ ctxt windows - are much closer to that than people who were using LLMs expected.

The tech isn't there yet, clearly. And stock valuations are over the board way too much. But, LLMs as a tech != the stock valuations of the companies. And, LLMs as a tech are here to stay and improve and integrate into everyday life more and more - with massive impacts on education (particularly K-12) as models get better at thinking and explaining concepts for example.

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

#468

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…

> 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.

Is it worse or better than quoting a Twitter comment and taking that as it were authoritative?

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

#469
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And people just sit around, unimpressed, and complain that ... what ... it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly? IMO there are two distinct reasons for this: 1. You've got the Sam Altman's of the world claiming that LLMs are or nearly are AGI and that ASI is right around the corner. It's obvious this isn't true even if LLMs are still incredibly powerful and useful. But Sam doing t…

> LLMs are an existential threat to basically every knowledge worker job on the planet. Given the typical problems of LLMs they are not. You still need them to check the results. It’s like FSD, impressive when it works, bad if not, scary because you never known beforehand when it’s failing

Yeah, the vast majority of what I spend my time on in a day isn’t something an LLM can help with.

My wife and I both work on and with LLMs and they seem to be, like… 5-10% productivity boosters on a good day. I’m not sure they’re even that good averaged over a year. And they don’t seem to be getting a lot better in ways that change that. Also, they’re that good if you’re good at using them and I can tell you most people really, really are not.

I remember when it was possible to be “good at Google”. It was probably a similar productivity boost. I was good at Google. Most (like, over 95% of) people were not, and didn’t seem to be able to get there, and… also remained entirely employable despite that.

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

#470
post #426

Earlier 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.

> when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct. people used to say the exact same thing with wikipedia back when it first started.

Correct; Wikipedia is still not authoritative.
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