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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

#491

Post by kelleyperry »

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'm completely with you. The technology is absolutely fascinating in its own right.

That said, I do experience frustrations: - Getting enraged when it messes up perfectly good code it wrote just 10 minutes ago - Constantly reminding it we're NOT using jest to write tests - Discovering it's created duplicate utilities in different folders

There's definitely a lot of hand-holding required, and I've encountered limitations I initially overlooked in my optimism.

But here's what makes it worthwhile: LLMs have significantly eased my imposter syndrome when it comes to coding. I feel much more confident tackling tasks that would have filled me with dread a year ago.

I honestly don't understand how everyone isn't completely blown away by how cool this technology is. I haven't felt this level of excitement about a new technology since I discovered I could build my own Flash movies.

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

#492

Post by damnever »

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 depends. For small tasks like summarization or self-contained code snippets, it’s really good—like figuring out how to inspect a binary executable on Linux, or designing a ranking algorithm for different search patterns. If you only want average performance or don’t care much about the details, it can produce reasonable results without much oversight.

But for larger tasks—say, around 2,000 lines of code—it often fails in a lot of small ways. It tends to generate a lot of dead code after multiple iterations, and might repeatedly fail on issues you thought were easy to fix. Mentally, it can get exhausting, and you might end up rewriting most of it yourself. I think people are just tired of how much we expect LLMs to deliver, only for them to fail us in unexpected ways. The LLM is good, but we really need to push to understand its limitations.

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

#493

Post by no_wizard »

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…

Keep in mind it understands nothing. The notion that LLMs understand anything is fundamentally flawed, as they do not demonstrate any markers of understanding

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

#494

Post by puppycodes »

relaxing wrote: post #206
krapp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the first link I got when I pasted that in is probably the Stack Exchange thread you would use to research further, along with other sources, which do seem relevant to the query. I don't see how an LLM is significantly faster or more informative, since you still have to do the legwork to validate the answer. I guess if you're google-phobic (which a lot of people seem to be, especially on HN) then I can see ho…

The first stackexchange link I see answers the question of thermal conductivity, not electrical. Google is convinced I didn’t actually mean electrical. Forcing it to include electrical brings up nothing of use. The Google AI summary suggests MLV which is wrong. ChatGPT suggests using copper which is also wrong. I call bullshit on the entire affair.

The answer I got from ChatGPT was: ...........

A material that is both electrically conductive and good at blocking sound is:

Lead (Pb) • Electrical conductivity: Lead is a metal, so it conducts electricity, although it’s not the most conductive (lower than copper or silver).

• Sound blocking: Lead is excellent at blocking sound due to its high density and mass, which help attenuate airborne sound effectively.

Other options depending on application:

Composite materials:

• Metal-rubber composites or metal-polymer composites can be engineered to conduct electricity (via embedded conductive metal layers or fillers) and block sound (due to the damping properties of the polymer/rubber layer).

Graphene or carbon-filled rubber:

• Electrically conductive due to graphene/carbon content.

• Sound damping from rubber base.

• Used in some specialized industrial or automotive applications.

Let me know if you need it optimized for a specific use case (e.g., lightweight, flexible, non-toxic).

...........

This took me less than 10 seconds.

Pretty damn good if you ask me.

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

#495

Post by mdp2021 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #355
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…

> 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.

> Thats not an LLM problem

It is, if the purpose of LLMs was to be AI. "Large language model" as a choir of pseudorandom millions converged into a voice - that was achieved, but it is by definition out of the professional realm. If it is to be taken as "artificial intelligence", then it has to have competitive intelligence.

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

#496

Post by johnfn »

abenga wrote: post #463
Davidzheng wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might be surprised to hear that people talk to other people and trust their judgements.

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

#497

Post by hnfong »

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…

Surely you're not saying everyone is using them wrong. Let's say only 99% of them are using LLMs wrong, and the remaining 1% creates $100B of economic value. That's $100B of upside.

Yes the costs of training AI models these days are really high too, but now we're just making a quantitative argument, not a qualitative one.

The fact that we've discovered a near-magical tech that everyone wants to experiment with in various contexts, is evidence that the tech is probably going somewhere.

Historically speaking, I don't think any scientific invention or technology has been adopted and experimented with so quickly and on such a massive scale as LLMs.

It's crazy that people like you dismiss the tech simply because people want to experiment with it. It's like some of you are against scientific experimentation for some reason.

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

#498

Post by tonyhart7 »

cogman10 wrote: post #203
MattGaiser wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> LLM opponents aren’t wrong about the limits of LLMs. They vastly overestimate humans. On the contrary. Humans can earn trust, learn, and can admit to being wrong or not knowing something. Further, humans are capable of independent research to figure out what it is they don't know. My problem isn't that humans are doing similar things to LLMs, my problem is that humans can understand consequences of bullshitting at…

"On the contrary. Humans can earn trust, learn, and can admit to being wrong or not knowing something."

You can do the same with LLM, I gaslight chatgpt all the time so it not hallucinate

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

#499

Post by rohit89 »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #388
mountainriver wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't doubt the first part, but how true is the second? Is there a shortage of React apps out there that companies are desperate for? I'm not having a go at you--this is a genuine inquiry. How many average people are feeling like they're missing some software that they're able to prompt into existence? I think if anything, the last few years have revealed the opposite, that there's a large/huge surplus of people in…

I think there is plenty of demand for software but not enough economic incentive to fulfill every single demand. Even for the software that is being worked on, we are constantly prioritizing between the features we need or want, deciding whether to write our own vs modifying something open source etc etc. You can also look at stuff like electron apps which is a hack to reduce programmer dev time and time to market for cross platform apps. Ideally, you should be writing highly performant native apps for each.

IMO if coding models get good enough to replace devs, we will see an explosion of software before it flattens out.

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

#500

Post by tonyhart7 »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #388
mountainriver wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't doubt the first part, but how true is the second? Is there a shortage of React apps out there that companies are desperate for? I'm not having a go at you--this is a genuine inquiry. How many average people are feeling like they're missing some software that they're able to prompt into existence? I think if anything, the last few years have revealed the opposite, that there's a large/huge surplus of people in…

"Is there a shortage of React apps out there that companies are desperate for?"

tech always shortage because its a kitchen sink problem, corporation want to reduce headcount so it saves money in the long run

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