Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

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

#571

Post by INTPenis »

I realized it would be a bubble this xmas when I ran across a neighbor of mine walking their dog. I told them what I did and they immedately asked if I worked with AI, they were looking for AI programmers. No regard for details, or what field, just get me AI programmers.

He's a person with money and he wants AI programmers. I bet there are millions like him.

Don't get me wrong though, I do believe in a future with LLMs. But I believe they will become more and more specialized for specific tasks. The more general an AI is, the more it's likely to fail.

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

#572

Post by oulipo »

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…

Probably because you don't have the same use-case as them... doing "code" is an "easy" use-case, but pondering on a humanities subject is much harder... you cannot "learn the structure" of humanities, you have to know the facts... and LLMs are bad at that

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

#573

Post by thaumasiotes »

somenameforme wrote: post #554
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 mostly because of how they were initially marketed. In an effort to drive hype 'we' were promised the world. Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? In reality Bard, let alone whatever early version he was using, is about as sentient as my left asscheek. OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety'…

> OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety' for what was basically a natural language search engine that has a habit of inventing nonsensical stuff.

The focus on safety, and the concept of "AI", preexisted the product. An LLM was just the thing they eventually made; it wasn't the thing they were hoping to make. They applied their existing beliefs to it anyway.

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

#574

Post by schnitzelstoat »

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…

This is true. But it needs to be more than a toy if it is to be economically viable.

So far the industrial applications haven't been that promising, code writing and documentation is probably the most promising but even there it's not like it can replace a human or even substantially increase their productivity.

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

#575

Post by Ylpertnodi »

mattmanser wrote: post #525
bjornsing wrote: post #520

I’ve been using Claude a lot lately, and I must say I very much disagree. For example, the other day I was chatting with it about the health risks associated with my high consumption of grown salmon. It then generated a small program to simulate the accumulation of PCB in my body. I could review the program, ask questions about the assumptions, etc. It all seemed very reasonable. A toxicokinetic analysis it called it…

Google it. There's a bunch of scientific papers talking about that. Bet that plenty of those researchers have written python programs they've uploaded to GitHub and you just got one of their programs regurgitated It's not intelligence mate, it's just copying an existing program.

>It's not intelligence mate, it's just copying an existing program.

Isn't the 'intelligence' part, the bit that gets a previously-constructed 'thing', and makes it work in 'situation'. Pretty sure that's how humans work, too.

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

#576

Post by gorgoiler »

tootie wrote: post #235
roxolotl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that’s hard about these discussions is that behind them is an obscene amount of money and hype. She’s not responding to realists like you. She’s responding to the bulls. The people saying these tools will be able to run the world by the end of this year, maybe next. And that’s honestly unfair to you since you do awesome realistic and level headed work with LLM. But I think it’s important when having…

Possibly a reaction to Bill Gates recent statements that it will begin replacing doctors and teachers. It's ridiculous to say LLMs are incredibly useful and valuable. It's highly dubious to think they can be trusted with actual critical tasks without careful supervision.

“Replacing teachers” is of course laughable.

Teachers are there to observe and manage behavior, resolve conflict, identify psychological risks and get in front of fixing them, set and maintain a positive tone (“setting the weather”), lift pupils up to that tone, and to summarize, assess and report on progress.

They are also there to grind through papers, tests, lesson plans, reports, marking, and letter writing. All of that will get easier with machine assistance.

Teaching is one of the most human-nature centric jobs in the world and will be the last to go. If AI can help focus the role of teacher more on using expert people skills and less on drudgery it will hopefully even improve the prospects of teaching as a career, not eliminate it.

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

#577

Post by mixermachine »

INTPenis wrote: post #571

I realized it would be a bubble this xmas when I ran across a neighbor of mine walking their dog. I told them what I did and they immedately asked if I worked with AI, they were looking for AI programmers. No regard for details, or what field, just get me AI programmers. He's a person with money and he wants AI programmers. I bet there are millions like him. Don't get me wrong though, I do believe in a future with LL…

It's more or less the same for every hype technology. Most people only glance over the executive slides version of the description of the technology (which is understandable because they have different priorities). Others have already told them that this is the "new thing" and they need it.

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

#578

Post by vanviegen »

relaxing wrote: post #175
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…

> Also, when she says "none of my students has ever invented references that just don't exist"...all I can say is "press X to doubt" I’ve never seen it from my students. Why do you think this? It’s trivial to pick a real book/article. No student is generating fake material whole cloth and fake references to match. Even if they could, why would they risk it?

Exactly. Lazy students just refer to vaguely related but existing material that they didn't read. Much better than llms! :-)

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

#579

Post by Mawr »

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…

Depends on your use case. If you don't need them to be the source of truth, then they work great, but if you do, the experience sucks because they're so unreliable.

The problems start when people start hyperventilating because they think since LLMs can generate tests for a function for you, that they'll be replacing engineers soon. They're only suitable for generating output that you can easily verify to be correct.

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

#580

Post by lnenad »

gloosx wrote: post #569
lnenad wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition This is your interpretation of what these companies are saying. I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that? Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? How many things from today when brought back into 2010 would make the person using it make it f…

No major company directly states "We have created human-like intelligence," they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR. >I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that? 1. DeepMind researchers: Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712…

> they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR.

As do all companies in the world. If you want to buy a hammer, the company will sell it as the best hammer in the world. It's the norm.

I don't know exactly what your point is with ELIZA?

> So as you can see, us humans are not too hard to fool with this.

I mean ok? How is that related to having a 30 minute conversation with ChatGPT where it teaches you a language? Or Claude outputting an entire application in a single go? Or having them guide you through fixing your fridge by uploading the instructions? Or using NotebookLM to help you digest a scientific paper?

Post reply on HN