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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

#631

Post by momiforgot »

It's a common and fair criticism. LLM-based products promise to save time, but for many complex, day-to-day tasks - adding a feature to a 50M LOC codebase, writing a magazine-quality article, properly summarizing 5 SEC filings - they often don't. They require careful re-validation, and once you find a few obvious issues, trust erodes and the whole thing gets tossed.

This isn't a technology problem, it's a product problem - and one that may not be solvable with better models alone.

Another issue: people communicate uncertainty naturally. We say "maybe", "it seems", "I'm not sure, but...". LLMs suppress that entirely, for structural reasons. The output sounds confident and polished, which warps perception - especially when the content is wrong.

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

#633

Post by TeMPOraL »

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'…

Nobody promised the world. The marketing underpromised and LLMs overdelivered. Safety worries didn't come from marketing, it came from people who were studying this as a mostly theoretical worry for the next 50+ years, only to see major milestones crossed a decade or more before they expected.

Did many people overhype LLMs? Yes, like with everything else (transhumanist ideas, quantum physics). It helps being more picky who one listens to, and whether they're just painting pretty pictures with words, or actually have something resembling a rational argument in there.

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

#635

Post by zkmon »

They are bullish for the right reasons. Those reasons are not the same ones you think of. They are betting that humans wouuld keep getting addicted to more and more technology crutches and assistants as they keep inviting more workload onto their minds and body. There is no going back with this trend.

Why do we burden ourselves with such expectations on us? Look at cities like Dallas. It is designed for cars. Not for human walking. The buildings are far apart, workplaces are far away from homes and everything looks like designed for some king-kong like creatures.

The burden of expectations on humans is driven by technology. Technology makes you work harder than before. It didn't make your life easier. Check how hectic life has become for you now vs a laid-back village peasant a century back.

The bullishness on LLMs is betting on this trend of self-inflicted human agony and dependency on tech. Man is going back to the craddle. LLMs give the milk feeder.

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

#637

Post by decimalenough »

f6v wrote: post #623
somenameforme wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? No, first time I hear about it. I guess the secret to happiness is not following leaks. I had very low expectations before trying LLMs and I’m extremely impressed now.

This was three years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...

He was fired and a casual browse of his blog makes it quite clear that he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal all along.

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

#638

Post by automatic6131 »

Two things can be true:

1) LLMs are a wonderous technology, capable of doing some really ingenious things

2) The hundreds of billions spent on them will not meet a positive ROI

Bonus 3) they are not good at everything & they are very bad at some things, but they are sold as good at everything.

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

#639

Post by TeMPOraL »

emsign wrote: post #564
somenameforme wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

They have their value in analyzing huge amounts of data for example scientific papers or raw observations, but the popular public ones are mostly trained on stolen/pirated texts offthe internet and from social media clouds the companies control. So this means: bullshit in -> bullshit out. I don't need machines for that the regular human bullshitters do this job just fine.

> the popular public ones are mostly trained on stolen/pirated texts offthe internet

You mean like actual literature, textbooks and scientific papers? You can't get them in bulk without pirating. Thank intellectual property laws.

> from social media clouds the companies control

I.e. conversations of real people about matters of real life.

But if it satisfies your elitist, ivory-towerish vision of "healthy information diet" for LLMs, then consider that e.g. Twitter is where, until now, you'd get most updates from the best minds in several scientific fields. Or that besides r/All, the Reddit dataset also contains r/AskHistorians and other subreddits where actual experts answer questions and give first-hand accounts of things.

The actually important bit though, is that LLM training manages to extract value from both the "bullshit" and whatever you'd call "not bullshit", as the model has to learn to work with natural language just as much as it has to learn hard facts or scientific theories.

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

#640

Post by jibal »

re-thc wrote: post #620
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…

> Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? Lots e.g. vacuum cleaners. > But at no point in history could you talk to your phone You could always "talk" to your phone just like you could "talk" to a parrot or a dog. What does that even mean? If we're talking about LLMs, I still haven't been able to have a real conversation with 1. There's too mu…

Of course they aren't "real" conversations but I can dialog with LLMs as a means of clarifying my prompts. The comment about parrots and dogs is made in bad faith.
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