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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

#651

Post by sexy_seedbox »

harrall wrote: post #29

I am neither bullish or bearish. LLM is a tool. It's a hammer -- sometimes it works well. It summarizes the user reviews on a site... cool, not perfect, but useful. And like every tool, it is useless for 90% of life's situations. And I know when it's useful because I've already tried a hammer on 1000 things and have figured out what I should be using a hammer on.

Yep, that's exactly how Microsoft is operating as a company recently: Copilot is a hammer—it needs to be used EVERYWHERE.

Forget bug fixes and new feature rollouts, every department and product team at Microsoft needs to add Copilot. Microsoft customers MUST jump on the AI-bandwagon!

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

#652

Post by UncleEntity »

adastra22 wrote: post #317
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 really depends on the task. Like Sabine, I’m operating on the very frontier of a scientific domain that is extremely niche. Every single LLM out there is worse than useless in this domain. It spits out incomprehensible garbage. But ask it to solve some leet code and it’s brilliant.

How many actual humans are useful in your niche scientific domain?

And how many actual humans, with a fair bit of training, can become a little bit less than useless?

I mean, my parents used to have this dog that would just look at you like "go get you own damn ball, stupid human" if you threw a ball around him.

--edit--

and, yes, the dog also made grammatical mistakes.

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

#653

Post by TeMPOraL »

eyegor wrote: post #310
snitty wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like you're trying to use these llms as oracles, which is going to cause you a lot of frustration. I've found almost all of them now excel at imitating a junior dev or a drunk PhD student. For example the other day I was looking at acoustic sensor data and I ran it down the trail of "what are some ways to look for repeating patterns like xyz" and 10 minutes later I had a mostly working proof of concept for…

> But truthfully 90% of work related programming is not problem solving, it's implementing business logic. And dealing with poor, ever changing customer specs. Which an llm will not help with.

Au contraire, these are exactly things LLMs are super helpful at - most of business logic in any company is just doing the same thing every other company is doing; there's not that many unique challenges in day-to-day programming (or business in general). And then, more than half of the work of "implementing business logic" is feeding data in and out, presenting it to the user, and a bunch of other things that boil down to gluing together preexisting components and frameworks - again, a kind of work that LLMs are quite a big time-saver for, if you use them right.

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

#654

Post by conartist6 »

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…

What you're impressed with is 40% human skill in creating an LLM, 0.5% value created by the model. And 59.5% the skills of all the people it ate and is now trying to destroy the livelihood of

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

#655

Post by myaccountonhn »

agentultra wrote: post #398
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 not that impressive to me, as a programmer. The crisis in programming hasn’t been writing code. It has been developing languages and tools so that we can write less of it that is easy to verify as correct. These tools generate more code. More than you can read and more than you will want to before you get bored and decide to trust the output. It is trained on the most average code available that could be sucked…

Yeah basically this. If I look at how it helps me as an individual, I can totally see how AI can sometimes be useful. If I take a look at what societal effect of AI, it becomes apparent that AI just is a net negative. Some examples:

- AI is great for disinformation

- AI is great at generating porn of women without their consent.

- Open source projects massively struggle as AI scrapers DDOS them.

- AI uses massive amounts of energy and water, most importantly the expectation is that energy usage will rise when we drastically in a world where we need to lower it. If Sam Altman gets his way, we're toast.

- AI makes us intellectually lazy and worse thinkers. We were already learning less and less in school because of our impoverished attention span. This is even worse now with AI.

- AI makes us even more dependent on cloud vendors and third-parties, further creating a fragile supply chain.

Like AI ostensibly empowers us as individuals, but in reality I think it's a disservice, and the ones it truly empowers are the tech giants, as citizens become dumber and even more dependent on them and tech giants amass more and more power.

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

#656

Post by Alifatisk »

She should try Perplexity.

I hope she is aware of the limited context window and ability to retrieve older tokens from conversations.

I have used llms for the exact same purpose she has, summerize chapters or whole books and find the source from e quote, both with success.

I think they key to a successful output lies in the way you prompt it.

Hallucinations should be expected though, as we all hopefully know, llms are more of a autocomplete than intelligence, we should stick to that mindset.

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

#657

Post by agentcoops »

I don't mean to be disparaging to the original author, but I genuinely think a good litmus test today for the calibre of a human researcher's intelligence is what they are able to get out of the current state of the art AI with all of its faults. Contrasting any of Terrance Tao's comments over the last year to the comments above are telling. Perhaps it seems unfair to contrast such a celebrated mathematician to a popular science author, but in fact one would a priori expect that AI ought to be less helpful for the most talented mind in a field. Yet we seem to find exactly the opposite: this cottage industry of "academics" who, now more than a year since LLMs entered popular consciousness, seem to do nothing but decry "AI hype" - while both everyday people and seemingly the most talented researchers continue to pursue what interests them at a higher level.

If I were to be cynical, I think we've seen over the last decade the descent of most of academia, humanities as much as natural sciences, to a rather poor state, drawing entirely on a self-contained loop of references without much use or interest. Especially in the natural sciences, one can today with little effort obtain an infinitely more insightful and, yes, accurate synthesis of the present state of a field from an LLM than 99% of popular science authors.

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

#658

Post by selfmodruntime »

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 the classic HN-like anti-anything bubble we see with Javascript frameworks. Hundreds of thousands of people are productive with them and enjoy them. They created entire industries and job fields. The same is happening with LLMs, but the usual counter-culture dev crowd is denying it while it's happening right before their eyes. I too use LLMs every day. I never click and a link and it doesn't exist. When I want to take my mind off of things, I just talk with GPT.

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

#659

Post by relaxing »

puppycodes wrote: post #494
relaxing wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You used the same search string and got a completely different answer?

That’s… weird. Definitely doesn’t inspire confidence.

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

#660

Post by josephwegner »

I become more and more convinced with each of these tweets/blogs/threads that using LLMs well is a skill set akin to using Search well.

It’s been a common mantra - at least in my bubble of technologists - that a good majority of the software engineering skill set is knowing how to search well. Knowing when search is the right tool, how to format a query, how to peruse the results and find the useful ones, what results indicate a bad query you should adjust… these all sort of become second nature the longer you’ve been using Search, but I also have noticed them as an obvious difference between people that are tech-adept vs not.

LLMs seems to have a very similar usability pattern. They’re not always the right tool, and are crippled by bad prompting. Even with good prompting, you need to know how to notice good results vs bad, how to cherry-pick and refine the useful bits, and have a sense for when to start over with a fresh prompt. And none of this is really _hard_ - just like Search, none of us need to go take a course on prompting - IMO folks jusr need to engage with LLMs as a non-perfect tool they are learning how to wield.

The fact that we have to learn a tool doesn’t make it a bad one. The fact that a tool doesn’t always get it 100% on the first try doesn’t make it useless. I strip a lot of screws with my screwdriver, but I don’t blame the screwdriver.

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