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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

#661

Post by TeMPOraL »

gloosx wrote: post #545
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…

The problem Sabine tries to communicate is that reality is different from what the cash-heads behind main commercial models are trying to portray. They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition, when in reality, they’ve just optimised prediction algorithms on an unprecedented scale. They are trying to say that they created Intelligence, which is the ability to acquire and apply knowled…

I hate to bring an ad hominem into this, but Sabine is a YouTube influencer now. That's her current career. So I'd assume this Tweet storm is also pushing a narrative on its own, because that's part of doing the work she chose to do to earn a living.

Pinch of salt & all.

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

#662

Post by nulbyte »

nottorp wrote: post #585
noufalibrahim wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much as i agree with the point about overhyping from companies, I'd be more sympathetic to this point of view if she acknowledged the merits of the technology. Yes, it hallucinates and if you replace your brain with one of these things, you won't last too long. However, it can do things which, in the hands of someone experienced, are very empowering. And it doesn't take an expert to see the potential. As it stands, i…

If it works for you... I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines, but that's because search has been entshittified more than because a LLM is better. However 90% of the marketing material about them is simply disgusting. The bigwigs sound like they're spreading a new religion, and most enthusiasts sound like they're new converts to some sect. I…

> I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines...

The problem for me is that I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone. Non-niche problems are usually already solved.

Like search. Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. I have no such problems with my SearxNG instance.

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

#663

Post by agentcoops »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #639
emsign wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

Yes, I find the biggest issue in discussing the present state of AI with people outside the field, whether technical or not, is that "machine learning" had only just entered popular understanding: i.e. everyone seems ready today to talk about the limits of training a machine learning model on X limited data set, unable to extrapolate beyond it. The difference between "learning the best binary classifier on a labelled training set" and "exploring the set of all possible programs representable by a deep neural network of whatever architecture to find that which best generates all digitally recorded traces of human beings throughout history" is very far from intuitive to even specialists. I think Ilya's old public discussions of this question are the most insightful for a popular audience, explaining how and why a world model and not simply a Markov chain is necessary to solve the seemingly trivial problem of "predicting the next word in a sequence."

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

#664

Post by skywhopper »

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…

They can do fun and interesting stuff, but we keep hearing how they’re going to replace human workers, and too many people in positions of power not only believe they are capable of this, but are taking steps to replace people with LLMs.

But while they are fun to play with, anything that requires a real answer, but can’t be directly and immediately checked, like customer support, scientific research, teaching, legal advice, identifying humans, correctly summarizing text - LLMs are very bad at these things, make up answers, mix contexts inappropriately, and more.

I’m not sure how you can have played with LLMs so much and missed this. I hope you don’t trust what they say about recipes or how to handle legal problems or how to clean things or how to treat disease or any fact-checking whatsoever.

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

#665

Post by jhbadger »

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…

Yeah, like I. I. Rabi said in regard to people no longer being amazed by the achievements of physics, "What more do you want, mermaids?"

Anyone who remembers further back than a decade or so remembers when the height of AI research was chess programs that could beat grandmasters. Yes, LLMs aren't C3PO or the like, but they are certainly more like that than anything we could imagine just a few years ago.

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

#666

Post by hansmayer »

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…

Right on the money. Plus vacuum cleaners are actually useful and predictable in their inputs and outputs :)

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

#667

Post by mexicocitinluez »

josephwegner wrote: post #660

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 result…

Agree. It's a tool like anything else.

On a side note, this lady is a fraud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJjPH3TQif0&themeRefresh=1

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

#668

Post by hansmayer »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #567
NoGravitas wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently see news stories where attorneys get in trouble for using LLMs, because they cite hallucinated case law (e.g.). If they didn't get caught, that would look the same as using them "productively".

Asking the LLM for relevant case law and checking it up - productive use of LLM. Asking the LLM to write your argument for you and not checking it up - unproductive use of LLM. It's the same as with programming.

Surely this was meant ironically, right? You must've heard of at least one of the many cases involving lawyers doing precisely what you described and ending up presenting made up legal cases in court. Guess how that worked out for them.

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

#669

Post by Thlom »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #646
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…

The technology is not just less than superintelligence, for many applications it is less than prior forms of intelligence like traditional search and Stack Exchange, which were easily accessible 3 years ago and are in the process of being displaced by LLMs. I find that outcome unimpressive. And this Tweeter's complaints do not sound like a demand for superintelligence. They sound like a demand for something far more…

A municipality in Norway used LLM to create a report about the school structure in the municipality (how many schools are there, how many should there be, where should they be, how big should they be, pros and cons of different size schools and classes etc etc). Turns out the LLM invented scientific papers to use as references and the whole report is complete and utter garbage based on hallucinations.

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

#670

Post by tiahura »

snitty wrote: post #286
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…

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…

This attorney uses it all day every day.
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