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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

#671

Post by weego »

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 talks to me like a person"

Because it has a sample size of our collective human knowledge and language big enough to trick our brains into believing that.

As a parallel thought, it reminds of a trick derren brown did. He picked every horse correctly across 6 races. The person who he was picking for was obviously stunned, as were the audience watching it.

The reality of course is just that people couldn't comprehend that he just had to go to extreme and tedious lengths to make this happen. They started with 7000 people and filmed every one like it was going to be the "one" and then the probability pyramid just dropped people out. It was such a vast undertaking of time and effort that we're biased towards believing there must be something really happening here.

LLMs currently are a natural language interface to a Microsoft Encarta like system that is so unbelievably detailed and all encompassing that we risk accepting that there's something more going on there. There isn't.

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

#672

Post by agentcoops »

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…

The whole point is that an LLM is not a search engine and obviously anyone who treats it as one is going to be unsatisfied. It's just not a sensible comparison. You should compare working with an LLM to working with an old "state of the art" language tool like Python NLTK -- or, indeed, specifying a problem in Python versus specifying it in the form of a prompt -- to understand the unbridgeable gap between what we have today and what seemed to be the best even a few years ago. I understand when a popular science author or my relatives haven't understood this several years after mass access to LLMs, but I admit to being surprised when software developers have not.

Hosted and free or subscription-based DeepResearch like tools that integrate LLMs with search functionality (the whole domain of "RAG" or "Retrieval Augmented Generation") will be elementary for a long time yet simply because the cost of the average query starts to go up exponentially and there isn't that much money in it yet. Many people have and will continue to build their own research tools where they can determine how much compute time and API access cost they're willing to spend on a given query. OCR remains a hard problem, let alone appropriately chunking potentially hundreds of long documents into context length and synthesizing the outputs of potentially thousands of LLM outputs into a single response.

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

#673

Post by hannofcart »

Cloudef wrote: post #600

In general LLMs have made many areas worse. Now you see people writing content using LLMs without understanding the content itself, it becomes really annoying especially if you don't know this and ask the question "did you perhaps write this using LLM" and get the "yes" answer. In programming circles it's also annoying when you try to help and you get fed garbage outputted by LLMs. I belive models for generating visu…

The equivalent trope of this as recent as 5 years back would have been the lazy junior engineer copying code from Stackoverflow without fully grokking it.

I feel humans should be held to account for the work they produce irrespective of the tools they used to produce it.

The junior engineer who copied code he didn't understand from Stackoverflow should face the consequences as much as the engineer who used LLM generated code without understanding it.

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

#674

Post by timcobb »

weego wrote: post #671
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 talks to me like a person" Because it has a sample size of our collective human knowledge and language big enough to trick our brains into believing that. As a parallel thought, it reminds of a trick derren brown did. He picked every horse correctly across 6 races. The person who he was picking for was obviously stunned, as were the audience watching it. The reality of course is just that people couldn't comprehe…

> Because it has a sample size of our collective human knowledge and language big enough to trick our brains into believing that.

Yes, it's artificial intelligence. It's not the real thing, it's artificial.

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

#675

Post by 9rx »

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…

> And people just sit around, unimpressed, and complain that ... what ... it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly?

The trouble is that, while incredibly amazing, mind blowing technology, it falls down flat often enough that it is a big gamble to use. It is never clear, at least to me, what it is good at and what it isn't good at. Many things I assume it will struggle with, it jumps in with ease, and vice versa.

As the failures mount, I admittedly do find it becoming harder and harder to compel myself to see if it will work for my next task. It very well might succeed, but by the time I go to all the trouble to find out it often feels that I may as well just do it the old fashioned way.

If I'm not alone, that could be a big challenge in seeing long-term commercial success. Especially given that commercial success for LLMs is currently defined as 'take over the world' and not 'sustain mom and pop'.

> the speed at which it is progressing is insane.

But same goes for the users! As a result the failure rate appears to be closer to a constant. Until we reach the end of human achievement, where the humans can no longer think of new ways to use LLMs, that is unlikely to change.

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

#676

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #661
gloosx wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#677

Post by ashoeafoot »

MichaelRo wrote: post #441
Animats wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

>> We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along? Heh. Easiest answer in the world. To be able to say "don't know", one has first to be able to "know". And we ain't there yet, by large. Not even flying by a million miles of it.

Needs meta annotation of certainty on all nodes and tokkens that accumulates while reasoning . Also gives the ability to train in believes, as in overriding any uncertainty. Right now we are in the pure believes phase.AI is its own god right now, pure blissful believe without the sin of doubt.

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

#678

Post by cainxinth »

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…

Broader than that, it’s critical thinking skills. Using search and LLMs requires analyzing the results and being able to separate what is accurate and useful from what isn’t.

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

#679

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

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…

Obligatory Louis CK everything is amazing and no one is happy bit goes here:

https://youtu.be/aGnMbKwP36U?si=WbXzphhhP8Hak1OQ

It’s a human nature thing - we’re supposed to be collecting nuts in the forest.

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