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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

#711

Post by Lendal »

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 speed at which anything progresses is impressive if you're not paying attention while other people toil away on it for decades, until one day you finally look up and say, "Wow, the speed at which this thing progressed is insane!"

I remember seeing an AI lab in the late 1980's and thinking "that's never going to work" but here we are, 40 years later. It's finally working.

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

#712

Post by mdp2021 »

jibal wrote: post #640
re-thc wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The comment about parrots and dogs is made in bad faith

Not necessarily. (Some aphonic, adactyl downvoters seem to have possibly tried to nudge you into noticing that your idea above is against some entailed spirit the guidelines.)

The poster may have meant that for the use natural to him, he feels in the results the same utility of discussing with a good animal. "Clarifying one's prompts" may be effective in some cases, but it's probably not what others seek. It is possible that many want the good old combination of "informative" and "insightful": in practice there may be issues with both.

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

#713

Post by theshackleford »

01100011 wrote: post #123
meowface wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of software developers have an initial bad experience and assume it's terrible and give up on it. I feel bad for people who haven't yet experienced how useful these models are for programming. Some also just prefer manually entering everything. Those people I will never understand.

how much time do I need to devote to see anything but garbage? For reference, I program systems code in C/C++ in a large, proprietary codebase. My experiences with OpenAI(a year ago or more), and more recently, Cursor, Grok-v3 and Deepseek-r1, were all failures. The later two started out OK and got worse over time. What I haven't done is asked "AI" to whip up a more standard application. I have some ideas(an ncurses…

> Most of my job is thinking about what the solution should be, talking to other people like me in meetings, understanding what customers really want beyond what they are saying, and tracking what I'm doing in various forms

None of this is particularly unique to software engineering. So if someone can already do this and add the missing component with some future LLM why shouldn’t they think they can become a software engineer?

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

#714

Post by dsr_ »

chimprich wrote: post #647
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? I presume you are referring to this Google engineer, who was sacked for making the claim. Hardly an example of AI companies overhyping the tech; precisely the opposite, in fact. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326 It seems to be a common human hallucination to imagine that large or…

There is no difference between an organization and a conspiracy. Organizing to do something is the same as conspiring to do something.

That leaves the question of whether the organization is commensal, symbiotic or predatory towards any given "us".

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

#715

Post by stetrain »

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 main issue is that if you ask most LLMs to do something they aren't good at, they don't say "Sorry, I'm not sure how to do that yet," they says "Sure, absolutely! Here you go:" and proceed to make things up, provide numbers or code that don't actually add up, and make up references and sources.

To someone who doesn't actually check or have the knowledge or experience to check the output, it sounds like they've been given a real, useful answer.

When you tell the LLM that the API it tried to call doesn't exist it says "Oh, you're right, sorry about that! Here's a corrected version that should work!" and of course that one probably doesn't work either.

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

#716

Post by hatefulmoron »

brookst wrote: post #688
hatefulmoron wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. He's pointing out what the atmosphere was/is around LLMs in these discussions, and how that impacts stories like with Lemoine. I mean, you're right that he's silly and Google didn't want to be part of it, but it was (and is?) taken seriously that: LLMs are nascent AGI, companies are pouring money to get there first, we might be a year or two away. Take these as true, it's at least po…

Sure, but does any of that support the claim that LLMs were marketed as superintelligence?

Which comment claimed that LLMs were marketed as super-intelligence? I'm looking up the chain and I can't see it.

I don't think they were, but I think it's pretty clear they were marketed as being the imminent path to super-intelligence, or something like it. OpenAI were saying GPT-(n-1) is as intelligent as a high school student, GPT-(n) is a university student, GPT-(n+1) will be.. something.

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

#717

Post by Extasia785 »

geuis wrote: post #342
maple3142 wrote: post #171

I think many people are just not really good at dealing with "imperfect" tools. Different tools can have different success probability, let's call that probability p here. People typically use tool that have p=100%, or at least very close to it. But LLM is a tool that is far from that, so making use of it takes different approach. Imagine there is an probabilistic oracle that can answer any question with a yes/no wit…

A scientific instrument that is unreliably accurate is useless. Imagine a kitchen scale that always gave +/- 50% every 3rd time you use it. Or maybe 5th time. Or 2nd. So we're trying to use tools like this currently to help solve deeper problems and they aren't up to the task. This is still the point we need to start over and get better tools. Sharpening a bronze knife will never be as sharp or have the continuity as…

A bad analogy doesn't make a good argument. The best analogy for LLMs is probably a librarian on LSD in a giant library. They will point you in a direction if you have a question. Sometimes they will pull up the exact page you need, sometimes they will lead you somewhere completely wrong and confidently hand you a fantasy novel, trying to convince you it's a real science book.

It's completely up to your ability to both find what you need without them and verify the information they give you to evaluate their usefulness. If you put that on a matrix, this makes them useful in the quadrant of information that is both hard to find, but very easy to verify. Which at least in my daily work is a reasonable amount.

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

#718

Post by Yizahi »

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…

There are basically 3 categories of LLM users (very roughly).

1. People creating or dealing with imprecise information. People doing SEO spam, people dealing with SEO spam, almost all creative arts people, people writing corporatese- or legalese- documents or mails, etc. For these tasks LLMs are god-like.

2. People dealing with precise information and or facts. For these people LLMs is no better than a parrot.

3. Subset of 2 - programmers. Because of the huge amount of stolen training data, plus almost perfect proofing software is the form of compilers, static analyzers etc. for this case LLMs are more or less usable, the more data was used the better (JS is the best as I understand).

This is why people's reaction is so polarizing. Their results differ.

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

#719

Post by ehutch79 »

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…

Because we're being told it is a perfect super intellegence, that it is going to replace senior engineers. The hype cycle is real, and worse than blockchain ever was. I'm sure llms will be able to code a full enterprise app about the same time moon coin replaces $usd.

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

#720

Post by naasking »

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

Hossenfelder is a scientist. There's a certain level of rigour that she needs to do her job, which is where current LLMs often fall down. Arguably it's not accelerating her work to have to check every single thing the LLM says.

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