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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

#721

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#722

Post by ElectronCharge »

stetrain wrote: post #715
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 be…

Yes. One of my early observations about LLMs was that we've now produced software that regularly lies to us. It seems to be a quite intractable problem. Also, since there's no real visibility as to how an LLM reaches a conclusion, there's no way to validate anything.

One takeaway from this is that labelling LLMs as "intelligent" is a total misnomer. They're more like super parrots.

For software development, there's also the problem of how up to date they are. If they could learn on the fly (or be constantly updated) that would help.

They are amazing in some ways, but they've been over-hyped tremendously.

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

#723

Post by Hasu »

iambateman wrote: post #300

I think people confuse the power of the technology with the very real bubble we’re living in. There’s no question that we’re in a bubble which will eventually subside, probably in a “dot com” bust kind of way. But let me tell you…last month I sent several hundred million requests to AI, as a single developer, and got exactly what I needed. Three things are happening at once in this industry… (1) executives are over p…

> But let me tell you…last month I sent several hundred million requests to AI, as a single developer, and got exactly what I needed

There are 2.6 million seconds in a month. You are claiming to have sent hundreds of requests per second to AI.

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

#724

Post by rsynnott »

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.

> Asking the LLM for relevant case law and checking it up - productive use of LLM.

Only if you're okay with it missing stuff. If I hired a lawyer, and they used a magic robot rather than doing proper research, and thus missed relevant information, and this later came to light, I'd be going after them for malpractice, tbh.

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

#725

Post by re-thc »

lnenad wrote: post #699
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…

Sure, a vacuum cleaner is the same. > If we're talking about LLMs, I still haven't been able to have a real conversation with 1. There's too much of a lag to feel like a conversation and often doesn't reply with anything related. I don't believe this one bit. But keep on trucking.

> Sure, a vacuum cleaner is the same.

> I don't believe this one bit. But keep on trucking.

You sure? Isn't that contradictory? It can't be the same if you don't believe it...

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

#726

Post by svrtknst »

brookst wrote: post #684
Thlom wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that says… what? The entire LLM technology is worthless for all applications, from all implementations? A company I worked for spent millions on a customer service solution that never worked. I wouldn’t say that contracted software is useless.

You, and the OP, are being unfair in your replies. Obviously, it's not worthless for all applications but when LLMs obviously fail in disastrous ways in some important areas, you can't refute that by going "actually it gives me codign advice and generates images".

Thats nice and impressive, but there are still important issues and shortcomings. Obligatory, semirelated xkcd: https://xkcd.com/937/

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

#727

Post by mdp2021 »

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.

What you have done there is to discount statements that may build up a narrative - and still may remain fair... On which basis? Possibly they do not match your own narrative?

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

#728

Post by toonalfrink »

She's a physicist. LLMs are not for creating new information. They're for efficiently delivering established information. I use it to quickly inform me about business decisions all the time, because a thousand answers about those questions already exist. She's just using it for the wrong thing.

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

#729

Post by oefrha »

etchalon wrote: post #207

I have such a hard time getting a read on Sabine Hossenfelder. I wish I was a physicist so I knew if she was full of shit

As a former theoretical high energy physicist (who believe the field does have problems): yes, and there’s no colleague of mine that I know of who gives a shit about what she says. She’s just a YouTuber to us. As a general rule of thumb, you can assume any “celebrity” “scientist” constantly feuding in public is full of shit.

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

#730

Post by dvhh »

As far as I understand LLM what is being asked is unfortunately close to impossible with LLM.

Also I find it disingenuous that apologists are stating thing close to "you are using it wrong". Where it is advertised that LLM based AI should be more and more trusted (because more accurate, based on some arbitrary metrics) and might save some time ( on some undescribed task).

Of course in that use case most would say to use your judgement to verify whatever is generated, but for the generation that is using AI LLM as a source of knowledge ( like some people are using Wikipedia as source of truth, or stack overflow) it will be difficult to verify, when all they knew is LLM generated content as source of knowledge.

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