731–740 of 1001 posts
They are impressive for what they are… but do you know what they are? I do, and that’s why I’m not that hyped about them.
If there's one common thread across LLM criticisms, it's that they're not perfect. These critics don't seem to have learned the lesson that the perfect is the enemy of the good . I use ChatGPT all the time for academic research. Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time. But has it pointed me to important research papers I might never have found otherwise? Absolutely . The rate of inac…
> Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time And you don't have concerns about that? What kind of damage is that doing to our society, long term, if we have a system that _everyone_ uses and it's just accepted that a third of the time it is just making shit up?
Could it end up being a net benefit? will the realistic sounding but incorrect facts generated by A.I. make people engage with arguments more critically, and be less likely to believe random statements they're given?
Now, I don't know, or even think it is likely that this will happen, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
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Yeah, it won't do your taxes for you, but it can sure help you do them yourself. Probably won't put you out of your job either, but it might help you accomplish more. Of course, one result of people accomplishing more in less time is that you need fewer people to do the same amount of work - so some jobs could be lost. But it's also possible that for the most part instead, more will be accomplished overall.
If it had access to my books, a current-gen frontier LLM most certainly could do my taxes. I don't understand that entire line of reasoning.
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…
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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.
A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pattern:
1. Someone gets an idea, like feeding papers into an LLM, and asks it to do something beyond its scope and proper use-case.
2. The LLM, predictably, fails.
3. Users declare not that they misused the tool, but that the tool itself is fundamentally corrupted.
It in my mind is no different to the steam roller being invented, and people remaking how well it flattens asphalt. Then a vocal group trying to use this flattening device to iron clothing in bulk, and declaring steamrollers useless when it fails at this task.
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…
If you ask it random things the output looks amazing, yes. At least at first glance. That's what they do. It's indeed magical, a true marvel that should make you go: Woooow, this is amazing tech: Coming across as convincing, even if based on hallucinations, is in itself a neat trick!
But is it actually useful? The things they come up with are untrustworthy and on the whole far less good than previously available systems. In many ways, insidiously worse: It's much harder to identify bad information than it was before.
It's almost like we designed a system to pass turing tests with flying colours but forgetting that usefulness is what we actually wanted, not authoritative, human sounding bullshit.
I don't think the LLM naysayers are 'unimpressed', or that they demand perfection. I think they are trying to make statements aimed at balancing things:
Both the LLMs themselves, and the humans parroting the hype, are severely overstating the quality of what such systems produce. Hence, and this is a natural phenomenon you can observe in all walks of life, the more skeptical folks tend to swing the pendulum the other way, and thus it may come across to you as them being overly skeptical instead.
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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…
Sure, it does middle-of-the-road stuff, but it comments the code well, I can manually tweak things at the various levels of granularity to guide it along, and the design doc is on par something a senior principal would produce.
I do in a week what a team of four would take a month and a half to do. It's insane.
Sure, don't be bullish. I'm frantically piecing together enough hardware to run a decent sized LLM at home.