I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs • Hacker News Board

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

#741

Post by thisissomething » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

taberiand wrote: post #108

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are almost perfect for this. It's generally faster than me looking up syntax/documentation, when it's wrong it's easy to tell and correct. Exactly this. I once had a function that would generate several .csv reports. I wanted these reports to then be uploaded to s3://my_bucket/reports/{timestamp}/ .csv I asked ChatGPT "Write a function that moves all .csv files in the current directory to and old_reports direc…

I have been saying this about llms for a while - if you know what you want, how to ask for it, and what the correct output will look like, LLMs are fantastic (at least Claude Sonnet is). And I mean that seriously, they are a highly effective tool for productive development for senior developers. I use it to produce whole classes, large sql queries, terraform scripts, etc etc. I then look over that output, iterate on…

"How to ask for it" is the most important part. As soon as you realize that you have to provide the AI with CONTEXT and clear instructions (you know, like a top-notch story card on a scrum board), the quality and assertiveness of the results increase a LOT.

Yes, it WON'T produce senior-level code for complex tasks, but it's great at tackling down junior to mid-level code generation/refactoring, with minor adjustments (just like a code review).

So, it's basically the same thing as having a freelancer jr dev at your disposal, but it can generate working code in 5 min instead of 5 hours.

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

#742

Post by w0m » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

Thlom wrote: post #669

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"an old poorly implemented model can't do item X well therefore the technology is garbage"

Likely the most accurate measure of progress would be watching detractors goalposts move over time.

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

#743

Post by cratermoon » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

alabastervlog wrote: post #473

cratermoon wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were impressed by Eliza in 1964.

I’m reminded of how I always think current cutting edge good examples of CG in movies looks so real and then, consistently, when I watch it again in 10 years it always looks distractingly shitty.

I honestly believe GP comment demonstrates a level of gullibility that AI hypesters are exploiting. Generative LLMs are text[1] generators, statistical machines extruding plausible text. To the extent that it a human believes it to be credible, the output exhibits all the hallmarks of a confidence game. Once you know the trick, after Toto pulls back the curtain[2], its not all that impressive.

1. I'm aware that LLMs can generate images and video as well. The point applies.

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR64EF3OpA

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

#744

Post by dkjaudyeqooe » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #740

To each is own. I give o3 with deep research my notes and ask it for a high-level design document, then feed that to claude and get a skeleton of a multi-service system, then build out functionality in each service with subsequent claude requests. 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 do…

AI sludge in, AI sludge out.

It's just another version of someone who is relativity incompetent but can produce something vaguely convincing.

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

#745

Post by rzwitserloot » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

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.

It mostly says that one of the seriously difficult challenges with LLMs is a meta-challenge:

* LLMs are dangerously useless for certain domains.

* ... but can be quite useful for others.

* The real problem is: They make it real tricky to tell, because most of all they are trained to sound professional and authoritative. They hallucinate papers because that's what authoritative answers look like.

That already means I think LLMs are far less useful than they appear to be. It doesn't matter how amazing a technology is: If it has failure modes and it is very difficult to know what they are, it's dangerous technology no matter how awesome it is when it is working well. It's far simpler to deal with tech that has failure modes but you know about them / once things start failing it's easy to notice.

Add to it the incessant hype, and, oh boy. I am not at all surprised that LLMs have a ridiculously wide range as to detractors/supporters. Supporters of it hype the everloving fuck out of it, and that hype can easily seem justified due to how LLMs can produce conversational, authoritative sounding answers that are explicitly designed to make your human brain go: Wow, this is a great answer!

... but experts read it and can see the problems there. Which lots of tech suffers from: as a random example: Plenty of highly upvoted apparently fantastically written Stack Overflow answers have problems. For example, it's a great answer... for 10 years ago; it is a bad idea today because the answer has been obsoleted.

But between the fact that it's overhyped and particularly complex to determine an LLM answer is hallucinated drivel, it's logical to me that experts are hyperbolic when highlighting the problems. That's a natural reaction when you have a thing that SEEMS amazing but actually isn't.

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

#746

Post by whamlastxmas » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

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…

I’m sorry but the experience of coding with an LLM is about ten billion times better than googling and stack overflowing every single problem I come across. I’ve stack overflowed maybe like two things in the past half year and I’m so glad to not have to routinely use what is now a very broken search engine and web ecosystem.

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

#747

Post by HSO » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

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…

I´m in the same boat and I think it boils down to this: some people are actually quite passive, while others are more active in their use of technology.

It`d take more time for me to flesh this out than I want to give but the basic idea is I am not just sitting there "expecting things". I´ve been puzzled too at why so many people don´t seem to get it or are so frustrated like this lady, and in my observation this is their common element. It just looks very passive to me, the way they seem to use the machines and expect a result to be "given" to them.

PS. It reminds me very strongly of how our parent generation uses computers. Like the whole way of thinking is different, I cannot even understand why they would act certain ways or be afraid of acting in other ways, it´s like they use a different compass or have a very different (and wrong) model in their head of how this thing in front of them works.

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

#748

Post by scryers_bloom » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #317

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 really depends on the task. Like Sabine, I’m operating on the very frontier of a scientific domain that is extremely niche. Every single LLM out there is worse than useless in this domain. It spits out incomprehensible garbage. But ask it to solve some leet code and it’s brilliant.

The question I ask afterwords then is: is solving some leet code brilliant? Is designing a simple inventory system brilliant if they've all been accomplished already? My answer tends towards no, since they still make mistakes in the process, and it harms newer developers from learning.

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

#749

Post by KoolKat23 » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

Thlom wrote: post #669

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is more a lack of understanding of it's limitations, it'd be different if they asked for it to write a python script to collate the data.

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

#750

Post by crazygringo » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

Hasu wrote: post #723

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.

Yeah I'm curious now.

If you have a lot of GPU's and you're doing massive text processing like spam detection for hundreds of thousands of users, sure.

But "as a single developer", "value for me and my team"... I'm confused.