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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

#791

Post by vonneumannstan »

skywhopper wrote: post #664
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…

They can do fun and interesting stuff, but we keep hearing how they’re going to replace human workers, and too many people in positions of power not only believe they are capable of this, but are taking steps to replace people with LLMs. But while they are fun to play with, anything that requires a real answer, but can’t be directly and immediately checked, like customer support, scientific research, teaching, legal…

>I’m not sure how you can have played with LLMs so much and missed this. I hope you don’t trust what they say about recipes or how to handle legal problems or how to clean things or how to treat disease or any fact-checking whatsoever.

This is like a GPT3.5 level criticism. o1-pro is probably better at pure fact retrieval than most PhDs in any given field. I challenge you to try it.

In fact take the GPQA test yourself and see how you do then give the same questions to o1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.12022

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

#793

Post by vonneumannstan »

imtheopposite wrote: post #425
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…

What I find interesting is that my experience has been 100% the opposite. I’ve been using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for almost a year (well only the ChatGPT for a year since the rest are more recent.) I’ve been using them to help build circuits and write code. They are almost always wrong with circuit design, and create code that doesn’t work north of 80% of the time. My patience has dropped off to the point where…

>They are almost always wrong with circuit design, and create code that doesn’t work north of 80% of the time.

Sorry but this is a total skill issue lol. 80% code failure rate is just total nonsense. I don't think 1% of the code I've gotten from LLMs has failed to execute correctly.

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

#794

Post by senordevnyc »

threeseed wrote: post #360
senordevnyc wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always perplexing when people talk about LLMs as "it", as if there's only one model out there, and they're all equally accurate. FWIW, here's 4o writing a selection sort: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e60f66-aacc-800c-9e1d-303982f54d...

I don't understand the point of that share. There are likely thousands of implementations of selection sort on the internet and so being able to recreate one isn't impressive in the slightest. And all the models are identical in not being able to discern what is real or something it just made up.

Because, to be blunt, I think this is total bullshit if you're using a decent model:

"I've even caught it literally writing the wrong algorithm when asked to implement a specific and well known algorithm. For example, asking it "write a selection sort" and watching it write a bubble sort instead. No amount of re-prompts pushes it to the right algorithm in those cases either, instead it'll regenerate the same wrong algorithm over and over."

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

#795

Post by topaz0 »

brookst wrote: post #700
topaz0 wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it's worse than this. A good lab biologist/chemist will try to use it, understand that it's useless, and stop using it. A bad lab biologist/chemist will try to use it, think that it's useful, and then it will make them useless by giving them wrong information. So it's not just that people over-index when it is useful, they also over-index when it's actively harmful but they think it's useful.

You think good biologists never need to summarize work into digestible language, or fill out multiple huge, redundant grant applications with the same info, or reformat data, or check that a writeup accurate reflects data? I’m not a biologist (good or bad) but the scientists I know (who I think are good) often complain that most of the work is drudgery unrelated to the science they love.

Sure, lots of drudgery, but none of your examples are things that you could trust an LLM to do correctly when correctness counts. And correctness always counts in science.

Edit to add: and regardless, I'm less interested in the "LLM's aren't ever useful to science" part of the point. The point that actual LLM usage in science will mostly be for cases where they seem useful but actually introduce subtle problems is much more important. I have observed this happening with trainees.

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

#796

Post by sswatson »

nancyminusone wrote: post #784
brookst wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it says that people dislike liars. If you are known for making up things constantly, you might have a harder time gaining trust, even if you're right this time.

All of these things can be true at the same time:

1. LLMs have been massively overhyped, including by some of the major players.

2. LLMs have significant problems and limitations.

3. LLMs can do some incredibly impressive things and can be profoundly useful for some applications.

I would go so far as to say that #2 and #3 are hardly even debatable at this point. Everyone acknowledges #2, and the only people I see denying #3 are people who either haven't investigated or are so annoyed by #1 that they're willing to sacrifice their credibility as an intellectually honest observer.

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

#797

Post by ttul »

Think about the early days of digital photography. When digital cameras first emerged, expert critics from the photograph field were quick to point out issues like low resolution, significant noise, and poor color reproduction—imperfections that many felt made them inferior to film. Yet, those early digital cameras represented a breakthrough: they enabled immediate image review, easy sharing, and rapid technological improvements that soon eclipsed film in many areas. Just as people eventually recognized that the early “flaws” of digital photography were a natural part of a revolutionary leap forward, so too should we view the occasional hallucinations in modern LLMs as a byproduct of rapidly evolving technology rather than a fundamental flaw.

Or how about computer graphics? Early efforts to move 3D graphics hardware into the PC realm were met with extreme skepticism by my colleagues who were “computer graphics researchers” armed with the latest Silicon Graphics hardware. One researcher I was doing some work with in the mid-nineties remarked about PC graphics at the time: “It doesn’t even have a frame buffer. Look how terrible the refresh rate is. It flickers in a nauseating way.” Etc.

It’s interesting how people who are actual experts in a field where there is a major disruption going on often take a negative view of the remarkable new innovation simply because it isn’t perfect yet. One day, they all end up eating their words. I don’t think it’s any different with LLMs. The progress is nothing short of astonishing, yet very smart people continue to complain about this one issue of hallucination as if it’s the “missing framebuffer” of 1990s PC graphics…

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

#798

Post by player1234 »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #746
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…

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.

How did you measure and compare googling/stack overflow to coding with an LLM? How did you get to the very impressive number ten billion times better?! Can you share your methodology? How have you defined better?

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

#799

Post by danjl »

People are bullish because, despite your rant about quality, even you still use it every day:

> I use GPT, Grok, Gemini, Mistral etc every day in the hope they'll save me time searching for information and summarizing it.

Even worse, you're continually waiting for it to get better. If the present is bright and the future is brighter, bullishness is justified.

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

#800

Post by elorant »

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 like LLMs for what they are. Classifiers. I don’t trust them as search engines because of hallucinations. I use them to get a bearing on a subject but then I’ll turn to Google to do the real research.
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