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

#801

Post by nemothekid » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #472

nemothekid wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who doesn't understand this either isn't required to use to utility it provides or has no idea how to prompt it correctly. Almost every counter-criticism of LLMs almost boil down to 1. you're holding it wrong 2. Well, I use it $DAYJOB and it works great for me! (And $DAYJOB is software engineering). I'm glad your wife was able to save 2 hours of work, but forgive me if that doesn't translate to the trillion…

Boiling down to a couple cases would be more useful if you actually tried to disprove those cases or explain why they're not good enough. > It's strange you don't see the inherent irony in your post. Instead of your wife just directly uploading the dataset and a prompt, she first has to prompt it to write code. There are clear limitations and it looks like LLMs are stuck at some sort of wall. What's ironic about that…

>Boiling down to a couple cases would be more useful if you actually tried to disprove those cases or explain why they're not good enough.

This reply is 4 comments deep into such cases, and the OP is about a well educated person who describes their difficulties.

>What's ironic about that? That's such a tiny imperfection.

I'd argue it's not tiny - it highlights the limitations of LLMs. LLMs excel at writing basic code but seem to struggle, or are untrustworthy, outside of those tasks.

Imagine generalizing his case: his wife goes to work and tells other bookkeepers "ChatGPClaudeSeek is amazing, it saved 2 hours for me". A coworker, married to a lawyer, instead of a software engineer, hearing this tries it for himself, and comes up short. Returning to work the next day and talking about his experience is told - "oh you weren't holding it right, ChatGPClaudeSeek can't do the work for you, you have to ask it to write code, that you must then run". Turns out he needs an expert to hold it properly and from the coworker's point of view he would probably need to hire an expert to help automate the task, which will likely only be marginally less expensive than it was 5 years ago.

From where I stand, things don't look amazing; at least as amazing as the fundraisers have claimed. I agree that LLMs are awesome tools - but I'm evaluating from a point of a potential future where OpenAI is worth a trillion dollars and is replacing every job. You call it a tiny imperfection, but that comes across as myopic to me - large swaths of industries can't effectively use LLMs! How is that tiny?

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

#802

Post by Fin_Code » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

LLM interactions are more a reflection on the user than a objective technology. I'm starting to believe that people that think that LLM's are terrible are sub optimal communicators. Because their input is bad the output is.

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

#803

Post by throwawaymaths » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

agentcoops wrote: post #672

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…

The whole point is that an LLM is not a search engine and obviously anyone who treats it as one is going to be unsatisfied. It's just not a sensible comparison. You should compare working with an LLM to working with an old "state of the art" language tool like Python NLTK -- or, indeed, specifying a problem in Python versus specifying it in the form of a prompt -- to understand the unbridgeable gap between what we ha…

to be fair a few? one? years ago LLMs were touted? marketed? as a "search killer", and a lot of people do use it in that fashion.

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

#804

Post by chimprich » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

MindBeams wrote: post #739

chimprich wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Corporations are motivated by profit, not doing what's best for humanity. If you need an example of "large organizations conspiring against us," I can give you twenty.

I agree that sometimes organisations conspire against people. My point was, in case it wasn't apparent, the irony that somenameforme was talking about how LLMs were of little use because they hallucinate, whilst apparently hallucinating a conspiracy by AI companies to overhype the technology.

I wasn't making a political point. You see similar evidence-free allegations against international organisations and national government bodies.

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

#805

Post by giraffe_lady » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

cainxinth wrote: post #678

josephwegner wrote: post #660

I become more and more convinced with each of these tweets/blogs/threads that using LLMs well is a skill set akin to using Search well. It’s been a common mantra - at least in my bubble of technologists - that a good majority of the software engineering skill set is knowing how to search well. Knowing when search is the right tool, how to format a query, how to peruse the results and find the useful ones, what result…

Broader than that, it’s critical thinking skills. Using search and LLMs requires analyzing the results and being able to separate what is accurate and useful from what isn’t.

From my experience this is less an application of critical skills and more a domain knowledge check. If you know enough about the subject to have accumulated heuristics for correctness and intuition for "lgtm" in the specific context, then it's not very difficult or intellectually demanding to apply them.

If you don't have that experience in this domain, you will spend approximately as much effort validating output as you would have creating it yourself, but the process is less demanding of your critical skills.

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

#806

Post by blactuary » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #682

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…

"They continue to fabricate links, references, and quotes, like they did from day one." - "I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error." Why have these companies not manually engineered out a problem like this by now? Just do a check to make sure links are real. That's pretty unimpressive to me. There are no fabricated links, references, or quotes, in OpenAI's GPT…

How do people in the future become domain experts capable of properly making use of it if they are not the analyst spending two weeks on the write-up today?

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

#807

Post by sitkack » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #667

josephwegner wrote: post #660

I become more and more convinced with each of these tweets/blogs/threads that using LLMs well is a skill set akin to using Search well. It’s been a common mantra - at least in my bubble of technologists - that a good majority of the software engineering skill set is knowing how to search well. Knowing when search is the right tool, how to format a query, how to peruse the results and find the useful ones, what result…

Agree. It's a tool like anything else. On a side note, this lady is a fraud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJjPH3TQif0&themeRefresh=1

I don't know if she is a fraud, but she has definitely greatly amplified Rage Bait Farming and talking about things that are far outside of her domain of expertise as if she were an expert.

In no way am I credentialing her, lots of people can make astute observations about things they weren't trained in, but she both mastered sounding authoritative and at the same time, presenting things to go the most engagement possible.

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

#808

Post by blactuary » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

The search ecosystem is broken now because google is focused on LLMs

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

#809

Post by Zak » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

Some web development advice I remember from long ago is to do most of the styling after the functionality is implemented. If it looks done, people will think it is done.

LLMs did the "styling" first. They generate high-quality language output of the sort most of us would take as a sign of high intelligence and education in a human. A human who can write well can probably reason well, and probably even has some knowledge of facts they write confidently about.

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

#810

Post by redeeman » Fri, Mar 28, 2025, 2:50 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…

> it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly?

it isnt ANY form of intelligence.