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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

#821

Post by hzhou321 »

One is a boss's view, looking for an AI to replace his employees someday. I think that is a dead end. It is just getting better to become a sophisticate, increasingly impressive but won't work.

One is the worker's view, looking at AI to be a powerful tool that can leverage one's productivity. I think that is looking promising.

I don't really care for the chat bot to give me accurate sources. I care about an AI that can provide likely places to look for sources and I'll build the tool chain to lookup and verify the sources.

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

#822

Post by iambateman »

crazygringo wrote: post #750
Hasu wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm NDA'ed on the specifics, sorry.

In general terms, we had to call the OpenAI API X00,000,000 times for a large-scale data processing task. We ended up with about 2,000,000 records in a database, using data created, classified, and cleaned by the AI.

There were multiple steps involved, so each individual record was the result of many round trips between the AI and the server, and not all calls are 1-to-1 with a record.

None of this is rocket science, and I think any average developer could pull off a similar task given enough time...but I was the only developer involved in the process.

The end product is being sold to companies who benefit from the data we produced, hence "value for me and the team."

The real point is that generative AI can, under the right circumstances, create absurd amounts of "productivity" that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

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

#823

Post by mentalgear »

Note that there is a different between being "bullish" (ie market that is upwards trending) vs "useful". I think there is general value with LLM for semantic search & information extraction, but not as an exclusive way to AGI that some the market expects for its overinflated valuation.

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

#824

Post by wormlord »

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…

Probably because the applications of the technology are things like automating calls for collections agencies:

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jo...

If we judge a technology by how it transforms our lives, LLMs and GenAI has mostly been a net negative (at least that is how it feels).

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

#825

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#826

Post by knowitnone »

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.

If it makes data up, then it is worthless for all implementations. I'd rather it said I don't have info on this question.

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

#827

Post by [deleted] »

topaz0 wrote: post #629
snitty wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks really over index when an LLM is very good for their use case. And most of the folks here are coders, at which they're already good and getting better. For some tasks they're still next to useless, and people who do those tasks understandably don't get the hype. Tell a lab biologist or chemist to use an LLM to help them with their work and they'll get very little useful out of it. Ask an attorney to use it and…

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.

[deleted]

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

#829

Post by mylastattempt »

GolDDranks wrote: post #375
GolDDranks wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so confused too. I hold these beliefs at the same time, and I don't feel they don't contradict each other, but apparently for many people some of these do: - LLMs are a miraculous technology that are capable of tasks far beyond what we believed would be achievable with AI/ML in the near future. Playing with them makes me constantly feel like "this is like sci-fi, this shouldn't be possible with 2025's technology…

I guess that Sabine's beef with LLM's that they are hyped as a legit "human level assistant" -kind of thing by the business people, which they clearly aren't yet. Maybe I've just managed to... manage my expectations?

That's on her then for fully believing what marketing and business execs are 'telling her' about LLMs. Does she get upset when she buys a coke around Christmas and her life doesn't become all warm and fuzzy with friendliness and cheer all around?

Seems like she's given a drill with a flathead, and just complains for months on end that it often fails (she didnt charge the drill) or gives her useless results (she uses philipheads). How about figuring out what works and what doesn't, and adjusting your use of the tool accordingly? If she is a painter, don't blame the drill for messing up her painting.

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

#830

Post by mmh0000 »

lostmsu wrote: post #334
sarchertech wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how language works.

That's precisely how language works in most cases, and there does not seem to be any reason to think it is different in this one. Although if you look at the trajectory of goalposts since https://web.archive.org/web/20140327014303/https://en.wikipe... , I could concede the point, that people discarded the obvious definition in the light of recent events.

Then Explain:

Firetruck — It's not a truck that is on fire nor is it a truck that delivers fire.

Butterfly — Not a fly made of butter.

Starfish — Not a fish, not a star.

Pineapple — Neither a pine nor an apple.

Guinea pig — A rodent, not a pig.

Koala bear — A marsupial, not a bear.

Silverfish — An insect, not a fish.

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