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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

#831

Post by rurp »

MostlyStable wrote: post #4

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

I think this points to much of the disagreement over LLMs. They can be great at one-off scripts and other similar tasks like prototypes. Some folks who do a lot of that kind of work find the tools genuinely amazing. Other software engineers do almost none of that and instead spend their coding time immersed in large messy code bases, with convoluted business logic. Looping an LLM into that kind of work can easily be net negative.

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

#832

Post by anamexis »

knowitnone wrote: post #826
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.

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.

It only makes it worthless for implementations where you require data. There's a universe of LLM use cases that aren't asking ChatGPT to write a report or using it as a Google replacement.

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

#833

Post by fire_lake »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #815

WORD OF ADVICE FOR LLM BEARS!! If you have tried to use LLMs and find them useless or without value, you should seriously consider learning how to correctly use them and doing more research. It is literally a skill issue and I promise you that you are in the process of being left behind. In the coming years Human + AI cooperatives are going to far surpass you in terms of efficiency and output. You are handicapping yo…

If the future is not LLMs, then this is a waste of time.

If the future is only LLMs then we’re all cooked.

If the future is a hybrid, then those “grey beard” skills are a much higher barrier to entry than a few months tinkering with ChatGPT.

Please stop spreading FUD.

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

#834

Post by alabastervlog »

myko wrote: post #788
dartharva wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, are they useful? ... Yeah, of course LLMs are useful, but we need to remain somewhat grounded in reality. How useful are LLMs? They are useful enough that they can passably replace (much more expensive) humans in a lot of noncritical jobs, thus being a tangible tool for securing enterprise bottom lines.

Which jobs? I haven't seen LLMs successfully replace more expensive humans in noncritical roles

From what I've seen in my own job and observing what my wife does (she's been working with the things on very LLM-centric processes and products in a variety of roles for about three years) not a lot of people are able to use them to even get a small productivity boost. Anyone less than very-capable trying to use them just makes a ton more work for someone more expensive than they are.

They're still useful, but they're not going to make cheap employees wildly more productive, and outside maybe a rare, perfect niche, they're not going to increase expensive employees' productivity so much that you can lay off a bunch of the cheap ones. Like, they're not even close to that, and haven't really been getting much closer despite improvements.

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

#835

Post by comte7092 »

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 think it’s more that the people who are boosting LLMs are claiming that perfect super intelligence is right around the corner.

Personally, I look back at how many years ago it was that we were seeing claims that truck drivers were all going to lose there jobs and society would tear itself apart over it within the next few years… and yet here we still are.

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

#836

Post by vonneumannstan »

zehaeva wrote: post #816
vonneumannstan wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I thought summarizing papers/stories/emails/meetings was one of the touted use cases of LLMs? What are the use cases where the expected performance is high?

I didn't notice that example. I doubt top tier models have issues with that. I was more referencing Sabines mentions of hallucinating citations and papers which is an issue I also had 2 years ago but is probably solved by Deep Research at this point. She just has massive skill issues and doesn't know what shes doing.

>What are the use cases where the expected performance is high?

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pro/

o1-pro is probably at top tier human level performance on most small coding tasks and definitely at answering STEM questions. o3 is even better but not released outside of it powering Deep Research.

https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/137543 o3 is top 200 on Codeforces for example.

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

#837

Post by zifpanachr23 »

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 two sides are never going to understand each other because I suspect we work on entirely different things and have radically different workflows. I suspect that hackernews gets more use out of LLMs in general than the average programmer because they are far more likely to be at a web startup and more likely to actually be bottlenecked on how fast you can physically put more code in the file and ship sooner.

If you work on stuff that is at all niche (as in, stack overflow was probably not going to have the answer you needed even before LLMs became popular), then it's not surprising when LLMs can't help because they've not been trained.

For people that were already going fast and needed or wanted to put out more code more quickly, I'm sure LLMs will speed them up even more.

For those of us working on niche stuff, we weren't going fast in the first place or being judged on how quickly we ship in all likelihood. So LLMs (even if they were trained on our stuff) aren't going to be able to speed us up because the bottleneck has never been about not being able to write enough code fast enough. There are architectural and environmental and testing related bottlenecks that LLMs don't get rid of.

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

#838

Post by internet101010 »

blactuary wrote: post #808
whamlastxmas wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's part of it. The other part is Google sacrificing product quality for excessive monetization. An example would be YouTube search - first three results are relevant, next 12 results are irrelevant "people also watched", then back to relevant results. Another example would be searching for an item to buy and getting relevant results in the images tab of google, but not the shopping tab.

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

#839

Post by dughnut »

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…

[flagged]

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

#840

Post by vonneumannstan »

fire_lake wrote: post #833
vonneumannstan wrote: post #815

WORD OF ADVICE FOR LLM BEARS!! If you have tried to use LLMs and find them useless or without value, you should seriously consider learning how to correctly use them and doing more research. It is literally a skill issue and I promise you that you are in the process of being left behind. In the coming years Human + AI cooperatives are going to far surpass you in terms of efficiency and output. You are handicapping yo…

If the future is not LLMs, then this is a waste of time. If the future is only LLMs then we’re all cooked. If the future is a hybrid, then those “grey beard” skills are a much higher barrier to entry than a few months tinkering with ChatGPT. Please stop spreading FUD.

Weight the three possibilities how you want but I think in scenario 3 you are coping hard and the grey beard skills aren't nearly as valuable as you think. Is this not already the case? Grey beards already have well known problems with age discrimination despite having such a unique and hard to earn skillset no?
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