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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

#841

Post by freilanzer »

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.

So they used the model as a database? It should be immediately obvious to anyone that this won't work.

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

#843

Post by darepublic »

I feel like at this point when people make some claim about LLM they need to actually include the model they are using. So many "LLMs can do / cant do X", without reference to the model, which I think is relevant.

I am hoping that the LLM approach will face increasingly diminished returns however. So I am biased toward Sabine's griping. I don't want LLM to go all the way to "AGI".

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

#844

Post by quonn »

chgs wrote: post #552
Animats wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. Still the elephant in the room. We need an AI technology that can output "don't know" when appropriate. How's that coming along?

> It's impossible to predict with certainty who will be the U.S. President in 2046. The political landscape can change significantly over time, and many factors, including elections, candidates, and events, will influence the outcome. The next U.S. presidential election will take place in 2028, so it would be difficult to know for sure who will hold office nearly two decades from now. So it can say “I don’t know”

I can do this because it is in fact the most likely thing to continue with, word by word.

But the most likely thing to continue a paper with is not to say at the end „I don‘t know“. It is actually providing sources which it proceeds to do wrongly.

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

#845

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#847

Post by CamperBob2 »

matkoniecz wrote: post #610
CamperBob2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they don't come with any inbuilt sense of when they might be getting things wrong Spend some time with current reasoning models. Your experience is obsolete if you still hold this belief.

Can you be more specific than "current reasoning models"? Maybe I missed it, but I have not yet seen any that would not hallucinate wildly.

Let's try it this way: give me one or two prompts that you personally have had trouble with, in terms of hallucinated output and lack of awareness of potential errors or ambiguity. I have paid accounts on all the major models except Grok, and I often find it interesting to probe the boundaries where good responses give way to bad ones, and to see how they get better (or worse) between generations.

Sounds like your experiences, along with zozbot234's, are different enough from mine that they are worth repeating and understanding. I'll report back with the results I see on the current models.

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

#848

Post by barrucadu »

zifpanachr23 wrote: post #837
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 yo…

That's a good point, I've personally not got much use out of LLMs (I use them to generate fantasy names for my D&D campaign, but find they fall down for anything complex) - but I've also never got much use out of StackOverflow either.

I don't think I'm working on anything particularly niche, but nor is it cookie-cutter generic either, and that could be enough to drastically reduce their utility.

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

#849

Post by jasonjmcghee »

dpkirchner wrote: post #756
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people have only tried the free version of ChatGPT, which is a completely different experience than the two most recent sonnet models.

Agreed. If one compares ChatGPT to, say, the Cline IDE plugin backed by Claude 3.7, they might well be blown away by how far behind ChatGPT seems. A lot of the difference has to do with prompting, for sure -- Cline helps there by generating prompts from your IDE and project context automatically. Every once in a while I send a query off to ChatGPT and I'm often disappointed and jam on the "this was hallucinated" feed…

You should try Claude Code. I was pretty impressed the first time I tried it. Go in with a specific task in mind

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

#850

Post by jaccola »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #840
fire_lake wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

LLMs are not difficult to use and learn though, if so called "greybeard" skills are valueless (or close to) then knowing how to use an LLM certainly won't be valuable either!

Just like in the 2000-2010's knowing how to effectively Google things (while undoubtedly a skill) wasn't what made someone economically valuable.

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