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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

#851

Post by pebble »

casey2 wrote: post #772
jchw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look man, and I'm saying this not to you but to everyone who is in this boat; you've got to understand that after a while, the novelty wears off. We get it. It's miraculous that some gigabytes of matrices can possibly interpret and generate text, images, and sound. It's fascinating, it really is. Sometimes, it's borderline terrifying. But, if you spend too much time fawning over how impressive these things are, you m…

>they can dump out a boilerplate react frontend to a CRUD API This is so clearly biased that it boarders on parody. You can only get out what you put in. The real use case of current LLMs is that any project that would previously require collaboration can now be down solo with a much faster turnover. Of course in 20 years when compute finally catches up they will just be super intelligent AGI

Complete hyperbole.

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

#852

Post by babyent »

somenameforme wrote: post #554
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's mostly because of how they were initially marketed. In an effort to drive hype 'we' were promised the world. Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? In reality Bard, let alone whatever early version he was using, is about as sentient as my left asscheek. OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety'…

Bro AGI as a marketing term is too stale already.

We are now at Artificial SUPER Intelligence.

I’m waiting for Artificial Pro Max Super Duper Intelligence.

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

#853

Post by jabroni_salad »

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.

Well yeah, it's fancy autocomplete. And it's extremely amazing what 'fancy autocomplete' is able to do, but making the decision to use an LLM for the type of project you described is effectively just magical thinking. That isn't an indictment against LLM, but rather the person who chose the wrong tool for the job.

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

#854

Post by some_random »

spamizbad wrote: post #762
mwigdahl wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these anecdotal stories about "LLM" failures need to go into more detail about what model, prompt, and scaffolding was used. It makes a huge difference. Were they using Deep Research, which searches for relevant articles and brings facts from them into the report? Or did they type a few sentences into ChatGPT Free and blindly take it on faith? LLMs are _tools_, not oracles. They require thought and skill to us…

If any non-trivial ask of an LLM also requires the prompts/scaffolding to be listed, and independently verified, along with its output, their utility is severely diminished. They should be saving time not giving us extra homework. Far better to just get these problems resolved.

In many, many cases those problems are resolved by improvements to the model. The point is that making a big deal about LLM fuck ups in 3 year old models that don't reproduce in new ones is a complete waste of time and just spreads FUD.

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

#855

Post by actinium226 »

mwigdahl wrote: post #759
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.

All of these anecdotal stories about "LLM" failures need to go into more detail about what model, prompt, and scaffolding was used. It makes a huge difference. Were they using Deep Research, which searches for relevant articles and brings facts from them into the report? Or did they type a few sentences into ChatGPT Free and blindly take it on faith? LLMs are _tools_, not oracles. They require thought and skill to us…

Did you read the original tweet? She mentions the models and gives high level versions of her prompts. I'm not sure what "scaffolding" is.

You're right that they're tools, but I think the complaint here is that they're bad tools, much worse than they are hyped to be, to the point that they actually make you less efficient because you have to do more legwork to verify what they're saying. And I'm not sure that "prompt training," which is what I think you're suggesting, is an answer.

I had several bad experiences lately. With Claude 3.7 I asked how to restore a running database in AWS to a snapshot (RDS, if anyone cares). It basically said "Sure, just go to the db in the AWS console and select 'Restore from snapshot' in the actions menu." There was no such button. I later read AWS docs that said you cannot restore a running database to a snapshot, you have to create a new one.

I'm not sure that any amount of prompting will make me feel confident that it's finally not making stuff up.

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

#857

Post by weego »

timcobb wrote: post #674
weego wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It talks to me like a person" Because it has a sample size of our collective human knowledge and language big enough to trick our brains into believing that. As a parallel thought, it reminds of a trick derren brown did. He picked every horse correctly across 6 races. The person who he was picking for was obviously stunned, as were the audience watching it. The reality of course is just that people couldn't comprehe…

> Because it has a sample size of our collective human knowledge and language big enough to trick our brains into believing that. Yes, it's artificial intelligence. It's not the real thing, it's artificial.

Again, it's not intelligence. It's a mirror that condenses our own intelligence and reflects back to us using probabilities at a scale that tricks us into the notion there is something more than just a big index and clever search interface.

There is no meaningful interpretation of the word intelligence that applies, psychologically or philosophically, to what is going on. Machine Learning is far more apt and far less misleading.

I saw the transition from ML to AI happen in academic papers and then pitch decks in real time. It was to refill the well when investors were losing faith that ML could deliver on the promises. It was not progress driven.

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

#858

Post by jodrellblank »

w0m wrote: post #742
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.

"an old poorly implemented model can't do item X well therefore the technology is garbage" Likely the most accurate measure of progress would be watching detractors goalposts move over time.

"Even a journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step. Unless you're an AI hyper then taking the first step is the entire journey - how dare you move the goalposts"

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

#859

Post by eric_cc »

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…

The tweeters complaints sound like a user problem. LLM’s are tools. How you use them, when you use them, and what you expect out of them should be based on the fact they are tools.

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

#860

Post by jodrellblank »

tempfile wrote: post #765
mwigdahl wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these anecdotal stories about "LLM" failures need to go into more detail about what model, prompt, and scaffolding was used. It makes a huge difference. Were they using Deep Research, which searches for relevant articles and brings facts from them into the report? Or did they type a few sentences into ChatGPT Free and blindly take it on faith? LLMs are _tools_, not oracles. They require thought and skill to us…

Why do you think these details are important? The entire point of these tools is that I am supposed to be able to trust what they say. The hard work is precisely to be able to spot which things are true and false. If I could do that I wouldn't need an assistant.

> Why do you think these details are important?

It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

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