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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

#861

Post by danielmarkbruce »

rurp wrote: post #831
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…

Maybe they are just lazy around tooling. Cursor with Claude works well for project sizes much larger than I expected but it takes a little set up. There is a chasm between engineers who use tools well and who do not.

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

#862

Post by eric_cc »

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.

Sounds like a user problem, though. When used properly as a tool they are incredible. When you give up 100% trust to them to be perfect it’s you that is making the mistake.

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

#863

Post by cthalupa »

etchalon wrote: post #207

I have such a hard time getting a read on Sabine Hossenfelder. I wish I was a physicist so I knew if she was full of shit

Sabine has moved well into the deep-end and has all sorts of bizarre anti-science content at this point. I had been getting more and more uncomfortable with some of her videos and couldn't really put it into words until one of the guys who blew up debunking flat earther stuff, professor dave, put out a few videos on what she's been doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70vYj1KPyT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_tceoHUH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJjPH3TQif0

She's youtuber who is happy to take whatever position she thinks will get her the most views and ad revenue, all while crying woe is me about how the scientific establishment shuns her.

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

#864

Post by danielmarkbruce »

turtletontine wrote: post #30
bluefirebrand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

I literally had a developer of an open source package I’m working with tell me “yeah that’s a known problem, I gave up on trying to fix it. You should just ask ChatGPT to fix it, I bet it will immediately know the answer.” Annoying response of course. But I’d never used an LLM to debug before, so I figured I’d give it a try. First: it regurgitated a bunch of documentation and basic debugging tips, which might have ac…

Exactly which model did you use? You talk about LLMs as though they are all the same.

Alien 1: I gave Jeff Dean a giant complex system to build, he crushed it! Humans are so smart.

Alien 2: I gave a random human a simple programming problem and he just stared at me like an idiot. Humans suck.

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

#865

Post by nijave »

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…

For me, I think they're valuable but also overhyped. They're not at the point they're replacing entire dev teams like some articles point out. In addition, they are amazingly accurate sometimes and amazingly misleading other times. I've noticed some ardent advocates ignore the latter.

It's incredibly frustrating when people think they're a miracle tool and blindly copy/paste output without doing any kind of verification. This is especially frustrating when someone who's supposed to be a professional in the field is doing it (copy lasting non working AI generated code and putting it up for review)

That said, on one hand, they multiply productive and useful information. On the other hand, they kill productive and spread misinformation. That said, I still seem them as useful but not a miracle

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

#866

Post by retrac »

simoncion wrote: post #535
retrac wrote: post #3

You're using them wrong. Everyone is though I can't fault you specifically. Chatbot is like the worst possible application of these technologies. Of late, deaf tech forums are taken over by language model debates over which works best for speech transcription. (Multimodal language models are the the state of the art in machine transcription. Everyone seems to forget that when complaining they can't cite sources for s…

> ...there was no such thing as live machine transcription ten years ago. What? Then what the hell do you call Dragon NaturallySpeaking and other similar software in that niche?

Thru the 90s and 00s and well into the 10s I generally dismissed speech recognition as useless to me, personally.

I have a minor speech impediment because of the hearing loss. They never worked for me very well. I don't speak like a standard American - I have a regional accent and I have a speech impediment. Modern speech recognition doesn't seem to have a problem with that anymore.

IBM's ViaVoice from 1997 in particular was a major step. It was really impressive in a lot of ways but the accuracy rate was like 90 - 95% which in practice means editing major errors with almost every sentence. And that was for people who could speak clearly. It never worked for me very well.

You also needed to speak in an unnatural way [pause] comma [pause] and it would not be fair to say that it transcribed truly natural speech [pause] full stop

Such voice recognition systems before about 2016 also required training on the specific speaker. You would read many pages of text to the recognition engine to tune it to you specifically.

It could not just be pointed at the soundtrack to an old 1980s TV show then produce a time-sync'd set of captions accurate enough to enjoy the show. But that can be done now.

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

#867

Post by dilDDoS »

I think LLMs have value, but what I'm really looking forward to is the day when everyone can just quietly use (or not use) LLMs and move on with their lives. It's like that one friend who started a new diet and can't shut up about it every time you see them, except instead of that one friend it's seemingly the majority of participants in tech forums. It's getting so old.

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

#869

Post by joquarky »

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.

> all implementations

Are you speaking for yourself or everyone?

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

#870

Post by pier25 »

dakial1 wrote: post #856

"Yes, it covers 99% of use cases, but look at this 1%...." It is the same discussion with autonomous driving, it generates much less accidents than humans, but look at these anedoctical accidents...

> 99% of use cases

You're being very generous.

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