Upon asking ChatGPT multiple times it just wouldn’t tell me why Vlad the Impaler has this name. It will refuse to say anything cruel I guess, but it’s very frustrating when history is not represented truthfully.
When I’m asking about topics unknown to me, what is it hidding from me, I don’t know it’s awful.
I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#872I wonder when we can get LLM, which might be more "stupid" but knows what it does not know rather than hallucinates... Though perhaps when it would be not LLM but entirely different tech :)
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#873I become more and more convinced with each of these tweets/blogs/threads that using LLMs well is a skill set akin to using Search well. It’s been a common mantra - at least in my bubble of technologists - that a good majority of the software engineering skill set is knowing how to search well. Knowing when search is the right tool, how to format a query, how to peruse the results and find the useful ones, what result…
I'm not so sure about that. I was really Anti llm in the previous generation of LLMs (GPT3.5/4) but never stopped trying them out. I just found the results to be subpar.
Since reasoning models came about I've been significantly more bullish on them purely because they are less bad. They are still not amazing but they are at a poiny where I feel like including them in my workflow isn't an impediment.
They can now reliably complete a subset of tasks without me needing to rewrite large chunks of it myself.
They are still pretty terrible at edge cases ( uncommon patterns / libraries etc ) but when on the beaten path they can actually pretty decently improve productivity. I still don't think 10x ( well today was the first time I felt a 10x improvement but I was moving frontend code from a custom framework to react, more tedium than anything else in that and the AI did a spectacular job ).
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
Broader than that, it’s critical thinking skills. Using search and LLMs requires analyzing the results and being able to separate what is accurate and useful from what isn’t.
From my experience this is less an application of critical skills and more a domain knowledge check. If you know enough about the subject to have accumulated heuristics for correctness and intuition for "lgtm" in the specific context, then it's not very difficult or intellectually demanding to apply them. If you don't have that experience in this domain, you will spend approximately as much effort validating output a…
Knowledge certainly helps, but I’m talking about something more fundamental: your bullshit detector.
Even when you lack subject matter expertise about something, there are certain universal red flags that skeptics key in on. One of the biggest ones is: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” and its corollary: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#875Earlier 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…
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…
I was responding to the "they used an LLM" story about the Norwegian school report, not the original tweet. The original tweet has a great level of detail.
I agree that hallucination is still a problem, albeit a lot less of one than it was in the recent past. If you're using LLMs for tasks where you are not directly providing it the context it needs, or where it doesn't have solid tooling to find and incorporate that context itself, that risk is increased.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole point is that an LLM is not a search engine and obviously anyone who treats it as one is going to be unsatisfied. It's just not a sensible comparison. You should compare working with an LLM to working with an old "state of the art" language tool like Python NLTK -- or, indeed, specifying a problem in Python versus specifying it in the form of a prompt -- to understand the unbridgeable gap between what we ha…
to be fair a few? one? years ago LLMs were touted? marketed? as a "search killer", and a lot of people do use it in that fashion.
A lot of people need to improve their critical thinking skills to deconstruct the marketing hype, and then choose the right tool for the job.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#877I 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…
This assessment is incomplete. Large languages models are both less and more than these traditional tools. They have not subsumed them and all can sit together in separate tabs of a single browser window. They are another resource, and when the conditions are right, which is often the case in my experience, they are a startlingly effective tool for navigating the information landscape. The criticism of Gemini is a fair one, and I encountered it yesterday, but perhaps with 50% less entitlement. But Gemini also helped me translate obscure termios APIs to python from C source code I provided. The equivalent using search and/or Stack Overflow would have required multiple piecemeal searches without guarantees -- and definitely would have taken much more time.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#878I think many people are just not really good at dealing with "imperfect" tools. Different tools can have different success probability, let's call that probability p here. People typically use tool that have p=100%, or at least very close to it. But LLM is a tool that is far from that, so making use of it takes different approach. Imagine there is an probabilistic oracle that can answer any question with a yes/no wit…
One of the magic things about engineering is that I can make usefulness out of unreliability. Voltage can fluctuate and I can transmit 1s and 0s, lines can fizz, machines can die, and I can reliably send video from one end to the other. Unreliability is something we live in. It is the world. Controlling error, increasing signal over noise, extracting energy from the fluctuations. This is life, man. This is what we ar…
Many people are trapped in black and white thinking. It's like they can only think in binary things that are not either good nor bad are heresy.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#879I 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 growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”
Same vibe.
Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
#880Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? I presume you are referring to this Google engineer, who was sacked for making the claim. Hardly an example of AI companies overhyping the tech; precisely the opposite, in fact. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326 It seems to be a common human hallucination to imagine that large or…
Corporations are motivated by profit, not doing what's best for humanity. If you need an example of "large organizations conspiring against us," I can give you twenty.
[deleted]