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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

#881

Post by dudeinhawaii »

I love this. The more people that say "I don't get it" or "it's a stochastic parrot", the more time I get to build products rapidly without the competition that there would be if everyone was effectively using AI. Effectively is the key.

It's cliche at this point to say "you're using it wrong" but damn... it really is a thing. It's kind of like how some people can find something online in one Google query and others somehow manage to phrase things just wrong enough that they struggle. It really is two worlds. I can have AI pump out 100k tokens with a nearly 0% error rate, meanwhile my friends with equally high engineering skill struggle to get AI to edit 2 classes in their codebase.

There are a lot of critical skills and a lot of fluff out there. I think the fluff confuses things further. The variety of models and model versions confuses things EVEN MORE! When someone says "I tried LLMs and they failed at task xyz" ... what version was it? How long was the session? How did they prompt it? Did they provide sufficient context around what they wanted performed or answered? Did they have the LLM use tools if that is appropriate (web/deepresearch)?

It's never a like-for-like comparison. Today's cutting-edge models are nothing like even 6-months ago.

Honestly, with models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet (thinking mode) and OpenAI o3-mini-high, I'm not sure how people fail so hard at prompting and getting quality answers. The models practically predict your thoughts.

Maybe that's the problem, poor specifications in (prompt), expecting magic that conforms to their every specification (out).

I genuinely don't understand why some people are still pessimistic about LLMs.

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

#882

Post by freedomben »

icepat wrote: post #737
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.

I agree. I use LLMs heavily for gruntwork development tasks (porting shell scripts to Ansible is an example of something I just applied them to). For these purposes, it works well. LLMs excel in situations where you need repetitive, simple adjustments on a large scale. IE: swap every postgres insert query, with the corresponding mysql insert query. A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pat…

> porting shell scripts to Ansible

Thank you for mentioning that! What a great example of something an LLM can pretty well do that otherwise can take a lot of time looking up Ansible docs to figure out the best way to do things. I'm guessing the outputs aren't as good as someone real familiar with Ansible could do, but it's a great place to start! It's such a good idea that it seems obvious in hindsight now :-)

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

#883

Post by 01100011 »

casey2 wrote: post #783
01100011 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much time do I need to devote to see anything but garbage? For reference, I program systems code in C/C++ in a large, proprietary codebase. My experiences with OpenAI(a year ago or more), and more recently, Cursor, Grok-v3 and Deepseek-r1, were all failures. The later two started out OK and got worse over time. What I haven't done is asked "AI" to whip up a more standard application. I have some ideas(an ncurses…

If your mind has trouble expanding outside the domain of "use this well known tool to do something that has already been done" then no amount of improvements will free you from your belief that chatbots are glorified autocomplete.

What?

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

#884

Post by barnabee »

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.

> The entire point of these tools is that I am supposed to be able to trust what they say

Hard disagree, and I feel like this assumption might be at the root of why some people seem so down on LLMs.

They’re a tool. When they’re useful to me, they’re so useful they save me hours (sometimes days) and allow me to do things I couldn’t otherwise, and when they’re not they’re not.

It never takes me very long to figure out which scenario I’m in, but I 100% understand and accept that figuring that out is on me and part of the deal!

Sure if you think you can “vibe code” (or “vibe founder”) your way to massive success but getting LLMs to do stuff you’re clueless about without anyone way to check, you’re going to have a bad time, but the fact they can’t (so far) do that doesn’t make them worthless.

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

#885

Post by DavideNL »

So after reading many of the comments here;

What is a good tutorial / training, to learn about LLMs from scratch ?

I guess that’s the main problem, even more so for non-developers and -tech people. The learning curve is too steep, and people don’t know where to start.

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

#886

Post by pixl97 »

dlevine wrote: post #770

I think of LLMs like smart but unreliable humans. You don't want to use them for anything that you need to have right. I would never have one write anything that I don't subsequently go over with a fine-toothed comb. With that said, I find that they are very helpful for a lot of tasks, and improve my productivity in many ways. The types of things that I do are coding and a small amount of writing that is often opinio…

I think there are a couple of truths to this.

1. Any low hanging fruits that could easily be solved by an LLM easily probably would have been solved by someone already using standard methods.

2. Humans and LLMs have to spend some particular amount of energy to solve problems. Now, there are efficiencies that can lower/raise that amount of energy but at the end of the day TANSTAAFL. Humans spend this in a lifetime of learning and eating, and LLMs spend this in GPU time and power. Even when AI gets to human level it's never going to abstract this cost away, energy still needs spent to learn.

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

#887

Post by 01100011 »

theshackleford wrote: post #713
01100011 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much time do I need to devote to see anything but garbage? For reference, I program systems code in C/C++ in a large, proprietary codebase. My experiences with OpenAI(a year ago or more), and more recently, Cursor, Grok-v3 and Deepseek-r1, were all failures. The later two started out OK and got worse over time. What I haven't done is asked "AI" to whip up a more standard application. I have some ideas(an ncurses…

> Most of my job is thinking about what the solution should be, talking to other people like me in meetings, understanding what customers really want beyond what they are saying, and tracking what I'm doing in various forms None of this is particularly unique to software engineering. So if someone can already do this and add the missing component with some future LLM why shouldn’t they think they can become a softwar…

Yeah I mean, if you can reason about, say, how an automobile engine works, then you can reason about how a modern computer works too, right? If you can discuss the tradeoffs in various engine design parameters then surely you understand amdahl's law, caching strategies of a modern CPU, execution pipelining, etc... We just need to give those auto guys an LLM and then they can do systems software engineering, right?

Did you catch the sarcasm there?

Are you a manager by any chance? The non-coding parts of my job largely require domain experience. How does an LLM provide you with that?

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

#888

Post by mannykoum »

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…

> 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 is an impressive technology but is it US$244.22bn [1] impressive (I know this stat is supposed to account for computer vision as well but seeing as to how LLMs are now a big chunk of that I think it's a safe assumption)? It's projected to grow to over US$1tr by 2031. That's higher than the market size of commercial aviation at its peak [2]. I'm sorry if I agree that a cool chatbot is not approximately as important as flying.

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence...

[2] https://www.statista.com/markets/419/topic/490/aviation/#sta...

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

#889

Post by throwawaymaths »

joquarky wrote: post #876
throwawaymaths wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sure. isn't that effectively what Sabine is doing though? She just doesn't have as compelling a use in the cases where LLMs are strong.

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

#890

Post by frm88 »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #817
giantrobot wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just not a use case where the expected performance on these tasks is high. Yet the hucksters hyping AI are falling all over themselves saying AI can do all this stuff. This is where the centi-billion dollar valuations are coming from. It's been years and these super hyped AIs still suck at basic tasks. When pre-AI shit Google gave wrong answers it at least linked to the source of the wrong answers. LLMs jus…

To be fair the newest tools like Deep Research are actually quite good and hallucination is essentially not a real problem for them. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/de...

>

>

These quotes are from the link you posted. There are a lot more.

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