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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

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Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#91

Post by alkonaut »

loveparade wrote: post #23
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I use LLMs to check solutions for graduate level math and physics problem I'm working on. Can I 100% trust their final output? Of course not, but I know enough about the domain to tell whether they discovered mistakes in my solutions or not. And they do a pretty good job and have found mistakes in my reasoning many times. I also use them for various coding tasks and they, together with agent frameworks, regularly do…

I think this is the key. If you have a problem where it's slow to produce a plausible answer but quick to check if it's correct (writing a shell script, solving an equation, making up a verse for a song) then you have a good tool. It's the Prime-factorization category of problems. Recognizing when you have one and going to an LLM when you do, is key.

But what if you _don't_ have that kind of problem? Yes LLMs can be useful to solve the above. But for many problems you ask for a solution and what you get is a suggested solution which takes a long to verify. Meaning: unless you are somewhat sure it will solve the problem you don't want to do it. You need some estimate of confidence. LLMs are useless for this. As a developer I find my problems are very rarely in the first category and more often in the second.

Yes it's "using them wrong". It's doing what they struggle with. But it's also what I struggle with. It's hard to stop yourself when you have a difficult problem and you are weighing googling it for an hour or chatgpt-ing it for an hour. But I often regret going the ChatGPT route after several hours.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#92

Post by wazoox »

terhechte wrote: post #35
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

Can you give some examples where it didn't work for you? I'm curious because I derive a lot of value from it and my guess is that we're trying very different things with it.

Not OP, but yesterday I was working on NFS server tuning on Linux, a typically quite difficult thing to find relevant info about through search engines. I asked Claude 3.5 to suggest some kernel settings or compile-time tweaks, and it provided me with entirely made up answers about kernel variables that don't exist, and makefile options that don't exist.

So maybe another LLM would have fared better, but still, so far it's mostly wasted time. It works quite well to summarise texts and creating filler images, but overall I still find them not reliable enough to care out of these two limited use cases.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#93

Post by notepad0x90 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #62
notepad0x90 wrote: post #4

Is it that ChatGPT is a gimmick or is it that people are using it as such? A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants…

> Don't blame ChatGPT for human laziness I thought the very nature of technology and progress is to allow humans to be lazy. We build technology to reduce our own burdens. And most of the AI marketing is revolving around giving you the luxury to think less and do more for a price. > The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even I…

the laziness you're talking about and intellectual laziness are different things. Wanting to do less work and wanting to think less.

> And most of the AI marketing is revolving around giving you the luxury to think less and do more for a price.

So yeah, intellectual laziness.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#94

Post by pzo »

I used AI to summarize this whole article and give me takeaways - it already saved me like 0.5h of reading something that in the end I would disagree with since the article is IMHO to harsh on AI.

I found AI extremely useful and easy sell for me to spend $20/m even if not used professionally for coding and I'm the person who avoid any type of subscription as a plague.

Even in educational setting that this article mostly focus about it can be super useful. Not everyone has access to mentors and scholars. I saved a lot of time helping family with typical tech questions and troubleshooting by teaching them how to use it and trying to solve their tech problem themselves.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#95

Post by Yiin »

wazoox wrote: post #92
terhechte wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples where it didn't work for you? I'm curious because I derive a lot of value from it and my guess is that we're trying very different things with it.

Not OP, but yesterday I was working on NFS server tuning on Linux, a typically quite difficult thing to find relevant info about through search engines. I asked Claude 3.5 to suggest some kernel settings or compile-time tweaks, and it provided me with entirely made up answers about kernel variables that don't exist, and makefile options that don't exist. So maybe another LLM would have fared better, but still, so far…

I mean you answered yourself why it didn't work, if there is no useful data in its training corpus, it would be a miracle if it could correctly guess unknown information.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#96

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

keiferski wrote: post #82
nsteel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles I don't think that's an accurate summary of this article. Are you basing that just on the title, or do you fundamentally disagree with the author here? > We call something a gimmick, the literary scholar Sianne Ngai points out, when it seems to be simultaneously working too hard and not hard enough. It appears both to save labor and to inflate it, like a fanciful R…

Not sure how that definition of a gimmick applies to what I wrote. Labeling AI tools as gimmicks would imply that they both save labor and inflate it and therefore offer no real fundamental improvements or value. In my own experience, that is absolute nonsense, and I have gotten immense amounts of value from it. Most of the critical arguments (like the link) are almost always from people that use them as basic chatbo…

Another commenter on here talked about AI's ability to "impress an idiot". I see lots of this. Your usage sounds decidedly unidiotic, and I'm not saying you are an idiot - but it sounds like your view of the criticism is based on the idea that everyone who isn't using it as cleverly as you essentially is an idiot who simply hasn't realised how to get to a "deeper understanding" in the "exploration" of these tools.

Please consider that there are some very clever people out there. I can respond to your point about languages personally - I speak three, and have lived and operated for extended periods in two others which I wouldn't call myself "fluent" in as it's been a number of years. I would not use an LLM to generate images for each word, as I have methods that I like already that work for me, and I would consider that a wasteful use of resources. I am into permacomputing, minimising resources, etc.

When I see you put the idea forward, I think, oh, neat, but surely it'd be much more effective if you did a 30s sketch for each word, and improved your drawing as you went.

In summary - do read the article, it's very good! You're responding to an imagined argument based on a headline, ignoring a nuanced and serious argument, by saying: "yeah, but I use it well, so?! It's not a gimmick then, for me!"

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#98

Post by keiferski »

-__---____-ZXyw wrote: post #96
keiferski wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how that definition of a gimmick applies to what I wrote. Labeling AI tools as gimmicks would imply that they both save labor and inflate it and therefore offer no real fundamental improvements or value. In my own experience, that is absolute nonsense, and I have gotten immense amounts of value from it. Most of the critical arguments (like the link) are almost always from people that use them as basic chatbo…

Another commenter on here talked about AI's ability to "impress an idiot". I see lots of this. Your usage sounds decidedly unidiotic, and I'm not saying you are an idiot - but it sounds like your view of the criticism is based on the idea that everyone who isn't using it as cleverly as you essentially is an idiot who simply hasn't realised how to get to a "deeper understanding" in the "exploration" of these tools. Pl…

I did read the article and wrote my comment afterward. I didn't find it to be nuanced at all, and the author's description of using LLMs was amateurish at best, which is my point.

30 second sketches also are not nearly as effective as detailed images and would likely have dubious value in implementing the Picture Superiority Effect.

Nowhere did I say that people who write essays about AI being useless are idiots. That's your terminology, not mine. Merely that they lack imagination and creativity when it comes to exploring the potential of a new tool and instead just make weak criticisms.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#99

Post by [deleted] »

loveparade wrote: post #23
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I use LLMs to check solutions for graduate level math and physics problem I'm working on. Can I 100% trust their final output? Of course not, but I know enough about the domain to tell whether they discovered mistakes in my solutions or not. And they do a pretty good job and have found mistakes in my reasoning many times. I also use them for various coding tasks and they, together with agent frameworks, regularly do…

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#100

Post by johnisgood »

visarga wrote: post #36
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I too have sat at pianos and banged the keys but no valuable music came out. It must be because the piano is a bad instrument. /s

Thanks, I am going to steal this one. :D
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