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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

#901

Post by never_inline »

Terretta wrote: post #682
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…

"They continue to fabricate links, references, and quotes, like they did from day one." - "I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error." Why have these companies not manually engineered out a problem like this by now? Just do a check to make sure links are real. That's pretty unimpressive to me. There are no fabricated links, references, or quotes, in OpenAI's GPT…

My complaints with Deep Research LLMs is they don't go deeper than 2 pages of SERPs. I want them to dig down obscure stuff, not list cursorily relevant peripheral directions. they just seem to do breadth first than depth first search.

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

#903

Post by fragmede »

nancyminusone wrote: post #784
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.

No, it says that people dislike liars. If you are known for making up things constantly, you might have a harder time gaining trust, even if you're right this time.

And yet we keep electing them to public office.

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

#904

Post by saaaaaam »

satisfice wrote: post #87
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 want to sit next to you and stop you every time you use your LLM and say, “Let me just carefully check this output.” I bet you wouldn’t like that. But when I want to do high quality work, I MUST take that time and carefully review and test. What I am seeing is fanboys who offer me examples of things working well that fail any close scrutiny— with the occasional example that comes out actually working well. I agree…

I think it’s very odd that you think that people using LLMs regularly aren’t carefully checking the outputs. Why do you think that people using LLMs don’t care about their work?

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

#905

Post by ben_w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #661
gloosx wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem Sabine tries to communicate is that reality is different from what the cash-heads behind main commercial models are trying to portray. They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition, when in reality, they’ve just optimised prediction algorithms on an unprecedented scale. They are trying to say that they created Intelligence, which is the ability to acquire and apply knowled…

I hate to bring an ad hominem into this, but Sabine is a YouTube influencer now . That's her current career. So I'd assume this Tweet storm is also pushing a narrative on its own, because that's part of doing the work she chose to do to earn a living. Pinch of salt & all.

While true, I think this is more likely a question of framing or anchoring — I am continuously impressed and surprised by how good AI is, but I recognise all the criticisms she's making here. They're amazing, but at the same time they make very weird mistakes.

They actually remind me of myself, as I experience being a native English speaker now living in Berlin and attempting to use a language I mainly learned as an adult.

I can often appear competent in my use of the language, but then I'll do something stupid like asking someone in the office if we have a "Gabelstapler" I can borrow — Gabelstapler is "forklift truck", I meant to ask for a stapler, which is "Tacker" or "Hefter", and I somehow managed to make this mistake directly after carefully looking up the word. (Even this is a big improvement for me, as I started off like Officer Crabtree from Allo' Allo').

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

#906

Post by xigoi »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #749
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.

This is more a lack of understanding of it's limitations, it'd be different if they asked for it to write a python script to collate the data.

If the LLM is intelligent, why can’t it figure out that writing a script would be the best way to solve the problem?

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

#907

Post by deadbabe »

School-Cotton wrote: post #191
deadbabe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s when we can start getting excited about LLMs: when they start making new and valid scientific discoveries that can radically change our world. When an AI can say “Here’s how you make better, smaller, more powerful batteries, follow these plans”, then we will have a reason to worship AI. When AI can bring us wonders like room temperature semiconductors, fast interstellar travel, anti-gravity tech, solutions to…

Google was fantastically impressive when it first came out.

Only because most people didn’t understand how it worked.

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

#909

Post by lionkor »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #575
mattmanser wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google it. There's a bunch of scientific papers talking about that. Bet that plenty of those researchers have written python programs they've uploaded to GitHub and you just got one of their programs regurgitated It's not intelligence mate, it's just copying an existing program.

>It's not intelligence mate, it's just copying an existing program. Isn't the 'intelligence' part, the bit that gets a previously-constructed 'thing', and makes it work in 'situation'. Pretty sure that's how humans work, too.

that's a wild assumption that has no place here

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

#910

Post by fragmede »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #745
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.

It mostly says that one of the seriously difficult challenges with LLMs is a meta-challenge: * LLMs are dangerously useless for certain domains. * ... but can be quite useful for others. * The real problem is: They make it real tricky to tell, because most of all they are trained to sound professional and authoritative. They hallucinate papers because that's what authoritative answers look like. That already means I…

> Stack Overflow answers have problems. For example, it's a great answer... for 10 years ago

To be fair, that's a huge problem with stack overflow and its culture. A better version of stack overflow wouldn't have that particular issue.

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