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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

#911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really don’t. People say this all the time, but you give any project a little time and it evolves into a special unique snowflake every single time. That’s why every low code solution and boilerplate generator for the last 30 years failed to deliver on the promises they made.

I agree some will evolve into more, but lots of them won't. That's why shopify, WordPress and others exist - most commercial websites are just online business cards or small shops. Designers and devs are hired to work on them all the time.

If your website is so basic that you can just take a template and put your specific details into it, what exactly do you need an LLM for?

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

#912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's also scary is that we know LLMs do fail, but nobody (even the people who wrote the LLM) can tell you how often it will fail at any particular task. Not even an order of magnitude. Will it fail 0.2%, 2%, or 20% of the time? Nobody knows! A computer that will randomly produce an incorrect result to my calculation is useless to me because now I have to separately validate the correctness of every result. If I nee…

I think part of it is that, from eons of experience, we have a pretty good handle on what kinds of mistakes humans make and how. If you hire a competent accountant, he might make a mistake like entering an expense under the wrong category. And since he's watching for mistakes like that, he can double-check (and so can you) without literally checking all his work. He's not going to "hallucinate" an expense that you never gave him, or put something in a category he just made up.

I asked Gemini for the lyrics to a song that I knew was on all the lyrics sites. To make a long story short, it gave me the wrong lyrics three times, apparently making up new ones the last two times. Someone here said LLMs may not be allowed to look at those sites for copyright reasons, which is fair enough; but then it should have just said so, not "pretended" it was giving me the right answer.

I have a python script that processes a CSV file every day, using DictReader. This morning it failed, because the people making the CSV changed it to add four extra lines above the header line, so DictReader was getting its headers from the wrong line. I did a search and found the fix on Stack Overflow, no big deal, and it had the upvotes to suggest I could trust the answer. I'm sure an LLM could have told me the answer, but then I would have needed to do the search anyway to confirm it--or simply implemented it, and if it worked, assume it would keep working and not cause other problems.

That was just a two-line fix, easy enough to try out and see if it worked, and guess how it worked. I can't imagine implementing a 100-line fix and assuming the best.

It seems to me that some people are saying, "It gives me the right thing X% of the time, which saves me enough developer time (mine or someone else's) that it's worth the other (100-X)% of the time when it gives me garbage that takes extra time to fix." And that may be a fair trade for some folks. I just haven't found situations where it is for me.

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

#913
I say the author tells us more than the headline or first sentence of the loop. If you have recently scrolled through Sabines posts on Twitter, or her clickbaity thumbnails, facial expressions and headlines on YouTube [1], you would see that she is all-in for clicks. She often takes a popular belief, then negates it, and throws around counter-examples of why X or Y has absolutely failed. It's a repeating pattern to gain popularity, and it seems to work not only on Twitter and YouTube, but even here on Hacker News, given the massive amount of upvotes her post has.

[1] https://youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder/featured

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

#914

If there's one common thread across LLM criticisms, it's that they're not perfect. These critics don't seem to have learned the lesson that the perfect is the enemy of the good . I use ChatGPT all the time for academic research. Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time. But has it pointed me to important research papers I might never have found otherwise? Absolutely . The rate of inac…

> Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time And you don't have concerns about that? What kind of damage is that doing to our society, long term, if we have a system that _everyone_ uses and it's just accepted that a third of the time it is just making shit up?

That's hilarious; I had no idea it was that bad. And for every conscientious researcher who actually runs down all the references to separate the 2/3 good from the 1/3 bad, how many will just paste them in, adding to the already sky-high pile of garbage out there?

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

#915
post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Verifying the accuracy of its statements is easy. For single statements, sometimes, but not always. For all of the many statements, no. Having the human attention and discipline to mindfully verify every single one without fail? Impossible. Every software product/process that assumes the user has superhuman vigilance is doomed to fail badly. > Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let…

> Having the human attention and discipline to mindfully verify every single one without fail? Impossible. I mean, how do you live life? The people you talk to in your life say factually wrong things all the time . How do you deal with it? With common sense, a decent bullshit detector, and a healthy level of skepticism. LLM's aren't calculators. You're not supposed to rely on them to give perfect answers. That would…

It's really funny how most anecdotes and comments about the utility and value of interacting with LLM's can be applied to anecdotes and comments about human beings themselves. Majority of people havent realized yet that consciousness is assumed by our society, and that we, in fact, don't know what it is or if we have it. Let alone prescribing another entity with it.

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

#916

If there's one common thread across LLM criticisms, it's that they're not perfect. These critics don't seem to have learned the lesson that the perfect is the enemy of the good . I use ChatGPT all the time for academic research. Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time. But has it pointed me to important research papers I might never have found otherwise? Absolutely . The rate of inac…

> Does it fabricate references? Absolutely, maybe about a third of the time And you don't have concerns about that? What kind of damage is that doing to our society, long term, if we have a system that _everyone_ uses and it's just accepted that a third of the time it is just making shit up?

people lie more

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

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that Sabine's beef with LLM's that they are hyped as a legit "human level assistant" -kind of thing by the business people, which they clearly aren't yet. Maybe I've just managed to... manage my expectations?

That's on her then for fully believing what marketing and business execs are 'telling her' about LLMs. Does she get upset when she buys a coke around Christmas and her life doesn't become all warm and fuzzy with friendliness and cheer all around? Seems like she's given a drill with a flathead, and just complains for months on end that it often fails (she didnt charge the drill) or gives her useless results (she uses…

I kinda agree. But she seems smart and knowledgeable. It's kinda disappointing, like... She should know better. I guess it's the Gell-Mann amnesia effect once again.

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

#918

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…

Great points. I think much of the pessimism is based on fear of inadequacy. Also the fact that these things bring up truly base-level epistemological quandaries that question human perception and reality fundamentally. Average joe doesnt want to think about how we dont know if consciousness is a real thing, let alone determine if the robot is.

We are going through a societal change. There will always be the people who reject AI no matter the capabilities. I'm at the point where if ANYTHING tells me that it's conscious... I just have to believe them and act accordingly to my own morals

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

#919
post #153

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…

Look man, and I'm saying this not to you but to everyone who is in this boat; you've got to understand that after a while, the novelty wears off. We get it. It's miraculous that some gigabytes of matrices can possibly interpret and generate text, images, and sound. It's fascinating, it really is. Sometimes, it's borderline terrifying. But, if you spend too much time fawning over how impressive these things are, you m…

> the novelty wears off.

Hardly. I pretty much have been using LLM at least weekly (most of the time daily) since GPT3.5. I am still amazed. It's really, really hard to not be bullish for me.

It kinda reminds me the days I learned Unix-like command line. At least once a week, I shouted to me self: "What? There is a one-liner that does that? People use awk/sed/xargs this way??" That's how I feel about LLM so far.

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

#920
post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really agree with framing it as lazy. Adding more tools and steps to your workflow isn't free, and the cost/benefit of each tool will be different for everyone. I've lost count of how many times someone has evangelized a software tool to me, LLM or not. Once in a while they turn out to be useful and I incorporate them into my regular workflow, but far more often I don't. This could be for any number of reasons like it does not fit with my workflow well, or I already have a better way of doing whatever it does, or the tool adds more friction than it remove.

I'm sure spending more time fiddling with the setup of LLM tools can yield better results, but that doesn't mean that it will be worth it for everyone. In my experience LLMs fail often enough at modestly complex problems that they are more hassle than benefit for a lot of the work I do. I'll still use them for simple tasks, like if I need some standard code in a language I'm not too familiar with. At the same time, I'm not at all surprised that others have a different experience and find them useful for larger projects they work on.

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