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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

#931

Post by camillomiller »

brookst wrote: post #684
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.

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.

That software just didn‘t work that way. I don’t think it tried to convince the users that they were wrong by spouting nonsense that seems legitimate.

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

#932

Post by kazinator »

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…

As a 50+ nerd, for decades I carried the idea that can't we just build a sufficiently large neural net, throw some data at it and have somehow be usefully intelligent? So it's kind of showing strong signs of something I've been waiting for.

In the 70's I read in some science book for kids about how one day we will likely be able to use light emitting diodes for illumination instead of light bulbs, and this "cold light" will save us lots of energy. Waited out that one too; it turned out so.

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

#933

Post by refulgentis »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #667
josephwegner wrote: post #660

I 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…

Agree. It's a tool like anything else. On a side note, this lady is a fraud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJjPH3TQif0&themeRefresh=1

Thanks for sharing this. I was heavily involved in graduate physics when I was in school, and was very worried about what direction shed take after the first big viral vid "telling her story." I wasn't sure it was well understood, or even understood at all, how blinkered her...viewpoint?...was.

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

#934

Post by tasuki »

knowitnone wrote: post #826
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.

If it makes data up, then it is worthless for all implementations. I'd rather it said I don't have info on this question.

> If it makes data up, then it is worthless for all implementations.

Not true. It's only worthless for the things you can't easily verify. If you have a test for a function and ask an LLM to generate the function, it's very easy to say whether it succeeded or not.

In some cases, just being able to generate the function with the right types will mostly mean the LLM's solution is correct. Want a `List(Maybe a) -> Maybe(List(a))`? There's a very good chance a LLM will either write the right function or fail the type check.

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

#935

Post by timcobb »

weego wrote: post #857
timcobb wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it has a sample size of our collective human knowledge and language big enough to trick our brains into believing that. Yes, it's artificial intelligence. It's not the real thing, it's artificial.

Again, it's not intelligence. It's a mirror that condenses our own intelligence and reflects back to us using probabilities at a scale that tricks us into the notion there is something more than just a big index and clever search interface. There is no meaningful interpretation of the word intelligence that applies, psychologically or philosophically, to what is going on. Machine Learning is far more apt and far less…

> our own intelligence

this doesn't make any more sense than calling LLMs "intelligence". There is no "our intelligence" beyond a concept or an idea that you or someone else may have about the collective, which is an abstraction.

What we do each have our own intelligence, and that intelligence is and likely always be, no matter how science progresses, ineffable. So my point is you can't say your made up/ill defined concept is any realer than any other made up/ill defined concept.

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

#936

Post by jchw »

casey2 wrote: post #772
jchw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>they can dump out a boilerplate react frontend to a CRUD API This is so clearly biased that it boarders on parody. You can only get out what you put in. The real use case of current LLMs is that any project that would previously require collaboration can now be down solo with a much faster turnover. Of course in 20 years when compute finally catches up they will just be super intelligent AGI

I have Cursor running on my machine right now. I am even paying for it. This is in part because no matter what happens, people keep professing, basically every single time a new model is released, that it has finally happened: programmers are finally obsolete.

Despite the ridiculous hype, though, I have found that these things have crossed into usefulness. I imagine for people with less experience, these tools are a godsend, enabling them to do things they definitely couldn't do on their own before. Cool.

Beyond that? I definitely struggle to find things I can do with these tools that I couldn't do better without. The main advantage so far is that these tools can do these things very fast and relatively cheaply. Personally, I would love to have a tool that I can describe what I want in detailed but plain English and have it be done. It would probably ruin my career, but it would be amazing for building software. It'd be like having an army of developers on your desktop computer.

But, alas, a lot of the cool shit I'd love to do with LLMs doesn't seem to pan out. They're really good at TypeScript and web stuff, but their proficiency definitely tapers off as you veer out. It seems to work best when you can find tasks that basically amount to translation, like converting between programming languages in a fuzzy way (e.g. trying to translate idioms). What's troubling me the most is that they can generate shitloads of code but basically can't really debug the code they write beyond the most entry-level problem-solving. Reverse engineering also seems like an amazing use case, but the implementations I've seen so far definitely are not scratching the itch.

> Of course in 20 years when compute finally catches up they will just be super intelligent AGI

I am betting against this. Not the "20 years" part, it could be months for all we know; but the "compute finally catches up" part. Our brains don't burn kilowatts of power to do what they do, yet given basically unbounded time and compute, current AI architectures are simply unable to do things that humans can, and there aren't many benchmarks that are demonstrating how absolutely cataclysmically wide the gap is.

I'm certain there's nothing magical about the meat brain, as much as that is existentially challenging. I'm not sure that this follows through to the idea that you could replicate it on a cluster of graphics cards, but I'm also not personally betting against that idea, either. On the other hand, getting the absurd results we have gotten out of AI models today didn't involve modest increases. It involved explosive investment in every dimension. You can only explode those dimensions out so far before you start to run up against the limitations of... well, physics.

Maybe understanding what LLMs are fundamentally doing to replicate what looks to us like intelligence will help us understand the true nature of the brain or of human intelligence, hell if I know, but what I feel most strongly about is this: I do not believe LLMs are replicating some portion of human intelligence. They are very obviously neither a subset or superset or particularly close to either. They are some weird entity that overlaps in other ways we don't fully comprehend yet.

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

#938

Post by cmbothwell »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #378
nonethewiser wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. … I've both seen online and heard people quote LLM output as if it were authoritative. Thats not an LLM problem. But indeed quite bothersome. Dont tell me what Chatgpt told you. Tell me what you know. Maybe you got it from ChatGPT and verified it. Great. But my jaw kind of drops when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct.

> But my jaw kind of drops when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct. Yes but they're literally told by allegedly authoritative sources that it's going to change everything and eliminate intellectual labor, so is it totally their fault? They've heard about the uncountable sums of money spent on creating such software, why would they assume it was anything short of advertised?

I’ve come to believe a more depressing take: they _want_ to believe it, and therefore do.

No disclaimer is gonna change that.

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

#939

Post by DarmokJalad1701 »

xigoi wrote: post #906
KoolKat23 wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some of the more modern tools do exactly that. If you upload a CSV to Claude, it will not (or at least not anymore) try to process the whole thing. It will read the header, and then ask you what you want. It will then write the appropriate Javascript code and run it to process the data and figure out the stats/whatever you asked it for.

I recently did this with a (pretty large) exported CSV of calories/exercise data from MyFitnessPal and asked it to evaluate it against my goals/past bloodwork etc (which I have in a "Claude Project" so that it has access to all that information + info I had it condense and add to the project context from previous convos).

It wrote a script to extract out extremely relevant metrics (like ratio of macronutrients on a daily basis for example), then ran it and proceeded to talk about the result, correlating it with past context.

Use the tools properly and you will get the desired results.

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

#940

Post by joquarky »

thisissomething wrote: post #755
bluefirebrand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

What changed my point of view regarding LLMs was when I realized how crucial context is in increasing output quality. Treat the AI as a freelancer working on your project. How would you ask a freelancer to create a Kanban system for you? By simply asking "Create a Kanban system", or by providing them a 2-3 pages document describing features, guidelines, restrictions, requirements, dependencies, design ethos, etc? Whi…

I see it as a knowledge multiplier. You still need to know enough about the subject to verify the output.
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