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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

#941

Post by KoolKat23 »

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?

Often they will do exactly that, currently their reasoning isn't the best so you may have to coax it to take the best path. It's also making a judgement call in its writing the code so worth checking too. No different to a senior instructing an intern.

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

#942

Post by hagbarth »

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 don’t think your main experience with LLMs (coding clearly defined tasks) refute what Sabine is saying.

The use cases are vastly different and the first is just _not_ world changing. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but it won’t change the world.

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

#943

Post by vendiddy »

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…

I'm glad I'm not the only person in awe with LLMs. It feels like it came straight out of science fiction novel. What does it take to impress people nowadays?

I feel like if teleportation was invented tomorrow, people would complain that it can't transport large objects so it's useless.

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

#944

Post by mywittyname »

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.

It says that people need training on what the appropriate use-cases for LLMs are.

This is not the type of report I'd use an LLM to generate. I'd use a database or spreadsheet.

Blindly using and trusting LLMs is a massive minefield that users really don't take seriously. These mistakes are amusing, but eventually someone is going to use an LLM for something important and hallucinations are going to be deadly. Imagine a pilot or pharmacist using an LLM to make decisions.

Some information needs to come from authoritative sources in an unmodified format.

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

#945

Post by jchw »

raincole wrote: post #919
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…

> 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.

I tried LLMs for generating shell snippets. Mixed bag for me. It seems to have a hard time making portable awk/sed commands. It also really overcomplicates things; you really don't need to break out awk for most simple file renaming tasks. Lesser used utilities, all bets are off.

Yesterday Gemini 2.5 Pro suggested running "ps aux | grep filename.exe" to find a Wine process (pgrep is the much better way to go for that, but it's still wrong here) and get the PID, then pass that into "winedbg --attach" which is wrong in two different ways, because there is no --attach argument and the PID you pass into winedbg needs to be the Win32 one not the UNIX one. Not an impressive showing. (I already knew how to do all of this, but I was curious if it had any insights I didn't.)

For people with less experience I can see how getting e.g. tailored FFmpeg commands generated is immensely useful. On the other hand, I spent a decent amount of effort learning how to use a lot of these tools and for most of the ways I use them it would be horrific overkill to ask an LLM for something that I don't even need to look anything up to write myself.

Will people in the future simply not learn to write CLI commands? Very possible. However, I've come to a different, related conclusion: I think that these areas where LLMs really succeed in are examples of areas where we're doing a lot of needless work and requiring too much arcane knowledge. This counts for CLI usage and web development for sure. What we actually want to do should be significantly less complex to do. The LLM actually sort of solves this problem to the extent that it works, but it's a horrible kludge solution. Literally converting video files and performing basic operations on them should not require Googling reference material and Q&A websites for fifteen minutes. We've built a vastly overly complicated computing environment and there is a real chance that the primary user of many of the interfaces will eventually not even be humans. If the interface for the computer becomes the LLM, it's mostly going to be wasted if we keep using the same crappy underlying interfaces that got us into the "how do I extract tar file" problem in the first place.

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

#946

Post by geysersam »

jtafurth wrote: post #581
geysersam wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. So what? People are wrong all the time. What happens when people are wrong? Things go wrong. What happens then? People learn that the way they got their information wasn't robust enough and they'll adapt to be more careful in the future. This is the way it has always worked. But people are "worried" about LLMs... Because they're new. Don't worry, it's just an…

Being wrong when you are building a grocery management app is one thing, being wrong when building a bridge is another. For those sensitive use cases, it is imperative we create regulation, like every other technology that came before it, to minimize the inherent risks. In an unrelated example, I saw someone saying recently they don't like a new version of an LLM because it no longer has "cool" conversations with the…

I have a hard time taking that kind of worry seriously. In ten years, how many bridges will have collapsed because of LLMs? How many people will have died? Meanwhile, how many will have died from fentanyl or cars or air pollution or smoking. Why do people care so much about the hypothetical bad effects from new technology and so little about the things we already know are harmful

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

#947

Post by [deleted] »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #793
imtheopposite wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is that my experience has been 100% the opposite. I’ve been using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for almost a year (well only the ChatGPT for a year since the rest are more recent.) I’ve been using them to help build circuits and write code. They are almost always wrong with circuit design, and create code that doesn’t work north of 80% of the time. My patience has dropped off to the point where…

>They are almost always wrong with circuit design, and create code that doesn’t work north of 80% of the time. Sorry but this is a total skill issue lol. 80% code failure rate is just total nonsense. I don't think 1% of the code I've gotten from LLMs has failed to execute correctly.

[deleted]

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

#948

Post by imtheopposite »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #793
imtheopposite wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is that my experience has been 100% the opposite. I’ve been using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for almost a year (well only the ChatGPT for a year since the rest are more recent.) I’ve been using them to help build circuits and write code. They are almost always wrong with circuit design, and create code that doesn’t work north of 80% of the time. My patience has dropped off to the point where…

>They are almost always wrong with circuit design, and create code that doesn’t work north of 80% of the time. Sorry but this is a total skill issue lol. 80% code failure rate is just total nonsense. I don't think 1% of the code I've gotten from LLMs has failed to execute correctly.

[dead]

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

#949

Post by Mawr »

gonzobonzo wrote: post #259
cogman10 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience! No, that's not my problem with it. My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. Sure, sometimes it produces useful code. And often, it'll simply call the "doTheHardPart()" method. I've even caught it literally writing the wrong algor…

> My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. The same is true about the internet, and people even used to use these arguments to try to dissuade people from getting their information online (back when Wikipedia was considered a running joke, and journalists mocked blogs). But today it would be considered sill…

Shades of grey fallacy. You have way more context clues about the information on the internet than you do with an LLM. In fact, with an LLM you have zero(-ish?).

I can peruse your previous posts to see how truthful you are, I can tell if your post has been down/upvoted, I can read responses to your post to see if you've been called out on anything, etc.

This applies tenfold in real life where over time you get to build comprehensive mental models of other people.

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

#950

Post by hansmayer »

jibal wrote: post #640
re-thc wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? Lots e.g. vacuum cleaners. > But at no point in history could you talk to your phone You could always "talk" to your phone just like you could "talk" to a parrot or a dog. What does that even mean? If we're talking about LLMs, I still haven't been able to have a real conversation with 1. There's too mu…

Of course they aren't "real" conversations but I can dialog with LLMs as a means of clarifying my prompts. The comment about parrots and dogs is made in bad faith.

By your own admission, those are not dialogues, but merely query optimisations in an advanced query language. Like how you would tune an SQL query until your get the data you are expecting to see. That's what it is for the LLMs.
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