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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

#951

Post by px1999 »

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.

Except value isnt polarised like that.

In a research context, it provides pointers, and keywords for further investigation. In a report-writing context it provides textual content.

Neither of these or the thousand other uses are worthless. Its when you expect working and complete work product that it's (subjectively, maybe) worthless but frankly aiming for that with current gen technology is a fool's errand.

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

#952

Post by latentsea »

babyent wrote: post #852
somenameforme wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly because of how they were initially marketed. In an effort to drive hype 'we' were promised the world. Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? In reality Bard, let alone whatever early version he was using, is about as sentient as my left asscheek. OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety'…

Bro AGI as a marketing term is too stale already. We are now at Artificial SUPER Intelligence. I’m waiting for Artificial Pro Max Super Duper Intelligence.

You wait, someday they'll come out with something they start calling AI 2.0

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

#953

Post by hansmayer »

lostmsu wrote: post #233
lolinder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a difference between seeing them as valuable in their current state vs being "bullish about LLMs" in the stock market sense. The big problem with being bullish in the stock market sense is that OpenAI isn't selling the LLMs that currently exist to their investors, they're selling AGI. Their pitch to investors is more or less this: > If we accomplish our goal we (and you) will have infinite money. So the expecte…

I think that people who don't believe LLMs to be AGI are not very good at Venn diagrams. Because they certainly are artificial, general, and intelligent according to any dictionary.

Oh, the irony of using the verb "believe" in the same sentence with Venn diagrams... :)

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

#954

Post by hansmayer »

jryan49 wrote: post #114
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…

It would be fine if it were sold that way, but there is so much hype. We're told that it's going to replace all of us and put us all out our jobs. They set the expectations so high. Like remember OpenAI showing a video of it doing your taxes for you? Predictions that super-intelligent AI is going to radically transform society faster than we can keep up? I think that's where most of the backlash is coming from.

Forget OpenAI ChatGPT doing your taxes for you. Now Gemini will write up your sales slides about Gouda cheese, stating wrongly in the process that gouda makes up about 50% of all cheese consumption worldwide :) These use-cases are getting more useful by the day ;)

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

#955

Post by abrichr »

crazygringo wrote: post #763
Terr_ wrote: 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…

> I just need to verify whichever part I need to use for something else. I can run the code it produces to see if it works. I can look up the reference to see if it exists. I can Google the particular fact to see if it's real. It's really very little effort. And the verification is orders of magnitude easier and faster than coming up with the information in the first place. Which is what makes LLM's so incredibly helpful.

Well put.

Especially this:

> I can run the code it produces to see if it works.

You can get it to generate tests (and easy ways for you to verify correctness).

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

#956

Post by foxglacier »

bongodongobob wrote: post #205

I wonder if this site isn't impressed because there are a lot of 1% coders here that don't understand what most people do at work. It's mostly administrative. Take this spreadsheet, combine with this one, stuff it into power BI, email it to Debbie so she can spell check it and send to the client. Y'all forget there are companies that actually make things that don't have insane valuations like your bullshit apps do. A…

I think it's because it's mostly old people which tends to come with being uninspired and jaded from previous hypes. There's always been the same attitude towards cryptocurrency. Young people are drawn to exciting new things that really break open their existing worldviews. Bitcoin was pioneered by teenagers and young men.

Also, people in general quickly adapt. LLMs are absolute sci-fi magic but you forget that easily. Here's a comedian's view on that phenomenon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

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

#957

Post by joquarky »

glimshe wrote: post #91
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'm tired of people bashing LLMs. AI is so useful in my daily work that I can't understand where these people are coming from. Well, whatever... As you said, examples where I wouldn't expect LLMs to be good at from people who dismiss the scenarios where LLMs are great at. I don't want to convince anyone, to be honest - I just want to say they are incredibly useful for me and a huge time saver. If people don't want to…

I'm starting to resign myself to just enjoying the benefits and let those who can't evolve fall behind.

I'm growing weary of trying to help people use these tools properly.

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

#958

Post by joquarky »

skydhash wrote: post #433
School-Cotton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never write code to automate something in your personal environment, or to analyze some one-off data, rather than to actually go into production?

Not GP, but more often than not I reach out to tools I already know (sed,awk,python) or read the docs which don't take that much time if you know how to get to the sections you need.

While you're scanning through the docs, I'm already done and working on the next task.

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

#959

Post by joquarky »

mplanchard wrote: post #308
sidewndr46 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every time someone brings up "Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases" I like to point at that such code is not likely to be used for anything that matters

I’m always amazed in these discussions how many people apparently have jobs doing a bunch of stuff that either doesn’t need to be correct or is simple enough that it doesn’t require any significant amount of external context.

I'm always amazed by the arrogance that if you can't hack it, then everyone else can't either.

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

#960

Post by joquarky »

Jyaif wrote: post #891
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…

> there are two kinds of people who use AI You hit the nail on this one. Around me I noticed that the bashing of LLMs come from the smart people that want others to know they are smart.

I've noticed there seems to be a gatekeeping archetype that operates as a hard cynic to nearly everything, so that when they finally judge something positively they get heaps of attention.

It doesn't always correlate with narcissism, but it happens much more than chance.

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