Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

961–970 of 1001 posts

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

#961

Post by joquarky »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #703
ryandrake wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Benchmarks could track that too - I don't know if they do, but that information should actually be available and easy to get. When models are scored on e.g. "pass10", i.e. pass the challen…

> For many tasks, validating a solution is order of magnitudes easier and cheaper than finding the solution in the first place.

A good example that I use frequently is a reverse dictionary.

It's also useful for suggesting edits to text that I have written. It's easy for me to read its suggestions and accept/reject them.

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

#962

Post by joquarky »

sitkack wrote: post #807
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know if she is a fraud, but she has definitely greatly amplified Rage Bait Farming and talking about things that are far outside of her domain of expertise as if she were an expert. In no way am I credentialing her, lots of people can make astute observations about things they weren't trained in, but she both mastered sounding authoritative and at the same time, presenting things to go the most engagement pos…

I've frequently heard that once you get sucked into the YouTube algorithm, you have to keep making content to maintain rankings.

This trap reminds me of the Perry Bible Fellowship comic "Catch Phrase" which has been removed for being too dark but can still be found with a search.

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

#963

Post by ksec »

I think she is right. And it may have some very real consequence. The latest Gen Alpha are AI native. They have been using AI for one or two years now. And as they grow up their knowledge will definitely be built on top of AI. This leads to a few fundamental problems.

1. AI inventing false information that is being used to built on their foundational knowledge.

2. There is a lot less problem solving for them once they are used to AI.

I think the fundamental of Eduction needs to look at AI or current LLM chatbot seriously and start asking or planning how to react to it. We have already witness Gen Z, with era of Google thinking they know everything and if not google it. Thinking of "They Know it ALL" only to be battered in the real world.

AI may make it even worst.

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

#964

Post by snackernews »

icepat wrote: post #737
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.

I agree. I use LLMs heavily for gruntwork development tasks (porting shell scripts to Ansible is an example of something I just applied them to). For these purposes, it works well. LLMs excel in situations where you need repetitive, simple adjustments on a large scale. IE: swap every postgres insert query, with the corresponding mysql insert query. A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pat…

In this analogy are all the steamroller manufacturers loudly proclaiming how well it 10x the process of bulk ironing clothes?

And is a credulous executive class en masse buying into that steam roller industry marketing and the demos of a cadre of influencer vibe ironers who’ve never had to think about the longer term impacts of steam rolling clothes?

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

#965

Post by mplanchard »

joquarky wrote: post #959
mplanchard wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, my arrogance amazes even me.

The point is more that everyone seems to acknowledge that a) output is spotty, and b) it’s difficult to provide enough context to work on anything that’s not fairly self-contained. And yet we also constantly have people saying that they’re using AI for some ridiculous percentage of their actual job output. So, I’m just curious how one reconciles those two things.

Either most people’s jobs consist of a lot more small, self-contained mini-projects than my jobs generally have, or people’s jobs are more accepting of incorrect output than I’m used to, or people are overstating their use of the tool.

Or something else!

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

#966

Post by sitkack »

joquarky wrote: post #962
sitkack wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if she is a fraud, but she has definitely greatly amplified Rage Bait Farming and talking about things that are far outside of her domain of expertise as if she were an expert. In no way am I credentialing her, lots of people can make astute observations about things they weren't trained in, but she both mastered sounding authoritative and at the same time, presenting things to go the most engagement pos…

I've frequently heard that once you get sucked into the YouTube algorithm, you have to keep making content to maintain rankings. This trap reminds me of the Perry Bible Fellowship comic "Catch Phrase" which has been removed for being too dark but can still be found with a search.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L0PAXOH718 Sponge Bob realizes he has played himself out with his own catchphrase!

Wow, thank you. I rarely good a good cultural recommendation here, but PBF I didn't know about.

I raise you, Joan Cornellà

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

#967

Post by off_by_inf »

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…

No, it can't write code like a Junior Zig engineer with 1 year of experience.

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

#968

Post by sitkack »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #805
cainxinth wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broader than that, it’s critical thinking skills. Using search and LLMs requires analyzing the results and being able to separate what is accurate and useful from what isn’t.

From my experience this is less an application of critical skills and more a domain knowledge check. If you know enough about the subject to have accumulated heuristics for correctness and intuition for "lgtm" in the specific context, then it's not very difficult or intellectually demanding to apply them. If you don't have that experience in this domain, you will spend approximately as much effort validating output a…

No, it is critical thinking skills, because the LLMs can teach you the domain, but you have to then understand what they are saying enough to tell if they are bsing you.

> you don't have that experience in this domain, you will spend approximately as much effort validating output as you would have creating it yourself,

Not true.

LLMs are amazing tutors. You have to use outside information, they test you, you test them, but they aren't pathologically wrong in the way that they are trying to do a Gaussian magic smoke psyop against you.

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

#970

Post by sweetheart »

GolDDranks wrote: post #354
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 am so confused too. I hold these beliefs at the same time, and I don't feel they don't contradict each other, but apparently for many people some of these do: - LLMs are a miraculous technology that are capable of tasks far beyond what we believed would be achievable with AI/ML in the near future. Playing with them makes me constantly feel like "this is like sci-fi, this shouldn't be possible with 2025's technology…

> but even just the tought of becoming... irrelevant is depressing

In my opinion, there can exist no AI, person, tool, ultra-sentient omniscient being, etc. that would ever render you irrelevant. Your existence, experiences, and perception of reality are all literally irreplaceable, and (again, just my opinion) inherently meaningful. I don't think anyone's value comes from their ability to perform any particular feat to any particular degree of skill. I only say this because I had similar feelings of anxiety when considering the idea of becoming "irrelevant", and I've seen many others say similar things, but I think that fear is largely a product of misunderstanding what makes our lives meaningful.

Post reply on HN