My problem with LLMs is that they're expert pattern matchers and little else.

Ask them the integral from 1-5 of ln(x) and they're sure to screw it up.

They'll give you something that sounds like the right answer, but their explanations are nonsense.

They checked to see whether or not they had Lemmy accounts.

Cold readings, like a psychic, is how I recently heard them referred to as.

I'm overtly anti-llm. I don't think it's dramatic at all to be so.

Enough has come out about how much power and water datacenters used to train and run it consume, people being driven insane by it, investors hoping to displace jobs with it, how over reliance on it diminishes your mental faculties, people from minors to adults using it to create deepfake porn of minors (literally it's on lemmy rn https://lemmy.ml/post/32581009), its use in overt misinformation (particularly from our modern warzones and disaster areas), overt theft of writing and artistry to train these things, and last but not least: limitless spam.

I'm affected by most of those things indirectly, but the spam affects me daily. Can't search for something on the net anymore without being served f-tier LLM-produced garbage.

So what are the good parts? Doesn't seem like they outweigh these bad parts, whatever they are.

I use AI daily and find it useful as a tool. Its also frustrating in its current state. The disgusting default buttlick responses, trying to please the user with fake polite drool.
And then the many, many mistakes.

And it's a new tool, so yea it need to ripen....

And that means to go all in on a company strategic level of AI as a technology is dumb.

When building a product the problem the product solves is to be the center of the work. Not the technology used to achieve the solution.

I've got some bad news for you. They will never fix the mistakes as it cannot reason, it has no actual intelligence. LLMs are already plateauing and are miles away from being trustworthy. And they steal copyrighted work every request

All Americans are, ya nitwits

There it is. Reason. Machines can't reason. Not one. They can fake it. They can mimic. But they cannot reason and never will

Remember how a few years ago 3d displays and VR were being shoved in everyone's faces? I can see the current "AI" trend going the same way.

As skeptical as I am, I'm feeling pressure to join the BS train on this. It's literally all over LinkedIn... Even though I'm sure it's all mostly bullshit, it doesn't matter that I think. What matters is that this is where billionaires are dumping their money so I need to be in a position to get some of it or I may not be able to be gainfully employed in 10 years.

Most of these arguments were made for computers back when they were gaining popularity fyi.

The people outsourcing their thinking to LLMs weren’t gonna do much thinking in the first place. And honestly once you use them for a while you quickly realize what their good uses are and what are their limitations and thinking is not its strong suit. But it’s great at sorting large data and making it digestible. Or writing corpo copy that was devoid of meaning anyways.

Remember that a hammer can kill a person just as well as it can build a house.

Now I agree that it is annoying that it is being shoved into everything without any good reason, but the market will sort that out. What you are seeing is everyone rushing into a nascent market before it ossifies and shakes everyone except one or two winners. In 10 years I’m sure LLMs will be more like you have one that you plug into every service you use and it will be provided by one of a handful of companies who are the only ones capable of profiting from this because of the economies of scales it requires to work. Ergo not very different from every other tech rush that has happened in history.

LLMs are tools, simple as. Being a Luddite, screaming and kicking and crying over them is not gonna make it go away any more than boomers crying over computers have managed to make computers go away.

There's a difference between healthy skepticism and invalid, knee-jerk opposition.

LLMs are a useful tool sometimes, and I use them for refining general ideas into specific things to research, and they're pretty good at that. Sure, what they output isn't trustworthy on its own, but I can pretty easily verify most of what it spits out, and it does a great job of spitting out a lot of stuff that's related to what I asked.

For example, I'm a SW dev, so I'll often ask it stuff like, "compare and contrast popular projects that do X", and it'll find a few for me and give easily-verifiable details about each one. Sometimes it's wrong on one or two details, but it gives me enough to decide which ones I want to look more deeply into. Or I'll do some greenfield research into a topic I'm not familiar with, and it does a fantastic job of pulling out keywords and other domain-specific stuff that help refine what I search for.

LLMs do a lot less than their proponents claim, but they also do a lot more than detractors claim. They're a useful tool if you understand the limitations and have a rough idea of how they work. They're a terrible tool if you buy into the BS coming from the large corps pushing them. I will absolutely push back against people on both extremes.

VR is still cool and will probably always be cool, but I doubt it'll never be mainstream. 3D was just awkward, and they really just wanted VR but the tech wasn't there yet.

I own neither, yet I've been considering VR for a few years now, just waiting for more headsets to have proper Linux support before I get one.

Likewise, I'm not paying for LLMs, but I do use the ones my workplace provides. They're useful sometimes, and it's nice to have them as an option when I hit a wall or something. I think they're interesting and useful, but not nearly as powerful as the big corporations want you to think.

I was just trying to figure out how to express that exact sentiment. Thank you.

Can’t search for something on the net anymore without being served f-tier LLM-produced garbage.

I don't see a material difference vs the f-tier human-produced garbage we had before. Garbage content will always exist, which is why it's important to learn to how to filter it.

This is true of LLMs as well: they can and do produce garbage, but they can and are useful alternatives to existing tech. I don't use them exclusively, but as an alternative when traditional search or whatever isn't working, they're quite useful. They provide rough summaries about things that I can usually easily verify, and they produce a bunch of key words that can help refine my future searches. I use them a handful of times each week and spend more time using traditional search and reading full articles, but I do find LLMs to be a useful tool in my toolbox.

I also am frustrated by energy use, but it's one of those things that will get better over time as the LLM market matures from a gold rush into established businesses that need to actually make money. The same happens w/ pretty much every new thing in tech, there's a ton of waste until the product finds its legs and then becomes a lot more efficient.

I mean there is place in between highly skeptical and anti. I think its a faster and more convenient search as long as it gives sources and it makes creating and editing media easier. I don't like the energy usage and do like work bringing that down. Its just trying to get it to solve things on its own that seems to be pushed when we can clearly see it not working when used like that. I think the biggest issue is its crammed in as a solution and it works in the most half assed manner and they want to say that fine.

A certain amount of skepticism is healthy, but it's also quite common for people to go overboard and completely avoid a useful thing just because some rich idiot is pushing it. I've seen a lot of misinformation here on Lemmy about LLMs because people hate the environment its in (layoffs in the name of replacing people with "AI"), but they completely ignore the merit the tech has (great at summarizing and providing decent results from vague queries). If used properly, LLMs can be quite useful, but people hyper-focus on the negatives, probably because they hate the marketing material and the exceptional cases the news is great at shining a spotlight on.

I also am skeptical about LLMs usefulness, but I also find them useful in some narrow use-cases I have at work. It's not going to actually replace any of my coworkers anytime soon, but it does help me be a bit more productive since it's yet another option to get me unstuck when I hit a wall.

Just because there's something bad about something doesn't make the tech useless. If something gets a ton of funding, there's probably some merit to it, so turn your skepticism into a healthy quest for truth and maybe you'll figure out how to benefit from it.

For example, the hype around cryptocurrency makes it easy to knee-jerk reject the technology outright, because it looks like it's merely a tool to scam people out of their money. That is partially true, but it's also a tool to make anonymous transactions feasible. Yes, there are scammers out there pushing worthless coins in a pump and dump scheme, but there are also privacy-focused coins (Monero, Z-Cash, etc) that are being used today to help fund activists operating under repressive regimes. It's also used by people doing illegal things, but hey, so is cash, and privacy coins are basically easier to use cash. We probably wouldn't have had those w/o Bitcoin, though they use very different technology under the hood to achieve their aims. Maybe they're not for you, but they do help people.

Instead of focusing on the bad of a new technology, more people should focus on the good, and then weigh for themselves whether the good is worth the bad. I think in many cases it is, but only if people are sufficiently informed about how to use them to their advantage.

Your last paragraph implies that I'm naive for believing that complaining about it will make it go away, but I've done no such thing.

the market will sort that out

This is the naive statement.

Thanks for the actual response. Personally I think you sample size is way too low, and the selection is skewed towards people that already feel marginalized, which will in turn, skew your results

Exactly... I advise anyone with some kind of expertise to ask chat gpt some questions about your specific field, and see how accurate it is... Then try to ever believe it about anything else ever again.