alt Hacker NewsJust before LLMs became available to the general public, I worked for a small (fewer than ten employees) strategy consultancy. They had some industry-specific analysis tools that were in Excel, and my job was to turn them into a software product that customers could operate themselves. The owner had a mechanical engineering degree, but every time I asked him a technical question about the tools, he'd just give me a sales pitch for the thing I was trying to build for him. He was always pitching for new business, and seemed to struggle to get out of 'sales mode'. I have no doubt that if I were working for him now, he'd be pointing me to an LLM in response to any question.
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Maybe unrelated but this memory pops up: I once worked with a mechanical engineer who could not visualize anything in his mind and had quite some trouble with word finding and explaining his ideas. He just couldn't say what needed to be built, he could only evaluate after it was built (often "argh, no not that").
It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:
"Why didn't you build what I said?" "I did. This is exactly what you said." "No it's not! I said x y z" "Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z" Silence. "Then that's not what I meant"
Its so much worse now.
I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!
This is why executives think LLMs can replace everyone. They can see it can replace them, and project that onto everyone else. And they don't see the gaps in knowledge because they don't care about the facts, only the presentation.