alt Hacker NewsLlms are far from being ingenious or innovative. The main way they can surprise you today is pulling in information that’s new TO YOU - I impressed with the algorithms they pop out sometimes simply because never formally studied compsci. But when it treads on my home turf I find it very basic, and for bigger picture stuff like system architecture its terrible, by its nature it doesn’t have a “vision” of how the whole system fits together
Replies
Strong agree. My 30 years of experience building computers and breaking them has made me better because I don’t trust my knowledge or myself as a first principle. If I didn’t have that and I could easily see myself in an alternate reality, coming in late to the game to leverage ai to build a car out of seatbelts; harnessing all the power of 1000 suns seeing that idea to fruition.
Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. —Michael Crichton
Edit: sibling comment explains it much more plainly.
I'd argue it is the other way around - LLMs are great at pure creativity, creating something that never existed before, but not always at "pulling in information that’s new TO YOU". I use them for entertainment - jokes, short flash fiction etc. and they are excellent at it.
Yeah, they can only impress the bottom 99% of people. Who needs junk like that.
The very best LLM can answer is the answer you can expect from an online forum like Reddit or a book/paper published more than a year ago.
If you know how they work and how they are trained this makes perfect sense.
Going out and searching the web gets around model cutoffs, so fixes the latency of knowledge issue a bit, but they’re still finding statistical modes of what they’ve seen before.
“Stochastic parrot” is seen as a crude and dismissive jibe at LLMs, but it’s actually a concise observation of the reality.
Exactly. If you're an expert on the topic, framework, or library, even the best LLMs are still underwhelming. Even for 15 line snippets, if you're very familiar with the programming language, you'd have written it differently.
An LLM is like a low IQ person with vast knowledge.
It's like reading a news paper, when it's about your field of expertise you find lots of errors, but when it's about something you don't know you take it at face value.