alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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You’re wrong on literally every point.
> 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.
Hard disagree.
Claude is able to come up with solutions in very niche areas where there is little discussion on the web, because it takes steps to digest the source of (for instance) frameworks and libraries, and can then use/advise on lots of esoteric options, edge-cases and all sorts of stuff that doesn't get discussed on the open web.
Nobody solves the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis by looking up online forums.
>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.
The LLMs are vastly superior for any subject matter with even the slightest hint of danger or otherwise high stakes because while both LLMs and Reddit will whine at you and talk down to you the LLM will actually knock it off when told.
Like I'm asking you about sheetmetal thickness vs joist spacing for re-skinning a goddamn carport with roofing steel, read the room, this is not the time to whine about permits and snow loads and whatnot because the project is happening with or without your advice.
And it's not just mundane stuff. Some guy who's retrofitting new chinesium controls onto 50yo industrial equipment that had a prior generation of controls cobbled on 20yr ago doesn't need to get talked down at about stainless on stainless corrosion when he's asking a question about a solenoid or something. If the LLM talks down to him he can brush it aside. If he tries that on reddit they'll dig in their heels and fling poo.
Cutting out the "negative value" middle man of having to painstakingly make the case about the validity of your big picture goal before getting answers to simple questions is of substantial value. Stuff that people would've painstakingly researched themselves rather than ask Reddit or HN or Stack Overflow because dealing with those people is so onerous they now just punch into their LLM of choice and get the best of both worlds.
That's not really true any more, since given tool use and iterative 'chain of thought' reasoning, it's more like an answer refined by conversation with the asker or the second best answerer, from the best answerer, is the best that you can expect.
E.g. consider the best answer describes how to achieve something with some CLI, but the CLI's changed and the command is now broken. It can discover that, combine with the 'best answer' about what changed in the CLI, and fix it to work for the original problem even if that's completely novel and there were no extant answers about solving the problem with the new CLI form, or that it had broken that use case.
It doesn't change fundamentally how they work of course, but 'thinking', creating that feedback loop, made them significantly more useful IMO.