What is it insanely useful for? (Besides convincing investors to sink more money into LLM-related companies? Because that is the one thing it does seem to truly be good at.)
LLMs generate text output that appears to be useful, but regularly is not. They're alleged to be a substantial boost to writing code, but that verdict seems to be in dispute. They can generate custom mediocre prose at scale, but that seems to be of ultimately limited utility (although it may be a godsend for propagandists).
We're coming up on the 4th anniversary of ChatGPT's release. And while I get that revolutionary technologies can take a while to mature, the Wright Brothers and Goddard weren't preaching imminent societal transformation by the end to the decade from the rooftops, either. (And that's before we get into the how they got there - getting to ignore laws and steal whatever they wanted might be insanely useful to a lot of people.)
With good input (prompts, specs...) LLMs can generate code that is often correct, faster than a human could generate equivalent code. Even when there are bugs, it is still "useful" from purely a time savings perspective. If you don't like the results, you can iterate rapidly.
Yes, you can use it to generate crap. I find Claude especially bad at writing like a normal person.
LLMs are not being promoted as "this can help write code faster/better/cheaper" (for the sake of argument presuming that they really can), they're being promoted as "Cortana" (. And their underlying economics are likewise premised on "Cortana" (for a huge amount of money). Which is going to be a disaster if/when they don't deliver.
To meet the threshold of "insanely useful"? The Sagan standard is, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
I can see that some people can make some use of them. (This is true of almost everything.) Whether or not that usefulness is worthwhile overall, whether it is a net good, or even ethical is a different question. But insanely useful?
Computers are insanely useful. So are engines. Water. Sunlight. Electricity. Grain and bread. Writing. Printing. And I don't feel bad making those sorts of comparisons, because that's the level of impact LLMs' advocates are promising. But it's not what we have.
What I would consider sufficient evidence for insanely useful? Reliably replace a human in prolonged, arbitrary, detailed interaction, without any inhuman screwups.
Agreed. Despite the many claims of how awesome LLMs are for productivity, we have yet to see that supposed productivity produce fruit. Moreover, I dispute the claims of productivity: in my own usage I find them to be at best neutral, or even a drain on productivity. In my opinion, there is to date zero evidence of the supposedly insane utility.
Yes it is. I find them empirically not useful. You may not wish to debate it, but the fact remains that there are a great many people who are not convinced of their usefulness.
LLMs are very good at writing code. The reality is that they are able to write code faster, at higher quality and with fewer bugs, with correct prompting. They are also really good at code analysis, penetration testing and discovery, and adjacent computer science disciplines.
No they are not perfect, nor do they produce the best code. But the undeniable reality is that any good engineer will produce more code, at higher quality, using an LLM.
So, that’s not really up for debate. The debatable part is if all that code is a good idea or has as much value as we think. The conversation has long moved passed “can LLMs write code?”. Yes, they can, very well, particularly if they’re steered by trained engineers.
This is probably just a personal quirk, but I despise spiral bindings. I hate the feel of them. They never hold together. They catch on everything and come apart. Pages get torn far more easily. They make the books - if you can even call spiral-bound stacks if paper that - more difficult to organize. They suck.
Also mass drivers so you can ship ridiculous amount of lunar oxygen, aluminium & even general dirt for shielding into the cislunar space. Not to mention any materials processed by high energy industrial processed provered by solar forges on the surface of the moon (both thermal & powered by locally manufactured solar panels).
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
On a similar note, the Large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) are structures in Earth's lower mantle that are hyothized to be remnants of Theia (the planetary-scale body that collied with, resulting in the formation of the Moon):
Thank you, and SahAssar for doing the due diligence here. Like many others, I have at least a passing interest in cryptography, and I'm confident I'd never even heard of this before.
A giant for-profit corporation based in Silicon Valley, funded by titans of finance, and in bed with the government is about as "traditional" as it gets.
LLMs generate text output that appears to be useful, but regularly is not. They're alleged to be a substantial boost to writing code, but that verdict seems to be in dispute. They can generate custom mediocre prose at scale, but that seems to be of ultimately limited utility (although it may be a godsend for propagandists).
We're coming up on the 4th anniversary of ChatGPT's release. And while I get that revolutionary technologies can take a while to mature, the Wright Brothers and Goddard weren't preaching imminent societal transformation by the end to the decade from the rooftops, either. (And that's before we get into the how they got there - getting to ignore laws and steal whatever they wanted might be insanely useful to a lot of people.)
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