4 ms·

I think you're just not thinking hard enough of ways to use it -- use cases where "close enough" can be augmented by deterministic validation, cleanup and itera

I think you're just not thinking hard enough of ways to use it -- use cases where "close enough" can be augmented by deterministic validation, cleanup and iteration to perform real-world work that is "all the way". I'm currently littering my platform with small, server-side decisions made by LLM prompts and it's doing real work that is working. There are a ton of other people doing this right now. You can be as angry as you want about it, but in a year or two you'll be using the result of this work every day.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
Eh, it can be as easily said that you can promote “good enough” all you like, but “good enough” is never going to cut it for critical applications where large money or real lives are at stake. Programming languages need to accommodate such large-scale scenarios, and not only the individual-level use cases that make exactly zero money such as scripts for self-hosted servers that some Joe has in his mom’s basement.
voidhorse 3y ago
Fair. I don't mean to suggest LLMs have no use, but I do mean to suggest that we are in a period of gross overfitting. At the end of this all, I think they'll be best suited as massive noise generators. Human beings already generate waaaaaay more data than we know what to do with. With LLMs at our disposal, we'll be able to do so to the Nth degree. It will be the age of spam. As for real applications, sure it can get you started, but you still have to review and massage the output. In some cases this may help you get past the "fear of the blank page" but in others just doing it yourself to begin with instead of finding clever ways to prompt the LLM to get what you really want would have been more efficient in the long run anyway when you factor in output reworking.
- frabjoused 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree with you on the overfitting, but I think when the dust settles the working uses for it will emerge and the rest will be trashed. To your point, I think its fully open-ended uses such as a chatbot will relatively fade. I predict the real value will come out in converting user-intent in some subdomain into a deterministic set of options. The schedule conversion in the article is a common example of this. If you build these small, domain-specific use cases into a user interface, things just get easier for the user. A big benefit of this is that you already have a ton of context, so the user doesn't have that burden.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago

Eh, it can be as easily said that you can promote “good enough” all you like, but “good enough” is never going to cut it for critical applications where large money or real lives are at stake. Programming languages need to accommodate such large-scale scenarios, and not only the individual-level use cases that make exactly zero money such as scripts for self-hosted servers that some Joe has in his mom’s basement.

voidhorse 3y ago

Fair. I don't mean to suggest LLMs have no use, but I do mean to suggest that we are in a period of gross overfitting. At the end of this all, I think they'll be best suited as massive noise generators. Human beings already generate waaaaaay more data than we know what to do with. With LLMs at our disposal, we'll be able to do so to the Nth degree. It will be the age of spam. As for real applications, sure it can get you started, but you still have to review and massage the output. In some cases this may help you get past the "fear of the blank page" but in others just doing it yourself to begin with instead of finding clever ways to prompt the LLM to get what you really want would have been more efficient in the long run anyway when you factor in output reworking.

frabjoused 3y ago
Yeah, I agree with you on the overfitting, but I think when the dust settles the working uses for it will emerge and the rest will be trashed. To your point, I think its fully open-ended uses such as a chatbot will relatively fade. I predict the real value will come out in converting user-intent in some subdomain into a deterministic set of options. The schedule conversion in the article is a common example of this. If you build these small, domain-specific use cases into a user interface, things just get easier for the user. A big benefit of this is that you already have a ton of context, so the user doesn't have that burden.