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>However, here I would like to argue that (especially in cutting edge scenarios) LLMs are not a good tool to do truly effective brainstorming. Great title, the

>However, here I would like to argue that (especially in cutting edge scenarios) LLMs are not a good tool to do truly effective brainstorming. Great title, they baited and switched. 95% of the time I don't need effective brainstorming, I need a bunch of ideas, let me pick the best, and move on. If its a real engineering problem, then I need >truly effective brainstorming.

defrost 2y ago
I recently spoke with a cousin about their current project decommissioning an oil and gas platform over the next four years (ie. real engineering (in reverse?)). Their comment was that ChatGPT can't write final reports but it's extremely useful for seeding brainstorming sessions with real human engineers. It can generate a list of health, safety, and environmental concerns related to the project that can be distributed and act as a "starter dot point list" that engineers can agree to, expand on, reject as being just silly, and add to as tengential thoughts arise. I'd argue that makes it useful in the context of real engineering brainstorming .. and that it's being used that way on multi million dollar projects in a billion dollar domain.
- behringer 2y ago
  Yeah for sure, lists of generalized questions is one of ChatGPTs strongest abilities, in my experience.
joegibbs 2y ago
There's a lot of this with current AI - someone will write a piece titled something like "LLMs are not suitable for brainstorming" or "GPT4 is useless for programmers" or "AI image generation has no use cases" - and what they say in the body is that they're not perfect for brainstorming, GPT4 can't write an entire app perfectly from one prompt, and Midjourney doesn't let you take a picture from your mind's eye and put it on paper.
firewolf34 2y ago
Seriously, it's the same argument that people give for "ChatGPT can't give me good code, I don't know why", just rephrased. The deluge of "GPT is not useful for X" articles meant to bait the average critic, despite it being used en masse for "subproblems in X-space" already... They're asking the wrong type of work from it. If you need some boilerplate or a transformation, it's going to give you a fantastic template to work with. If you need it, on the other hand, to engineer out a highly-specific and nuanced solution with an esoteric codebase to a complex problem, maybe not so much. The former is wide, the latter is narrow. It's going to take maybe a bit more breakdown of the scope into proper subproblems before you'll get a good answer; and that's something you can do yourself, or have an agent perform across multiple queries maybe (though I'll admit, more work needs to be done for the whole multi-agent workflows to be truly useful).

defrost 2y ago

I recently spoke with a cousin about their current project decommissioning an oil and gas platform over the next four years (ie. real engineering (in reverse?)). Their comment was that ChatGPT can't write final reports but it's extremely useful for seeding brainstorming sessions with real human engineers. It can generate a list of health, safety, and environmental concerns related to the project that can be distributed and act as a "starter dot point list" that engineers can agree to, expand on, reject as being just silly, and add to as tengential thoughts arise. I'd argue that makes it useful in the context of real engineering brainstorming .. and that it's being used that way on multi million dollar projects in a billion dollar domain.

behringer 2y ago
Yeah for sure, lists of generalized questions is one of ChatGPTs strongest abilities, in my experience.

joegibbs 2y ago

There's a lot of this with current AI - someone will write a piece titled something like "LLMs are not suitable for brainstorming" or "GPT4 is useless for programmers" or "AI image generation has no use cases" - and what they say in the body is that they're not perfect for brainstorming, GPT4 can't write an entire app perfectly from one prompt, and Midjourney doesn't let you take a picture from your mind's eye and put it on paper.

firewolf34 2y ago

Seriously, it's the same argument that people give for "ChatGPT can't give me good code, I don't know why", just rephrased. The deluge of "GPT is not useful for X" articles meant to bait the average critic, despite it being used en masse for "subproblems in X-space" already... They're asking the wrong type of work from it. If you need some boilerplate or a transformation, it's going to give you a fantastic template to work with. If you need it, on the other hand, to engineer out a highly-specific and nuanced solution with an esoteric codebase to a complex problem, maybe not so much. The former is wide, the latter is narrow. It's going to take maybe a bit more breakdown of the scope into proper subproblems before you'll get a good answer; and that's something you can do yourself, or have an agent perform across multiple queries maybe (though I'll admit, more work needs to be done for the whole multi-agent workflows to be truly useful).