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Personally, it blows my mind that there are people out there who haven't experienced LLMs writing paragraphs of polished flowing prose that are ultimately strai

Personally, it blows my mind that there are people out there who haven't experienced LLMs writing paragraphs of polished flowing prose that are ultimately straight up wrong. Personally I only use LLMs for option/context discovery and to refine my own thinking, similar to how I'll bounce ideas off of friends. But even there they tend to get stuck on emphasizing obscure less-popular ideas. So it's more like checking with one friend who is happy to geek out on every topic, but has ended up going down some weird rabbit holes on many. Still I don't think this is going to be enough to kill the energy for it (humans are confident and wrong quite often as well). But this should be guiding how it's adopted and regulations surrounding it. For example, it shouldn't be used to make any decisions itself, rather just helping a human who is ultimately responsible for applying judgement, with their decisions necessarily rebuttable/appealable. Although given our past several decades of "computer says no" and "policy says no", I'm not so hopeful on this front.

ethagknight 2y ago
It is a very interesting idea generator, in terms of kicking ideas around with friends. I think the sticking point is that, continuing with real estate, a very programmatic task I encounter is 'write a contract to purchase XYZ property at ABC address with the following requirements...' Not too different from spitting out some lines of code. An attorney does that for me, he will start with an old contract we've used in the past, and it takes his team 30 minutes to an hour, at a blended rate of $500/hr. So that starts to set an upper bound on the value of work to be performed, in one of the higher per-hour cost lines of work out there. When you really drill down on the question of "but how will it generate value," it is relegated to being an efficiency tool for many and a replacement for google search for most. The smart will get more effective and powerful with better information, the less intelligent will be running off inaccurate or old info.

ethagknight 2y ago

It is a very interesting idea generator, in terms of kicking ideas around with friends. I think the sticking point is that, continuing with real estate, a very programmatic task I encounter is 'write a contract to purchase XYZ property at ABC address with the following requirements...' Not too different from spitting out some lines of code. An attorney does that for me, he will start with an old contract we've used in the past, and it takes his team 30 minutes to an hour, at a blended rate of $500/hr. So that starts to set an upper bound on the value of work to be performed, in one of the higher per-hour cost lines of work out there. When you really drill down on the question of "but how will it generate value," it is relegated to being an efficiency tool for many and a replacement for google search for most. The smart will get more effective and powerful with better information, the less intelligent will be running off inaccurate or old info.