5 ms·

I agree about an abundance of apps, but what type of value are LLMs adding? It can sometimes be useful to input a more "human" search and have something get sp

I agree about an abundance of apps, but what type of value are LLMs adding? It can sometimes be useful to input a more "human" search and have something get spit out but 60% of the time it completely lies to you. I'm talking about questions related to web specifications which are public documents. Section numbers, standards names, etc.. will be completely made up.

jklinger410 2y ago
> but 60% of the time it completely lies to you This is such an exhausting conversation
- hansonkd 2y ago
  i think when people say things like this it indicates that they tried LLMs in 2022 and solidified their opinion there. I had the same impression about the hallucinations 2 years ago. The reality is in at the end of 2024, you can get incredible value from LLMs. I've used copilot to code almost exclusively now for the past few months. Anyone still comparing it to text completion I feel is operating on completely out of date information either intentionally or unintentionally.
  - beefnugs 2y ago
    Wait do you expect people to retry every failed thing they have tried due to marketing lies every how often exactly?
    - jklinger410 2y ago
      Do you expect the first iteration of every product to be perfect?
dayjah 2y ago
This is a thin edge of the wedge issue, right? ChatGPT is pretty darn good for most things. I’ve used it extensively for the past 18 months and only in a few cases would I say it “completely lied to me”. My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well. If the volume on a particular subject is low / susceptible to false information then it’ll lie. Recently it lied hard about how to configure MikroTik routers. I lost many hours. But for a large construction project recently it completely balled out. Are you doing cutting edge / complicated stuff? Have you examples of where it lies?
- therein 2y ago
  I don't want to turn this into another Claude lies less than ChatGPT subthread but since you mentioned configuration of MikroTik routers I felt like I should. ChatGPT lies a lot about RouterOS, I don't know why. Claude helped me a lot on the other hand with all things MikroTik.
  - dayjah 2y ago
    Thanks! I’ll give it a shot when I get to the vlan stuff I’ve on deck
- hypeatei 2y ago
  > Have you examples of where it lies? No specific prompts, but most were related to the XHR/Fetch specs and behaviors within. It would say "X.Y.Z sections defines this" but that section didn't exist at all and the answer provided was not accurate. > My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well I see. Well, I don't know if I find that very valuable but if others do, then so be it.
- adamc 2y ago
  I've asked it for things like book recommendations and gotten: - completely made up books - real books that were only marginally related - real books with really bad reviews I'd estimate that only 30-40% of the time did I find the results at all useful.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    stop using it like a database that you can query
    - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
      I wonder how many people are promoting it correctly. You can’t just query it like you might for google or something. It works best with lots of context and back and forth. And yeah, for many things you are going to get directional answers not exact ones (esp with “rote memory” like exact quotes from a book or something.)
rajamaka 2y ago
The value to me is by having an on-demand junior developer working alongside me for the price of $20 a month
- ipaddr 2y ago
  Mine is a senior developer with memory lapses.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    And that sometimes you need to bully a bit to get coerced answers out of... feels bad
- hypeatei 2y ago
  My experience with code completion tools (i.e. single line/method snippets) has been positive. But, anything more complicated seems to fall apart rather quickly.
- stonedge 2y ago
  I have upgraded to the $200 Pro tier, and, with o1-pro, all of my tasks delegated to the "junior" have been so much better. It takes longer to complete, of course, but the overall duration is less because I'm not having to go back and correct it as much as I was with 4o. It's been able to figure out problems that 4o continually failed on.
drusepth 2y ago
LLMs have been a personal tutor to me for the last year, able to explain anything and everything I've been curious about professionally and personally. I changed jobs to new technologies in large part because I effectively had an assistant able to help cover any gaps in knowledge I had, train me up quickly, and offer ongoing help on the job. They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years.
- krger 2y ago
  >They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years. If you're using them to fill knowledge gaps, what scaffolding have you set up to ensure that those gaps aren't being filled with incorrect-but-plausible-sounding information?
rtsil 2y ago
Off the top of my head, and just for the last couple of months, and only outside of work (where its value is even more immense), it has saved one of my indoor plants, told me how to handle a major boiler problem that would have left us without a working boiler during a weekend in the winder, with the next "emergency" repairman only available on Monday, advised me to use Kopia as backup solution for my personal files instead of Syncthing, helped me choose the right type of glass for a painting frame, answered a couple of questions about bikes and helped me when I was stuck in an harmonic analysis of a piece of music. All of that are extremely valuable to me (if only for the time not wasted googling answers), and in none of them its potential hallucinating would have been an issue. And I can't count the number of times where "specialists" in bike repairs or plumbing told me something incorrect or outright false, so I've learned to deal with hallucinations already!
- vel0city 2y ago
  > And I can't count the number of times where "specialists" in bike repairs or plumbing told me something incorrect or outright false, so I've learned to deal with hallucinations already! So much this. So many times I've argued with hired experts saying "can't be done" just to see yes, it can be done.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Yes, but which of those things would you not have resolved just as well 10 years ago? All those possibilities were added by the maturing web itself, as a genuinely novel change from having to source books or experts/friends in the days before. I'm glad ChatGPT didn't lead you astray, but I'm not seeing what it's added here besides shuffling up the user interface in a way that you presently and subjectively prefer?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    objectively, it takes less time to ask a question and get a direct answer than it does to search for some words, leaf through a couple of results, find one that has the information you want, and then read that page. If I want to know the height of the Eiffel tower, being told it's 1083 meters tall is faster than searching for its website, finding the stats section, then locating that information on the page. Google realizes that, so they pull that info out of the page and just put it on the results page for you.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
I find it useful, and it brings value to me (literally: I exchange valuable money for API access), even if it doesn't for you. Many other people report the exact same thing. Just because you don't find value in a technology, doesn't mean that others don't. In the past week I have used it for helping write a script in a framework I'm not super familiar with (OpenSCAD), I was able to finish a project in 5 minutes that otherwise would have taken me hours. I have used it to help make movie recommendations (none of them were hallucinated). I have used it to translate a conversation with a non-english speaker, etc. There are other tools that can help me do all of these things, but none quite as fast or painlessly. It might not be useful for your use case of asking questions related to specific web specs, but that doesn't mean that the technology has no value. Horses for courses...
lxgr 2y ago
That's because we're currently largely not using them correctly, i.e. hooked up to RAG instead of hoping that they've memorized enough of the training data verbatim, which is arguably a waste of neurons in a foundational model. Imaging being graded on your ability to quote exact line numbers of particular parts of your codebase as a senior software engineer without being able to look at it! LLMs are not, in isolation, a search product.
- lethibo 2y ago
  [dead]

jklinger410 2y ago

> but 60% of the time it completely lies to you This is such an exhausting conversation

hansonkd 2y ago
i think when people say things like this it indicates that they tried LLMs in 2022 and solidified their opinion there. I had the same impression about the hallucinations 2 years ago. The reality is in at the end of 2024, you can get incredible value from LLMs. I've used copilot to code almost exclusively now for the past few months. Anyone still comparing it to text completion I feel is operating on completely out of date information either intentionally or unintentionally.
- beefnugs 2y ago
  Wait do you expect people to retry every failed thing they have tried due to marketing lies every how often exactly?
  - jklinger410 2y ago
    Do you expect the first iteration of every product to be perfect?

dayjah 2y ago

This is a thin edge of the wedge issue, right? ChatGPT is pretty darn good for most things. I’ve used it extensively for the past 18 months and only in a few cases would I say it “completely lied to me”. My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well. If the volume on a particular subject is low / susceptible to false information then it’ll lie. Recently it lied hard about how to configure MikroTik routers. I lost many hours. But for a large construction project recently it completely balled out. Are you doing cutting edge / complicated stuff? Have you examples of where it lies?

therein 2y ago
I don't want to turn this into another Claude lies less than ChatGPT subthread but since you mentioned configuration of MikroTik routers I felt like I should. ChatGPT lies a lot about RouterOS, I don't know why. Claude helped me a lot on the other hand with all things MikroTik.
- dayjah 2y ago
  Thanks! I’ll give it a shot when I get to the vlan stuff I’ve on deck
hypeatei 2y ago
> Have you examples of where it lies? No specific prompts, but most were related to the XHR/Fetch specs and behaviors within. It would say "X.Y.Z sections defines this" but that section didn't exist at all and the answer provided was not accurate. > My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well I see. Well, I don't know if I find that very valuable but if others do, then so be it.
adamc 2y ago
I've asked it for things like book recommendations and gotten: - completely made up books - real books that were only marginally related - real books with really bad reviews I'd estimate that only 30-40% of the time did I find the results at all useful.
- airstrike 2y ago
  stop using it like a database that you can query
  - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
    I wonder how many people are promoting it correctly. You can’t just query it like you might for google or something. It works best with lots of context and back and forth. And yeah, for many things you are going to get directional answers not exact ones (esp with “rote memory” like exact quotes from a book or something.)

rajamaka 2y ago

The value to me is by having an on-demand junior developer working alongside me for the price of $20 a month

ipaddr 2y ago
Mine is a senior developer with memory lapses.
- airstrike 2y ago
  And that sometimes you need to bully a bit to get coerced answers out of... feels bad
hypeatei 2y ago
My experience with code completion tools (i.e. single line/method snippets) has been positive. But, anything more complicated seems to fall apart rather quickly.
stonedge 2y ago
I have upgraded to the $200 Pro tier, and, with o1-pro, all of my tasks delegated to the "junior" have been so much better. It takes longer to complete, of course, but the overall duration is less because I'm not having to go back and correct it as much as I was with 4o. It's been able to figure out problems that 4o continually failed on.

drusepth 2y ago

LLMs have been a personal tutor to me for the last year, able to explain anything and everything I've been curious about professionally and personally. I changed jobs to new technologies in large part because I effectively had an assistant able to help cover any gaps in knowledge I had, train me up quickly, and offer ongoing help on the job. They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years.

krger 2y ago
>They can make stuff up, but saying "60% of the time they lie to you" hasn't been true for years. If you're using them to fill knowledge gaps, what scaffolding have you set up to ensure that those gaps aren't being filled with incorrect-but-plausible-sounding information?

rtsil 2y ago

Off the top of my head, and just for the last couple of months, and only outside of work (where its value is even more immense), it has saved one of my indoor plants, told me how to handle a major boiler problem that would have left us without a working boiler during a weekend in the winder, with the next "emergency" repairman only available on Monday, advised me to use Kopia as backup solution for my personal files instead of Syncthing, helped me choose the right type of glass for a painting frame, answered a couple of questions about bikes and helped me when I was stuck in an harmonic analysis of a piece of music. All of that are extremely valuable to me (if only for the time not wasted googling answers), and in none of them its potential hallucinating would have been an issue. And I can't count the number of times where "specialists" in bike repairs or plumbing told me something incorrect or outright false, so I've learned to deal with hallucinations already!

vel0city 2y ago
> And I can't count the number of times where "specialists" in bike repairs or plumbing told me something incorrect or outright false, so I've learned to deal with hallucinations already! So much this. So many times I've argued with hired experts saying "can't be done" just to see yes, it can be done.
swatcoder 2y ago
Yes, but which of those things would you not have resolved just as well 10 years ago? All those possibilities were added by the maturing web itself, as a genuinely novel change from having to source books or experts/friends in the days before. I'm glad ChatGPT didn't lead you astray, but I'm not seeing what it's added here besides shuffling up the user interface in a way that you presently and subjectively prefer?
- fragmede 2y ago
  objectively, it takes less time to ask a question and get a direct answer than it does to search for some words, leaf through a couple of results, find one that has the information you want, and then read that page. If I want to know the height of the Eiffel tower, being told it's 1083 meters tall is faster than searching for its website, finding the stats section, then locating that information on the page. Google realizes that, so they pull that info out of the page and just put it on the results page for you.

dghlsakjg 2y ago

I find it useful, and it brings value to me (literally: I exchange valuable money for API access), even if it doesn't for you. Many other people report the exact same thing. Just because you don't find value in a technology, doesn't mean that others don't. In the past week I have used it for helping write a script in a framework I'm not super familiar with (OpenSCAD), I was able to finish a project in 5 minutes that otherwise would have taken me hours. I have used it to help make movie recommendations (none of them were hallucinated). I have used it to translate a conversation with a non-english speaker, etc. There are other tools that can help me do all of these things, but none quite as fast or painlessly. It might not be useful for your use case of asking questions related to specific web specs, but that doesn't mean that the technology has no value. Horses for courses...

lxgr 2y ago

That's because we're currently largely not using them correctly, i.e. hooked up to RAG instead of hoping that they've memorized enough of the training data verbatim, which is arguably a waste of neurons in a foundational model. Imaging being graded on your ability to quote exact line numbers of particular parts of your codebase as a senior software engineer without being able to look at it! LLMs are not, in isolation, a search product.

lethibo 2y ago
[dead]