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I don’t understand. When I asked DeepSeek how to find AWS IoT Thing creation time it suggested me to use “version” field and treat it as a Unix timestamp. This

I don’t understand. When I asked DeepSeek how to find AWS IoT Thing creation time it suggested me to use “version” field and treat it as a Unix timestamp. This is obvious nonsense. How can this tool generate anything useful other than summaries of pre-existing text? My knowledge of theory behind LLMs also suggests this is all they can do reasonably well. When I see claims like this I suspect that either people around me somehow 10x better at promoting or they use different models.

simonw 2y ago
You're making the mistake of treating an LLM like a search engine, and expecting it to be able to answer questions directly from its training data. Sometimes this works! But it's not guaranteed - this isn't their core strength, especially once you get into really deep knowledge of complex APIs. They are MUCH more useful when you use them for transformation tasks: feed in examples of the APIs you need to work with, then have them write new code based on that. Working effectively with LLMs for writing code is an extremely deep topic. Most people who think they aren't useful for code have been mislead into believing that the LLMs will just work - and that they don't first need to learn a whole bunch of unintuitive stuff in order to take advantage of the technology.
- tejinderss 2y ago
  > Working effectively with LLMs for writing code is an extremely deep topic. There is a space for learning materials here. I would love to see books/trainings/courses on how to use AI effectively. I am more and more interested in this instead of learning new programming language of the week.
  - pertymcpert 2y ago
    At the moment the space is moving so fast that anyone who tries to write a book will be outdated by the time it's published. The only option is to dive in yourself or give up and wait for things to settle down and plateau.
- swfsql 2y ago
  So they still aren't lamp geniuses that you can rub and ask for 3 wishes??
- kikimora 2y ago
  You are making great point. Thanks!

simonw 2y ago

You're making the mistake of treating an LLM like a search engine, and expecting it to be able to answer questions directly from its training data. Sometimes this works! But it's not guaranteed - this isn't their core strength, especially once you get into really deep knowledge of complex APIs. They are MUCH more useful when you use them for transformation tasks: feed in examples of the APIs you need to work with, then have them write new code based on that. Working effectively with LLMs for writing code is an extremely deep topic. Most people who think they aren't useful for code have been mislead into believing that the LLMs will just work - and that they don't first need to learn a whole bunch of unintuitive stuff in order to take advantage of the technology.

tejinderss 2y ago
> Working effectively with LLMs for writing code is an extremely deep topic. There is a space for learning materials here. I would love to see books/trainings/courses on how to use AI effectively. I am more and more interested in this instead of learning new programming language of the week.
- pertymcpert 2y ago
  At the moment the space is moving so fast that anyone who tries to write a book will be outdated by the time it's published. The only option is to dive in yourself or give up and wait for things to settle down and plateau.
swfsql 2y ago
So they still aren't lamp geniuses that you can rub and ask for 3 wishes??
kikimora 2y ago
You are making great point. Thanks!