6 ms·

As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improv

by klabb3 2y ago

As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way of putting it is ”picking the brain” of an expert in order to build a rough mental model. It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning (yeah) aren’t very problematic here. Once you’re familiar enough you can switch to better tools and know what to look for.

wewewedxfgdf 2y ago
[flagged]
- the13 2y ago
  Probably all the hype and bs.
- layer8 2y ago
  They didn’t say that they were invested in it.
- fasbiner 2y ago
  Your framing is extrapolative, mendacious and is adding what could charitably be called your interpersonal problems to a statement which is perfectly neutral, intended as an admission against general inclination to lend credibility to the observation that follows. Someone uncharitable would say things about your cognitive abilities and character that are likely true but not useful.
- shitloadofbooks 2y ago
  I know you’re being disparaging by using language like “bake into their identity” but everyone is “something” about “something”. I’m “indifferent” about “roller coasters” and “passionate” about “board games”. To answer the question (but I’m not OP), I’m skeptical about LLMs. “These words are often near each other” vastly exceeds my expectation at being fairly convincing that the machine “knows” something, but it’s dangerously confident when it’s hilariously incorrect. Whatever we call the next technological leap where there’s actual knowledge (not just “word statistics” I’ll be less skeptical about.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  > invested Very probably not somebody who blindly picked a position, easily somebody who is quite wary of the downsides of the current state of the technology, as expressed already explicitly in the post: > It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning
keeptrying 2y ago
Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant. You can now do literally anything. Literally. Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they will given time.
- whartung 2y ago
  > You can now do literally anything. Literally. In theory. In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a drive littered with failed AI projects. And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects don’t work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic heads. “Sometime in the future I’ll try again.” It’s most successful with “stuff I don’t want to RTFM over”. How to git. How to curl. A working example for a library more specific to my needs. But higher than that, no, I’ve not had success with it. It’s also nice as a general purpose wizard code generator. But that’s just rote work. YMMV
  - tqwhite 2y ago
    First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI do it is a huge win. It’s also really good for finding bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic like a boss. Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty good results. I hope that helps.
  - ch4s3 2y ago
    They seem pretty good with human language learning. I used ChatGPT to practice reading and writing responses in French. After a few weeks I felt pretty comfortable reading a lot of common written French. My grammar is awful but that was never my goal.
  - keeptrying 2y ago
    You just aren’t delving deep enough. For every problem that stops you, ask the LLM. With enough context it’ll give you at least a mediocre way to get around your problem. It’s still a lot of hard work. But the only person that can stop yourself is you. (Which it looks like you’ve done.) List the reasons you’ve stopped below and I’ll give you prompts to get around them.
mdp2021 2y ago
My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known (e.g. a standard task in some technology used by many), and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public. About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments" (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue one" // "It is mission critical to cut the right wire; in order to decide which wire to cut, we must first get acquainted with the idea that cutting the wrong wire will make the device explode..." // "Yes, which one?" // "Cutting the wrong one can have critical consequences...")
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known Yes, that's a necessary condition. If there isn't some well known solution, LLMs won't give you anything useful. The point though, is that the solution was not well known to the GP. That's where LLMs shine, they "understand" what you are trying to say, and give you the answer you need, even when you don't know the applicable jargon.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public Very much so (I should have added this as a downside in the original comment). Before I even ask a question I ask myself "does it have training data on this?". Also, having a bad answer is only one failure mode. More commonly, I find that it drifts towards the "center of gravity", i.e. the mainstream or most popular school of thought, which is like talking to someone with a strong status-quo bias. However, before you've familiarized yourself with a new domain, the "current state of things" is a pretty good bargain to learn fast, at least for my brain.
- khaledh 2y ago
  Agreed. LLMs pull you towards the average knowledge, and they suck when you're trying to find a creative solution that challenges the status quo.
sunami-ai 2y ago
LLMs don't reason the way we do, but there are similarities at the cognitive pre-conscious level. I made a challenge to various lawyers and the Stanford Codex (no one took the bait yet) to find critical mistakes in the "reasoning" of our Legal AI. One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law. Sample output (scroll and click on stats and the donuts on the second slide): Samples: https://labs.sunami.ai/feed https://labs.sunami.ai/feed I built the AI using an inference-time=scaling approach that I evolved over a year's time, and it is based on Llama for now, but could be replace with any major foundational model. Presentation: https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/ https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/ 8-minute long video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s info sunami ai
- elicksaur 2y ago
  .
  - sunami-ai 2y ago
    A former attorney general is taking it for a spin, and has said great things about it so far. One of the top 100 lawyers in the US. HN has turned into a pit of hate. WTF all this hate for? People just really angry at AI, it seems. JFC, Grow up.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - sunami-ai 2y ago
    The sensitivity can be turned up or down. It's why we are asking for input. If you're talking about the Disney EULA, it has the context that it is a browsewrap agreement. The setting for material omission is very greedy right now, and we could find a happy middle.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 2y ago

by klabb3 2y ago

wewewedxfgdf 2y ago

[flagged]

the13 2y ago
Probably all the hype and bs.
layer8 2y ago
They didn’t say that they were invested in it.
fasbiner 2y ago
Your framing is extrapolative, mendacious and is adding what could charitably be called your interpersonal problems to a statement which is perfectly neutral, intended as an admission against general inclination to lend credibility to the observation that follows. Someone uncharitable would say things about your cognitive abilities and character that are likely true but not useful.
shitloadofbooks 2y ago
I know you’re being disparaging by using language like “bake into their identity” but everyone is “something” about “something”. I’m “indifferent” about “roller coasters” and “passionate” about “board games”. To answer the question (but I’m not OP), I’m skeptical about LLMs. “These words are often near each other” vastly exceeds my expectation at being fairly convincing that the machine “knows” something, but it’s dangerously confident when it’s hilariously incorrect. Whatever we call the next technological leap where there’s actual knowledge (not just “word statistics” I’ll be less skeptical about.
mdp2021 2y ago
> invested Very probably not somebody who blindly picked a position, easily somebody who is quite wary of the downsides of the current state of the technology, as expressed already explicitly in the post: > It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning

keeptrying 2y ago

Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant. You can now do literally anything. Literally. Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they will given time.

whartung 2y ago
> You can now do literally anything. Literally. In theory. In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a drive littered with failed AI projects. And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects don’t work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic heads. “Sometime in the future I’ll try again.” It’s most successful with “stuff I don’t want to RTFM over”. How to git. How to curl. A working example for a library more specific to my needs. But higher than that, no, I’ve not had success with it. It’s also nice as a general purpose wizard code generator. But that’s just rote work. YMMV
- tqwhite 2y ago
  First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI do it is a huge win. It’s also really good for finding bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic like a boss. Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty good results. I hope that helps.
- ch4s3 2y ago
  They seem pretty good with human language learning. I used ChatGPT to practice reading and writing responses in French. After a few weeks I felt pretty comfortable reading a lot of common written French. My grammar is awful but that was never my goal.
- keeptrying 2y ago
  You just aren’t delving deep enough. For every problem that stops you, ask the LLM. With enough context it’ll give you at least a mediocre way to get around your problem. It’s still a lot of hard work. But the only person that can stop yourself is you. (Which it looks like you’ve done.) List the reasons you’ve stopped below and I’ll give you prompts to get around them.

mdp2021 2y ago

My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known (e.g. a standard task in some technology used by many), and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public. About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments" (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue one" // "It is mission critical to cut the right wire; in order to decide which wire to cut, we must first get acquainted with the idea that cutting the wrong wire will make the device explode..." // "Yes, which one?" // "Cutting the wrong one can have critical consequences...")

marcosdumay 2y ago
> My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known Yes, that's a necessary condition. If there isn't some well known solution, LLMs won't give you anything useful. The point though, is that the solution was not well known to the GP. That's where LLMs shine, they "understand" what you are trying to say, and give you the answer you need, even when you don't know the applicable jargon.
klabb3 2y ago
> and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public Very much so (I should have added this as a downside in the original comment). Before I even ask a question I ask myself "does it have training data on this?". Also, having a bad answer is only one failure mode. More commonly, I find that it drifts towards the "center of gravity", i.e. the mainstream or most popular school of thought, which is like talking to someone with a strong status-quo bias. However, before you've familiarized yourself with a new domain, the "current state of things" is a pretty good bargain to learn fast, at least for my brain.
khaledh 2y ago
Agreed. LLMs pull you towards the average knowledge, and they suck when you're trying to find a creative solution that challenges the status quo.

sunami-ai 2y ago

LLMs don't reason the way we do, but there are similarities at the cognitive pre-conscious level. I made a challenge to various lawyers and the Stanford Codex (no one took the bait yet) to find critical mistakes in the "reasoning" of our Legal AI. One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law. Sample output (scroll and click on stats and the donuts on the second slide): Samples: https://labs.sunami.ai/feed https://labs.sunami.ai/feed I built the AI using an inference-time=scaling approach that I evolved over a year's time, and it is based on Llama for now, but could be replace with any major foundational model. Presentation: https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/ https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/ 8-minute long video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s info sunami ai

elicksaur 2y ago
.
- sunami-ai 2y ago
  A former attorney general is taking it for a spin, and has said great things about it so far. One of the top 100 lawyers in the US. HN has turned into a pit of hate. WTF all this hate for? People just really angry at AI, it seems. JFC, Grow up.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- sunami-ai 2y ago
  The sensitivity can be turned up or down. It's why we are asking for input. If you're talking about the Disney EULA, it has the context that it is a browsewrap agreement. The setting for material omission is very greedy right now, and we could find a happy middle.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
2y ago