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Sometimes I don't want creativity though, I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space and I use the LLM as a sort of gradient descent simulator to the
by satvikpendem 7mo ago
Sometimes I don't want creativity though, I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space and I use the LLM as a sort of gradient descent simulator to the right solution to my problem (the LLM which itself used gradient descent when trained, meta, I know). I am not looking for wholly new solutions, just one that fits the problem the best, just as one could Google that information but LLMs save even that searching time.
- bandrami 7mo ago> I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space Neither is the LLM
- satvikpendem 7mo agoOftentimes it is though, good enough for my purposes.
- bandrami 7mo agoIf you're not familiar with the problem space, by definition you don't know whether or not that's the case. The problem spaces I do know well, I know the LLM isn't good at it, so why would I assume it's better at spaces I don't know?
- satvikpendem 7mo agoI said familiar enough, not familiar. For example, let's say I'm building an app I know needs caching, the LLM is very good at telling me what types of caching to use, what libraries to use for each type, and so on, for which I can do more research if I really want to know specifically what the best library out of all the rest are, but oftentimes its top suggestion is, like I said, good enough for my purpose of e.g. caching.
- bandrami 7mo agoI still don't get what you're saying. If you possess enough information to accurately judge the LLM's suggestions you possess enough information to decide on your own. There's not really a way around that.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoOf course I'm deciding on my own, I'm not letting the LLM decide for me (although some people do). But the point is whatever the suggestion is is merely an implementation detail that either solves my problem or not, not sure what part of that is confusing. Replace LLM with glorified Google and maybe it's less confusing.
- bandrami 7mo agoNo, Google (at least back when it worked) ranked results based on the feedback of other users, so it was a useful signal.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoTheoretically the LLM would weight more popular suggestions more too. Regardless you're reading too much into this, either use the LLM or don't, I'm not sure if someone else can convince you. As I said for my purposes of getting shit done it works perfectly fine and works more like a research tool than anything else, especially if it can understand my specific use case unlike general research tools like Google or Stack Overflow.
- bandrami 7mo agoIDK man this sounds a lot like my junior devs saying "it works fine for me" as they hand in PRs that break prod
- satvikpendem 7mo ago
- jimbokun 7mo agoNo, this is the kind of thing LLMs are very good at. Knowing the specifics and details and minutiae about technologies, programming languages, etc.
- bandrami 7mo agoOh Lord, no. Not at all. That's what they're terrible at. They are ok-ish at superficial overviews and catastrophically bad at specific minutiae
- darth_aardvark 7mo agoHonest, non-confrontational, non-passive aggressive question: Have you used any of the latest models in the last 6 months to do coding? Or frankly, in the last year?
- satvikpendem 7mo agoThey note in another comment they don't even use search engines so I don't think they're the right person to ask regarding frontier models.
- darth_aardvark 7mo agoI'd ask them what tools they do use, but I doubt they'll see my comment; I'll see if I can mail it to them.
- bandrami 7mo ago(Why wouldn't I see your comment?) I just don't use the web much anymore because the experience has degraded so much over the past several years and it has become decreasingly useful at work as well. I do sometimes need to search for a document and find Kagi pretty good for that, but the old way of using a search engine to kind of explore and discover stuff just isn't viable anymore, unfortunately. I administer software for a living so I read a lot of documentation of that software but it comes with the software so I don't ever really need to search for it; I also read and participate in some forums and us the relevant IRC channels.
- apsurd 7mo ago(Trying to find where you might still see this) I've read the thread and in my mind you're missing that LLMs increase the surface area of visibility of a thing. It's a probe. It adds known unknowns to your train of thought. It doesn't need to be "creative" about it. It doesn't need to be complete or even "right". You can validate the unknown unknown since it is now known. It doesn't need to have a measured opinion (even though it acts as it does), it's really just topography expansion. We're getting in the weeds of creativity and idea synthesis, but if something is net-new to you right now in your topography map, what's so bad about attributing relative synthesis to the AI?
- bandrami 7mo agoBecause if that's it we've made a ludicrously expensive i-ching.
- imtringued 7mo agoIf there is something LLMs are good at it's knowing some obscure fact that only 10 other people on this planet know.
- bandrami 7mo agoThey're also very good at almost knowing an obscure fact that only 10 people know but getting a detail catastrophically wrong about it