3 ms·
This is the great disconnect in thinking around LLMs right now. You have people saying they are so amazing, why wouldn't you use them? But if they are so amaz
by krupan 6mo ago
This is the great disconnect in thinking around LLMs right now. You have people saying they are so amazing, why wouldn't you use them? But if they are so amazing, why are you mad when someone won't accept the code they produce? Just ask the LLM to duplicate that whole project! Oh, it's not actually that amazing of a tool? Hmmm
The fact is, LLMs are incapable of invention and synthesizing new ideas. They can't contribute to the zig compiler because they have not been trained on the zig compiler, because it doesn't exist yet.
Yes, they can churn out simple apps, and quickly. That's a pretty useful thing, especially for people that don't know how to write code. But that's not as revolutionary as you think it is.
Others have mentioned the hype around 3D printing several years back. Kinda the same story. People thought manufacturing was dead, stores were dead. You'd just print everything you need yourself! Turns out it's not quite like that. It could still get to that point someday but these are hard problems that take time.
Similar with LLMs. It took us, what, 70 years of computer and AI research to get to this point? And people assume we're going to skyrocket way past this point in another year or two?
- hansvm 6mo ago> The fact is, LLMs are incapable of invention and synthesizing new ideas. I don't think it's fully appreciated how much of the hard work of "synthesizing a new idea" is just combining existing ideas. LLMs have given me brand new algorithmic ideas with precious little in the way of a spark on my end to make that happen, and not just a few times either. Mind you, that workflow is arduous and involves a huge amount of experimentation, screening through interesting but ultimately wrong ideas, screening through outright bad ideas the LLM can't help but spew out as well, and manually massaging the results into something useful. It exists though.
- krupan 6mo agoThat sounds like the AI did some brainstorming, so to speak, and you did the hard work. If I understand what you are saying
- hansvm 6mo agoI did some kind of hard work, and the AI took away some other kind of hard work off my plate. For some problems, targeted brainstorming is still very valuable.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago> But if they are so amazing, why are you mad when someone won't accept the code they produce? Just ask the LLM to duplicate that whole project! Oh, it's not actually that amazing of a tool? Hmmm Is the barrier to entry really that you must be able to perfectly recreate the project from scratch before you can possibly have anything to contribute?
- krupan 6mo agoNo, and sorry if that's what I implied, but most of the work that needs to be done on cutting edge software like zig, most of the little tasks, are things LLMs have never been trained on. They will struggle to do even small tasks correctly if the small task is something they haven't been trained on. And of course the worst part about it is they will lie the whole time, telling you they can do it, that they did it, that it works, when none of those are true.