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Nice balanced perspective there at the end: "as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that t
by wffurr 3mo ago
Nice balanced perspective there at the end:
"as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable."
It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.
- an0malous 3mo ago> and generally not to be trusted There are many AI bulls who adamantly disagree and cite Tao’s statements about LLMs for mathematical proofs as an example of how advanced and autonomous these systems already are
- irishcoffee 3mo agoStatistical gradient descent token vomiter. We can all say it together. Nothing about this is advanced or autonomous.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoThis is like saying humans are a self contained electron transport system, nothing special or advanced about that, just a scaled up nematode.
- abecedarius 3mo agoThe same AIs are doing math research now, you know. At what point do you stop explaining it all away?
- satvikpendem 3mo agoThey never will, because it seems to be a psychological effect among humans via the AI effect (see my sibling comment).
- satvikpendem 3mo ago[dead]
- mxkopy 3mo agoI mean just from the above quote it’s clear he doesn’t trust them for “mission-critical” tasks. And I doubt LLms have evolved significantly from their stochastic parrot nature over the last few years
- dahart 3mo ago> It’s a tool. Good for some things but not for others and generally not to be trusted. I agree completely you always need to check the work of LLM agents, but it does strike me as a tiny bit funny to anthropomorphize AI by using ‘trust’ while warning against anthropomorphizing the AI by using unchecked output. ;) Generally speaking, “trust” in AI has been going up very quickly as the models & harnesses improve, and as people figure out effective workflows. I trust my hammer with nails but not screws… does that mean the hammer should generally not be trusted? The problem with AI is we don’t know the difference between nails and screws. (This may be where my analogy breaks down. :P) But I feel like saying don’t trust it isn’t as helpful as saying something like you should expect to spend more time planning and iterating than before, and you should expect tot spend more time reviewing and checking output than before, and learn how to use skills and context and subagents, and learn to use AI on some non-production low-consequence projects first. Saying ‘generally not to be trusted’ implicitly suggests not using AI, and doesn’t leave the reader with how to use AI. The goal is to build trust by building good workflows and by understanding what works well and what doesn’t, right?
- lukan 3mo ago"I trust my hammer with nails but not screws… does that mean the hammer should generally not be trusted?" I trust a hammer to be able to hit a nail, without breaking. But if the hammer is old and the wood brittle, I don't trust it anymore. Using it for anything else (screws) has nothing to do with trust, but using the wrong tool.
- wffurr 3mo agoI don't see how "trust" is anthropomorphizing. Do I trust this bridge to hold my weight? Do I trust that this tool in my hand will perform as expected?
- falcor84 3mo agoI don't understand what trust means in this context. Even if I were able to hire Donald Knuth to write all my code, I wouldn't "trust" it to be bug-free, let alone to be the right fit for my needs.
- dhosek 3mo agoYou could trust it to be probably correct but he wouldn’t have tried compiling it.
- throwaway20xdl1 3mo agoIt’s quite clear from the blog post that LLM was used for something that was: - nice to have but clearly not important enough to invest time in - definitely not worthwhile paying someone to do - not going to hurt anything or anyone if it wasn’t implemented as close to what was envisioned. If you read between the lines then trust may also mean privacy, if you’re furthering the goal of some company that may be stealing your data for training even when they say they are not because there are legal loopholes that allows them to get away with it, etc. Your example of hiring Donald Knuth to write your code doesn’t fit into what’s being said about trust either. If you were never going to trust anyone to write your code, it doesn’t matter who it is anyway. For most of us, even if we are engineers, chances are hiring someone legendarily good at writing code to requirement will produce far better results than what we knew we could achieve. I would trust someone who is that good to write the code — more than myself — to do things I want to do it better than I can while being able to catch all the things that didn’t realize I needed.
- wffurr 3mo ago"Trust" - what level of review does the output need to meet your standards of correctness? Donald Knuth's code would be much more likely to meet my standards during a code review than some LLM output.
- falcor84 2mo ago> Donald Knuth's code would be much more likely to meet my standards during a code review than some LLM output. Just to nitpick - will it actually? I don't know what your relationship with Donald Knuth is, but to the extent I'm familiar with him and his approach to work, I would expect that even if I could afford him, I would not be able to get him to agree to accept my coding standards, whereas I found that LLMs (although flawed in many ways) can be cajoled relatively effectively to adopt my particular standards.
- andrepd 3mo agoIndeed. LLMs produce truly atrocious code, unmaintainable and unreliable. If you're vibecoding a toy to amuse yourself or something similar low-stakes, that's perfectly fine! For higher-stakes code, it's definitely not.