The problem is not the LLMs, but what people are trying to do with them.
They are currently spoons, but people are desperately wishing they were katanas.
They work really well for soup, but they can’t cut steak. But they’re being hyped as super ninja steak knives, and people are getting pissed when they can’t cut steak.
If you give them watery, soupy tasks they can do successfully, they can lighten your workload, as long as you’re aware of what they are and aren’t good at.
What people want LLMs to be able to do, ie. “Steak” tasks:
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write complex documents
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apply complex knowledge/rules to a situation
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Write complex code and create entire programs based on vague description
What LLMs can currently do ie. “Soup” tasks:
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check this document and fix all spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors
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summarise this paragraph as dot points
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write a python program that sorts my photographs into folders based on the year they were taken
Half of Lemmy is hyping katanas, the other half is yelling “Why won’t my spoon cut this steak?!! AI is so dumb!!!”
Update: wow, the pure vitriol pouring out of the replies is just stunning. Seems there are a lot of you out there who have, in one way or another, tied your ego very strongly to either the success or failure of AI.
Take a step back, friends, and go outside for a while.
What LLMs can currently do summarise this paragraph as dot points
The entire point here is that they can’t?
Clearly this post is about LLMs not succeeding at this task, but anecdotally I’ve seen it work OK and also fail. Just like humans, which is the benchmark but they are faster.
they don’t do any of that soup shit reliably either and reading the article might have told you that
I’d offer congratulations on obfuscating a bad claim with a poor analogy, but you didn’t even do that very well.
“spoons and katanas” has got to be the most baby brained analogy. are you a child
good god this entire post is the most tortured believer whataboutism I’ve encountered this month and there’s extremely strong competition here
are currently spoons, but people are desperately wishing they were katanas
ie. “Steak” tasks
you should make a youtube channel, The Katana Steak-Eater. I’d watch the shit out of that at least one saturday afternoon
Food analogy
This level of discourse wouldn’t fly on 4chan, how is it so popular with LLM fans?
needs to be a car analogy
- What people want LLMs to do, i.e. Corvette tasks
- What LLMs actually do, i.e. Trabant tasks