this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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I pooh-poohed ChatGPT when it first came out so I gave it another crack at a technical issue I’ve been avoiding.
Gave me an outdated answer.
Gave me another outdated answer to a URL that doesn’t exist.
Gave me the answer I told it won’t work in the initial prompt.
Scolded me for swearing at it.
This is what’s supposed to replace search engines?
Your experience highlights what current iterations of LLMs are not well suited for, so I understand if that's what you were hoping to achieve, why you were left wanting, or disillusioned.
There's a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.
This can save you hours and hours, of reading time, and it's something that you can verify the answer on relatively quickly, to double check the LLMs response accuracy.
They're also good at doing something Google used to be good at, but sucks at now. Which enabling you to describe process, simple or complicated, short or long, that you either can't recall the name of, or aren't even sure where it's called, and letting you know exactly what it is. Also, easily verifiable.
There's plenty of other things too, but just remember that they are tools, not magic, or sentient intelligence.
The models are not real time, but there are tricks to figure out it's most recent dates of ingestion, such as asking topical entertainment or news questions, but don't go looking for a real-time information.
Also, I have yet to find a model that can provide an actual URL and specific source for anything it generates, which is why it's a good practice to use them to do tasks, or get information, that would take you longer to do, or get, manually, but that can be easily verified once you receive it.
And full self driving is also still coming! promise!
But if any research source cannot be used without verification, is it really useful? I agree, we should verfiy crucial information but when its wrong often, but confidently so, using natural language is a barrier not a benefit.
It's not a peer-reviewed journal or academic level source, and shouldn't be used as that.
But if I need to find some technical or scientific writings on a subject, but I don't know the correct nomenclature or need a more narrow set of keywords, that is something I can describe to the LLM and get back.
The keywords in their response can help me then hunt down the journal article or papers that I need using traditional search engines. I'm not just brainstorming here, this is something I do often enough to find real utility in it.
Again, these are problems that can be solved with traditional search engines, but at the cost of time and frustration sifting though every potential result.
You can spit out a hundred more examples of what an LLM can't do, but as I already said, they're not magic, just tools.
Yes, but for the average user, if it confidently gives misinformation, then its worse than a search engine. It is removing the verification step of reading the source, seospam aside. The whole business model is on using it more, not selectively.
One thing the article leaves out is the costs of processing should go down over time. Hopefully, as power transitions,.it also becomes more sustainable. However, it starts to become a bit like uber and self driving cars. How long can they burn through other peoples money to undercut competitions until the actual plan becomes profitable.
I'm not advocating for openai, their business model, or the environmental and financial cost benefit of current LLM technology.
They suck, it's dogshit, and it's not worth cooking the planet for.
I also don't disagree about the very real possibility that the average user may actually get dumber and more misinformed by relying on LLMs.
But we're on Lemmy, and I'm just tired of all these comments incessantly complaining about about how LLM's can't do x,y, or z.
Imagine being on a carpentry forum, and every day people complained about how their new belt sander was dogshit at cutting 2x4's or screwing in fasteners, so clearly the problem was with the concept of belt sander technology.
Oh, certainly LLMs are here to stay. Hopefully, they become conmoditised very quickly. But also, hopefully, the bubble bursts quickly too. Shoehorning AI into everything is dogshit. Actually using it for select reasons, where it is successful, should be great.
Already we have things like customer support phone trees that try to get rid of user interaction with scripts. AI here could be great to improve them. What's more likely is as the tech improves, more companies use AI rather than peioke for customer support, lol. Its dystopian.
The difference, of course, is the belt sander is not purporting to be able to screw fasten. Nor will it with a future update or subscription.
In your example, the thing missing is that the belt sander companies are selling their belt sanders as screw fastening, band saw multitools.
I always say about AI that it's not the tool but who's making it and why, and this is especially true for the average person. Your average person isn't seeing the LLMs that are trained to identify anomalies in MRIs or iterate on chemical formulas to improve drugs in a simulation that takes milliseconds compared to the months of research it would take technicians to replicate the same experiments. So all they can talk about is the AI that is in their face all day, every day, as every company in the world tries to shoehorn it into their product somehow. And so they complain about the belt sanders that the company told them would fasten their screws and cut their 2x4's.
The only way the complaining is going to stop is when the bubble bursts and these companies have to find a new way to chase the infinite profit pipedream.
Replace belt sander with CBD. A compound with very real and tangible benefits for specific use cases, but is marketed as a modern day snake oil cure all.
Imagine seeing people regularly complaining on bluelight, erowid, or whatever forums educated drug users frequent these days, bitching that CBD didn't cure their asthma, or STDs, so therefore it has no medical value.
They know it's a tool, yet they keep complaining about how the gas station CBD isn't magic and failed to cure their gonorrhea, even though they already knew it was never going to be able to, no matter what the packaging said.
But my analogy wasn't meant to be critically analyzed and dissected, it was a throwaway example to highlight the problem of people on Lemmy, who actually know better, but keep whinging about LLM's providing bogus URLs for citations, etc.
That's the story people tell at least. The weasel phrase at the end is fun, I guess. Leaves a massive backdoor excuse when it doesn't actually work.
But in practice, LLMs are falling down even at this job. They seem to have some yse in academic qualitaruve coding, but for summarizing novel or extended bodies of text, they struggle to actually tell people what they want to know.
Most people do not give a shit if text contains a reference to X. And if they do, they can generally just CTRL+F "X".
Weasel phrase? You mean the fact that I don't treat them like their actual Ai, but just a tool that needs to be used properly, monitored, and verified?
There's a reason why I never call them AI, because they're not. They're just advanced machine learning tools, and just like I keep a steady hand when using a table saw, I only use LLMs for tasks that they can help me do something faster, but are easy to verify they did it right.
And as someone who has been using them very regularly, I feel confident in saying that. It's not a weasel phrase, I'm not trying to sell anyone snake oil about what they can actually do, and I acknowledge that they're an oversold and overhyped means of cooking the planet faster, so it's not like I would be mad if they were banned tomorrow, but until then, I will keep using them in ways that are actually fruitful.
But sure, if all you need to do is find one word and a one body of text, that's not really a good use of an LLM, but that wasn't what I was talking about.
If I need examples of various legal or ethical concerns documented in a piece of writing, or other conceptual topics, I can give it a list, and then ask it to highlight all examples of those issues, and include the verbatim text where their present. I can then give that same task to a multiple different LLMs, with the same prompts, and a task that would have taken me hours to complete, takes me 30 to 45 minutes, including the time it takes me to give it quick read through see if anything was missed. But yeah, that requires a well crafted prompt, and it's not infallible.
"You'll fucking know when I'm swearing at you," was my reply to that shit the last time I gave it a spin (after it regurgitated nonsense after many prompts specifically asking for not nonsense).
Then as you ask "provide sources.", it says simply "Source: Tech Review Websites". If this came from an actual person I would genuinely ask it "do you take me for gullible trash?".
It's still somewhat useful, due to Google Search crumbling away into nothingness, if you ask "link me five sites with info about [topic]".
Garbage in garbage out. You give a shit prompt, you generally get a shit answer.