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Gave me an outdated answer.
Gave me another outdated answer to a URL that doesn’t exist.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.
Have you tried Llama? If so, is it useful according to your criteria?
Llama is the model I use most often, followed by ChatGPT and Claude.
Others as well, but yes, it is incredible helpful for the tasks I use it for.
Self-hosted?
Yes and no, I have self-hosted models on one of my Linux boxes, but even with a relatively modern 70 series Nvidia GPU, it's still faster to use free non-local services like ChatGPT or DDG.
My rule of thumb for SaaS LLMs is to never enter in any data that I wouldn't also be willing to upload cleartext to Google Drive or OneDrive.
Sometimes that means modifying text before submitting it, and other times having to rely entirely on self-hosted tools.