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I'm pretty sure most people, developers especially, have had magical, life-changing experiences with LLMs. I think the problem is that they can't cant do these
by zkry 2y ago
I'm pretty sure most people, developers especially, have had magical, life-changing experiences with LLMs. I think the problem is that they can't cant do these things reliably.
I get this sentiment from a lot of AI startups, that they have a product which can do amazing things, but due to its failure modes makes it almost useless as, to use an analogy from self-driving cars, the users have to still constantly pay attention to the road: you don't get a ride from Baltimore to New York where you can do whatever you please, you get a ride where you're constantly babysitting an autonomous vehicle, bored out of your mind, forced to monitor the road conditions and surrounding vehicles, lest the car make a mistake costing you your life.
To take the analogy farther, after experimenting with not using LLM tools, I feel that the main difference between the two modes of work is similar to driving a car and being driven by an autonomous care: you exert less mental effort, not, you get to your destination faster.
Another point of the analogy are things like Waymo. They really can do a great job of driving autonomously. But, they require a legible system of roads and weather conditions. There are LLM systems too that when given a legible system to work in can do a near perfect job.
- olivermuty 2y agoI mean… I agree that LLMs give only superficial value, but your analogy is plain wrong. I drove 3600 km Norway to Spain in 2018 with only adaptive cruise. Then again in 2023 with autonomous highway driving (the kind where you keep a hand on the wheel for failure mode) and it was amaaaazing how big the difference was.
- zkry 2y agoI get how I could be wrong on that front. I guess what I was trying to say was that there needs to be legible, predictable infrastructure for these AI systems to work well. I actually think that an LLM workflow in a constrained, well understood environment would be amazingly good too. I've been driving a lot in Istanbul lately and I'm not holding my breath for autonomous vehicles any time soon.
- zestyping 2y agoWait, can you say more about that? That doesn't match my intuitions very well, so I'd like to understand what made it such a big difference to you. Were you using Tesla Autopilot? If I were using Autopilot, I'd have to be constantly watching out for its mistakes, which would probably be equally or more stressful compared to using adaptive cruise.