It's also important to say what it isn't. LLM detractors, for lack of a better word, expect an oracle and then when they find out it's just a lossily compressed blob of human knowledge with natural language as a query interface they say the tool is useless.

I've got my opinion on whether that's useful or not and it's quite a bit more nuanced. You don't zoom-enhance JPEGs for a reason either.

An oracle was expected because that's what everyone kept saying it was or would be. If LLMs were shown and demonstrated realistically people would think they were really neat and find ways to use them. Instead I'm told I have phd™ level intelligence in my pocket. So of course people are going to be mad when it gets stumped on problems my 4yo could figure out.

Aren't the detractors the ones who know for a fact that it's a lossily compressed blob of knowledge and don't blindly fall for the hype?

> You don't zoom-enhance JPEGs for a reason either.

Tell that to the Google Pixel product team:

https://mk.absturztau.be/notes/ac4jnvjpskjc02lq

There are several human endeavors for which we select people of high aptitude and crush their souls in very demanding postgraduate professional education so they can remix a knowledge base that's difficult for humans to master and impossible for humans to fully encompass.

The worm in that apple is that you still need educated humans to catch the erroneous LLM output.

The problem is that figuring out which bits are the wrong ones is as much or more work than reading the relevant documentation. I think the main value is that it has a unified interface rather than 5000 different websites that you need to learn how to navigate.