| ▲ | maccard 2 hours ago | |
As someone else said in this thread: > The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high. I’m perfectly happy to write code, to use these tools. I do use them, and sometimes they work (well). Other times they have catastrophic failures. But apparently it’s my failure for not understanding the tool or expecting too much of the tool, while others are screaming from the rooftops about how this new model changes everything (which happens every 3 months at this point) | ||
| ▲ | elzbardico 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
There's no silver bullet. I’m not a researcher, but I’ve done my best to understand how these systems work—through books, video courses, and even taking underpaid hourly work at a company that creates datasets for RLHF. I spent my days fixing bugs step-by-step, writing notes like, “Hmm… this version of the library doesn’t support protocol Y version 4423123423. We need to update it, then refactor the code so we instantiate ‘blah’ and pass it to ‘foo’ before we can connect.” That experience gave me a deep appreciation for how incredible LLMs are and the amazing software they can power—but it also completely demystified them. So by all means, let’s use them. But let’s also understand there are no miracles here. Go back to Shannon’s papers from the ’60s, and you'll understand that what seems to you like "emerging behaviors" are quite explainable from an information theory background. Learn how these models are built. Keep up with the latests research papers. If you do, you’ll recognize their limitations before those limitations catch you by surprise. There is no silver bullet. And if you think you’ve found one, you’re in for a world of pain. Worse still, you’ll never realize the full potential of these tools, because you won’t understand their constraints, their limits, or their pitfalls. | ||