Oh hey, it's my point of view from a year ago...

It's definitely changed in that time

I've been hearing this retort every year. The only difference this time is you're not a green account.

If things have actually changed, you wouldn't be begging the question. LLMs, as popularly used, are still just a new kind of search engine for natural language answers to natural language questions. They're portable in a way, too. That's really cool tech, but not a revolution. It's pretty underwhelming compared to previous decades of change. It's a lot more error prone too, since it's a mudball of stats.

If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. At that point, we're not even talking about AI anymore.

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wing-_-nuts 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics.

I'm sorry, what?

I'll put it to you again, you sound like me after playing around with gpt 3.5. It was interesting, but it wasn't good. There were still questions as to whether scaling would persist. My doubts were pretty much obliterated. LLMs haven't been mere text completion for a while now. Heck, even a model small enough to fit on my 3090 is now shockingly competent and useful. Does claude sometimes go off on weird tangents making me reel it in? Yeah, but it's genuinely great in present form, and it's the worst it'll ever be.

You're welcome to your opinion. It used to be mine too, but I disagree now. I find pretty much every AI benchmark has shown forward progress, some with non public datasets, and some things have gotten scarily better.

	▲	weakfish 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		For me, at least, despite being obviously powerful, I just can’t find anything useful to do with it beyond toys.
	▲	sublinear 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You're also welcome to put your two cents in, but your replies sound identical to the bots and throwaways of last year and the year before that. Every time it's the same agenda: trying to keep up appearances of meaningful engagement. In reality, I'm the only idiot willing to engage anymore and the opinion has always been majority negative on practical applications of LLMs from day one. It's not like anyone who frequents HN was blindsided by the initial release of ChatGPT like the rest of the public. The negativity has only grown since then. There are important niches for LLMs, but they don't really make money without bigger ideas. I am very happy with the results for the broader topics of natural language processing and accessibility. Software is now easier to use and write. People have more agency over technology in general. These are massive leaps. They are still tiny hops compared to what people's expectations were. That's only a failure of marketing, and a testament to its power even when botched. The end result is the same: the public yawns big and takes the almost invisible results for granted. Talking to a computer finally works like they expected over 20 years ago. Talking to a computer still sucks though. It's an entirely new genre of computer error.