One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained.

I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias."

And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience.

Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean.

I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society.

I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.

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huurtehoog 2 days ago | parent [-]

I have great success in specifically asking LLM tools for academic literature after describing the problem or field I would like to get some insight into.

It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers.

They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers.

It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now.

But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.

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techblueberry 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I think part of it is - I want LLM's to do I think what they're promising to do which is like provide new perspectives on things.

But they're response is kinda always.

"Python? Have you considered that some people prefer, javascript?"

To your point, I think I'm asking too much, and would have a better time if I adjusted my approach.

	▲	sanderjd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I think it's just flatly a mistake to want them to "provide new perspectives". Weights are much better at encoding consensus than heterodoxy. What they are good at is finding, summarizing, and providing links to perspectives from other humans.