And full self driving is also still coming! promise!
Comment on OpenAI Is A Bad Business
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months agoYour experience is highlight what current iterations of LLMs are not well suited for, so I understand if that’s what you were hoping to achieve, why you were left wanting, or disillusioned.
There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.
This can save you hours and hours, of reading time, and it’s something that you can verify the answer on relatively quickly, to double check it’s.
They’re also good at doing something Google used to be good at, but sucks at now. Which is describing process, simple or complicated, short or long, that you either can’t recall the name of, or aren’t even sure where it’s called.
There’s plenty of other things too, but just remember that they are tools, not magic, or sentient intelligence.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 2 months ago
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I mean, it probably will, but that has nothing to do with LLMs, nor is it a technology that I want to exist.
I can definitely see a world where lobbyists for automakers and insurance companies create such a regulatory burden, where only the wealthy can afford to drive their own cars, if they choose to. Where as everyone else must rent or lease their self driving car as is if it’s a IaaS or SaaS subscription.
But none of that has anything to do with using LLMs for the tasks they can accomplish, or telling people to bitching about them not being able to complete the tasks they aren’t good at, or even capable of.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 2 months ago
I was saying that this is investment money wasted on an empty promise. Like the full self driving feature
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Who’s talking about investing…? I’ve exclusively been talking about what LLMs can do now, today, for free (aside from energy costs).
None of what your throwing out there has anything to do with what’s being discussed here. It’s a red herring.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Let me translate for you:
“[insert empty promise here]” will come! Please sent me more investment money.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.
That’s the story people tell at least. The weasel phrase at the end is fun, I guess. Leaves a massive backdoor excuse when it doesn’t actually work.
But in practice, LLMs are falling down even at this job. They seem to have some yse in academic qualitaruve coding, but for summarizing novel or extended bodies of text, they struggle to actually tell people what they want to know.
Most people do not give a shit if text contains a reference to X. And if they do, they can generally just CTRL+F “X”.
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Weasel phrase? You mean the fact that I don’t treat them like their actual Ai, but just a tool that needs to be monitored and verified?
There’s a reason why I never call them AI, because they’re not. They’re just advanced machine learning tools, and just like I keep a steady hand when using a table saw, I only use LLMs for tasks that they can help me do something faster, but are easy to verify they did it right.
And as someone who has been using them very regularly, I feel confident in saying that. It’s not a weasel phrase, I’m not trying to sell anyone snake well about what they can actually do, and I think they’re in oversold and overhyped means of cooking the planet faster, so it’s not like I would be mad if they were banned tomorrow, but until then, I will keep using them in ways that are actually fruitful.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Have you tried Llama? If so, is it useful according to your criteria?
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Llama is the model I use most often, followed by ChatGPT and Claude.
Others as well, but yes, it is incredible useful for what I use it for.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Self-hosted?
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Yes and no, I have self-hosted models on one of my Linux boxes, but even with a relatively modern 70 series Nvidia GPU, it’s still faster to use free non-local services like ChatGPT or DDG.
My rule of thumb is to never enter in any data that I wouldn’t also be willing to upload cleartext to Google Drive or OneDrive.
Sometimes that means modifying text before submitting it, and other times having to rely entirely on self-hosted tools.
hitmyspot@aussie.zone 2 months ago
But if any research source cannot be used without verification, is it really useful? I agree, we should verfiy crucial information but when its wrong often, but confidently so, using natural language is a barrier not a benefit.
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
It’s not a peer-reviewed journal or academic level source, and shouldn’t be used as that.
But if I need to find some technical or scientific writings on a subject, but I don’t know the correct nomenclature or need a more narrow set of keywords, that is something I can describe to the LLM and get back.
The keywords in their response can help me then hunt down the journal article or papers that I need using traditional search engines. I’m not just brainstorming here, this is something I do often enough to find real utility in it.
Again, is it all problems that can be solved with traditional search engines, but at the cost of time and frustration sifting though every potential result.
hitmyspot@aussie.zone 2 months ago
Yes, but for the average user, if it confidently gives misinformation, then its worse than a search engine. It is removing the verification step of reading the source, seospam aside. The whole business model is on using it more, not selectively.
One thing the article leaves out is the costs of processing should go down over time. Hopefully, as power transitions,.it also becomes more sustainable. However, it starts to become a bit like uber and self driving cars. How long can they burn through other peoples money to undercut competitions until the actual plan becomes profitable.
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’m not advocating for openai, their business model, or the environmental and financial cost benefit of current LLM technology.
They suck, it’s dogshit, and it’s not worth cooking to planet.
I also don’t disagree about the very real possibility that the average user may actually get dumber and more misinformed by relying on LLMs.
But we’re on Lemmy, and I’m just tired of all these comments incessantly complaining about about how LLM’s can’t do x,y, or z.
Imagine being on a carpentry forum, and every day people complained about how their new belt sander was dogshit at cutting 2x4’s or screwing in fasteners, so clearly the problem was with concept belt sander technology.