Comment on OpenAI Is A Bad Business
Kichae@lemmy.ca 2 months agoThere’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.