this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

The problem is not the LLMs, but what people are trying to do with them.

They are currently spoons, but people are desperately wishing they were katanas.

They work really well for soup, but they can't cut steak. But they're being hyped as super ninja steak knives, and people are getting pissed when they can't cut steak.

If you give them watery, soupy tasks they can do successfully, they can lighten your workload, as long as you're aware of what they are and aren't good at.

What people want LLMs to be able to do, ie. "Steak" tasks:

  • write complex documents

  • apply complex knowledge/rules to a situation

  • Write complex code and create entire programs based on vague description

What LLMs can currently do ie. "Soup" tasks:

  • check this document and fix all spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors

  • summarise this paragraph as dot points

  • write a python program that sorts my photographs into folders based on the year they were taken

Half of Lemmy is hyping katanas, the other half is yelling "Why won't my spoon cut this steak?!! AI is so dumb!!!"

Update: wow, the pure vitriol pouring out of the replies is just stunning. Seems there are a lot of you out there who have, in one way or another, tied your ego very strongly to either the success or failure of AI.

Take a step back, friends, and go outside for a while.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (12 children)

You could use them to know what the text is about, and if it's worth your reading time. In this situation, it's fine if the AI makes shit up, as you aren't reading its output for the information itself anyway; and the distinction between summary and shortened version becomes moot.

However, here's the catch. If the text is long enough to warrant the question "should I spend my time reading this?", it should contain an introduction for that very purpose. In other words if the text is well-written you don't need this sort of "Gemini/ChatGPT, tell me what this text is about" on first place.

EDIT: I'm not addressing documents in this. My bad, I know. [In my defence I'm reading shit in a screen the size of an ant.]

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