LLM people are really starting to veer into crypto-bro territory with the evangelising about how they’re the best thing since sliced bread and transistors.
That's your take on LLMs?
Ask it how it is possible for a photon to travel across the universe, arriving at the same time it departed, resulting in the journey taking zero time (in its reference frame).
Ask what implications are if certain viral amino sequences result in messenger RNA translocating to the host cell nucleus, potentially with the entire genome.
Ask if aircraft fly due to Bernoulli's Principle or Newton's Third Law and physical impact.
This is "crypto-bro territory"? No, not quite.
That's a big "if", isn't it? We're seeing claims like "The future is an LLM at the front of just about everything: “Human” is the new programming language"[1] but so far that's not panning out, and it seems really dubious. Natural language seems like an absolutely atrocious user interface. As a machine operator, I'm going to use levers, wheels, and buttons to control the machine. As a computer programmer I'm going to use programming languages to control the machine. I'm not going to speak English to it.
So, ok, this marks an advance in NLP. How do we get from there to "omg it's gonna change everything!!!1111oneeleven"
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/nvidia-ceo-we-bet-the-farm...
It seems like they’ve accelerated our capabilities- previously tiresome and difficult-to-automate things are easier- but have done very little for our fundamental understanding. We have a tool, but cannot dissect it and explain how it fits together. LLM’a themselves don’t appear (happy to be wrong here) to actually have improved our understanding our NLP and associated theory. Yeah, it can parse a sentence and bang out some JSON/sql/mid-tier-essay, but these models (so far) aren’t helping us figure out how and why, and I think that understanding is critical to progress further. Anthropic seems to be trying to push a bit further on that front at least, but for all we know, they might just turn into another scummy OpenAI on us.
So I'm not sure how I could use an LLM as a tool, but maybe I'm just not a sufficiently proficient user? It seems like they're just too full of "surprises".