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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

You can usually tell that a lot of people just go off rumors they read once off Twitter or reddit or somewhere about hallucinations or doing math, against a weaker model, without every validating what they read online or updating their model of how well latest models work.

Just have to learn to let it go, despite xkcd 386.

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I use gpt4o and claude 3.5 while coding every day. The rumors on twitter and reddit are accurate.

I constantly run into incorrect answers from the LLMs every day. Just recently I asked whether I needed to reverse the bit shift to mask the upper 24 bits in an IP address on a little endian platform and it incorrectly told me no probably because most of the answers on Google appeared to answer no to similarly phrased questions.

That's probably the best we can do for now with LLMs. Surely it would be unreasonable for LLMs to provide a correct answer when the majority of people on various forums also provide the wrong answer. Some day LLMs will be able to objectively provide truthful statements but we're not there yet. Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% correct.

I'm not going to pass any judgement on what is reasonable or unreasonable for LLMs, just pointing out that it makes serious mistakes.

Many people here argue that LLMs are able to reason, you can check my post history 3 months ago to see an example of this.

And if you have to double check everything, how much time are you really saving? And is this thing really on track to replace programmers any time soon? Absolutely not.

I'm confused, you said earlier that you use it every day.

Where did I say I didn't?

I mean, call it dot producting if you don't want to use the word reason, but it takes a bit of multiplying matricies and converting tokens to words to be able to say that if b follows a, it doesn't mean that a follows b, but that not b follows not a (the contrapositive). sure, that's in an unknown amount of textbooks in the training corpus, but at what point does putting down a bunch of axioms and applying them ok each other lead to what you'd actually call reasoning? at some point when a human does it, the human's gone past its training corpus and entered the hallowed realm of reasoning, unless we're able to deliniate clearly where that line is and isn't, and then all agree on it, we're going to keep going in circles about if it can be called reasoning or not.

> Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% correct.

But they're not. They're a little tool some programmers use to save a small amount of time. They're not replacing programmers.

And there's no evidence they will ever be as good as actual programmers.

Thankfully! In the 90' and outsourcing became a thing, programming as a career was over. and then when ChatGPT came out, programming as a career was over again. turns out, programming's not dead quite yet, though time will tell if it ever does.

Maybe you're using a strawman.

you need to give a counterexample to claim it's a strawman.

"The people who disagree with me have no good reason to" is prima facie a strawman.

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