Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the LLMs are extremely useful. You’re just using them wrong.

There is nothing wrong with the LLMs, you just have to double-check everything. Any exploits and problems you think they have, have already been possible to do for decades with existing technology too, and many people did it. And for the latest LLMs, they are much better — but you just have to come up with examples to show that.

View on HN

What's the point again of letting LLMs write code if I need to double check and understand each line anyway. Unless of course your previous way of programming was asking google "how do I..." and then copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow without understanding the pasted code. For that situation, LLMs are indeed a minor improvement.

You can ask followup questions about the code it wrote. Without it you would need more effort and search more to understand the code snippet you found. For me it completely replaced googling.

I get it for things you do on the side to broaden your horizon, but how often do you actually need to Google things for your day job?

Idk, of the top of my head, I can't even remember the last time exactly. It's definitely >6 month ago.

Maybe that's the reason some people are so enthusiastic about it? They just didn't really know the tools they're using yet. Which is normal I guess, everyone starts at some point.

> There is nothing wrong with the LLMs, you just have to double-check everything.

That does not seem very helpful. I don't spend a lot of time verifying each and every X509 cert my browser uses, because I know other people have spent a lot of time doing that already.

The fact that hallucinates doesn’t make it useless for everything, but it does limit its scope. Respectfully, I think you haven’t applied it to the right problems if this is your perspective.

In some ways, its like saying the internet is useless because we already have the library and “anyone can just post anything on the internet”. The counter to this could be that an experienced user can sift through bullshit found on websites.

A argument can be made for LLMs; as such, they are a learnable tool. Sure it wont write valid moon lander code, but it can teach you how to get up and running with a new library.

If an official comes to my door with an identity card I can presumably verify who the person is (although often the advice is to phone the organisation and check if unsure) but I don’t necessarily believe everything they tell me

Ask not what the LLM can do for you. Ask what you can do in order to prompt the LLM better so it can finally produce the correct result. The more that happens, the more it can learn and we can all win.

Think of it like voluntarily contributing your improvements to an open source library that we can all use. Except where the library is actually closed source, and controlled by a for-profit corporation.

This is only the first stage: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ we need you to continue to prompt it.

Train the LLM by feeding it all your data. Allow it to get better. We all win from it. Maybe not today, but one day. It may take your job but it will free you up to do other things and you will thank your LLM overlords hehe

Wait, how does rewriting a prompt until it gives you the output you expect help the LLM learn? Are you suggesting better prompting gets fed back into the training process in some helpful way? This feels confused.

You think OpenAI isn’t using your prompts and results to train better models? Think of yourself as a large RLHF experiment LOL

Kinda like Netflix did with people watching movies 10 years ago. The data’s there, and abundant. People are massaging their chatbot to get better results. You can measure when people are satisfied. So… obviously…

(the above is sarcasm and parody of what AI maximalists say)

Poe’s law in action

Reply on news.ycombinator.com