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Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

> Mostly the main limitation with LLMs is the imagination of the person using it. Ask the right questions and they get a lot more useful.

Completely agree.

We get waves of comments on HN downplaying model abilities or their value.

Many people don’t seem to explore and experiment with them enough. I have 3 screens. The left one has two models on it. The right one has a model & a web browser for quick searches. I work on the largest middle screen.

Extreme maybe, but I use them constantly resulting in constant discovery of helpful new uses.

I web search maybe 10% of what I did six months ago.

The quirks are real, but the endless upsides models deliver when you try things were unobtainium, from humans or machines, until LLMs.

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I've only found useful answers for when I've begun something from completely zero. Things I've got even a reasonable grasp on I start to spot large dangerous holes a model very confidently claims is the right solution. Stuff like bringing camping stove inside a tent to avoid rainy weather, nevermind it being suicide at the same time.

>I web search maybe 10% of what I did six months ago.

Me too, though this is more driven by the total cliff-fall of web search result quality

I'm not sure what you used for it to tell you that?

what should I do with my camping stove if I want to avoid the rain

ChatGPT said: If you want to avoid the rain while using your camping stove, here are your best options:

Shelter Options: Use a Tarp: Set up a tarp high above your stove area with good airflow. Make sure it's not enclosed and water runs off away from you.

Camp Kitchen Tent: Lightweight pop-up canopies or dedicated camp kitchen shelters are perfect. Just make sure it’s ventilated.

Picnic Table Shelter: Many campgrounds have covered areas you can cook under — check for those.

Vestibule (Cautiously): If you have a tent with a large vestibule, you can use the stove there, only if it's very well-ventilated and you're extremely cautious (fire and carbon monoxide risks are real).

Important Safety Tips: Never use a stove inside a closed tent — risk of carbon monoxide poisoning and fire.

Keep the stove on a stable, flat surface.

Avoid cooking right under trees with low-hanging branches.

Ensure your shelter is tall enough — heat rises.

Would you like a quick sketch or image of a tarp setup that works well in rain?

I'm starting to think that many of the "But the AIs tell me I should drive my car off a cliff!!" posters are just making stuff up.

No! A friend of a friend asked an AI and the AI said they were real. Honest. But it was the other AIs. Not the one the friend asked.

I've seen enough weird output from some models to not think quite so negatively about nay-sayers.

If "stupid response" happens 1% of the time, and the first attempt to use a model has four rounds of prompt-and-response, then I'd expect 1 in 25 people to anchor on them being extremely dumb and/or "just autocomplete on steroids" — the first time I tried a local model (IIRC it was Phi-2), I asked for a single page Tetris web app, which started off bad and half way in became a python machine learning script; the first time I used NotebookLM, I had it summarise one of my own blog posts and it missed half and made up clichés about half the rest.

And driving off, if not a cliff then a collapsed bridge, has gotten in the news even with AI of the Dijkstra era: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gp...

The problem I have with this conclusion is that "trust but verify" long predates AI models. People can, and have been, posting total bullshit on the internet since time immemorial. You have never _not_ needed to actually validate the things you are reading.

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