In essence, they are only adequate in niche situations (like creative writing, marketing, placeholder during iterative design, …) where there's no such social contract and assumption that people operate in good faith and do their best diligence not to deceive others.
Pretending otherwise, not pushing back when LLMs are clearly used outside of those contexts, or dressing them into what they are not (thinking machines, search engines, knowledge archives, …) is doing the work of useful idiots defending tech oligarchs and data thieves against their own interests.
And yeah, I get it, naysayers are annoying. Doesn't mean they are wrong or their voices shouldn't be heard at a time where the legality and ethics of all this are being debated.
Placeholders, sure. But I'm surprised you don't know about the utility it has in a programming context.
I was kicking the tires on Claude for a personal thing the other day - "given this data and this output I want, write a utility function" - and it quickly gave me something that gave me exactly what I needed on the first try.
I also had an extended session recently where it really helped me with the "naming is hard" problem. Naming is hard and it's nice to have a rubber duck that has a certain understanding of your code and is able to throw a bunch of ideas at you quickly.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.
And I'll emphasize your "placeholder" point: sometimes it's not even about the solution it gives, it's about the process of articulating the problem and getting something out there. A lot of times the first iteration of anything is the hardest to complete, and it can really cut down the time to achieve that.
It is in that sense that I see LLMs challenge "social contracts": their use is infectious (probably also in the GPL-sense, be warned) and should be agreed upon by all parties upfront (do you want to be on the receiving end of a software that you pay good money to have developed while knowing that its developers have little understanding of its workings? How many times cheaper is cheap enough to pay-off the amount of technical and institutional debt/risk? Can LLMs effectively become that cheap?).
What does that mean? Are you implying that I used a LLM to formulate my comment? A comment about the dangers of LLMs for civic and respectful discourse?
> Ultimately saying a LLM is only useful in niche situations
is a fact. LLMs are not something new or obscure, we have plenty of open-source/weights implementations keeping in check the outlandish marketing promises of the big players and their "SOTA" models.
> …is a tell of the boat passing you by.
is an opinion, giving an emotional twist to something that really doesn't deserve one. All it shows is that you bought into LLMs being more than what they really are, and welcome the (admittedly cool and tempting) marketing above the truth and your critical and independent thinking on the subject.
We can debate usefulness all day, but reducing the opposing view to “you fell for marketing” isn’t critical thinking.
And yes your reply unfortunately read exactly like ChatGPT would respond which I found both amusing but also hard to read as the logic was overly verbose.
I'm sorry but I can't assume that your comment comes in good faith. You are the one making the exceptional claims here, not me. The burden of the proof falls on you.
From my side, I've provided clear use-cases where LLMs are adequate, and large categories of use-cases where they are provably not (misguided usage in those by a number of people is no counter-argument).
The extent of your argumentation is annoyingly nihilist "we don't know everything about LLMs, so I'm entitled to believe anything I want".
> We can debate usefulness all day, but reducing the opposing view to “you fell for marketing” isn’t critical thinking.
The reason why I'm pulling marketing into this is because that's the reason why people generally believe that LLMs are more capable than they really are. Placarding LLMs everywhere and over-selling their abilities is a coordinated effort by a very few immensely rich tech companies. Not by Machine Learning scientists or Computational Neuroscientists who have been mapping this same space for decades.
> And yes your reply unfortunately read exactly like ChatGPT would respond
Then I suppose it's a compliment, taken as someone whose native language obviously isn't English.
Nice chatting, but it’s clear you’re out of productive things to say.
I mean, one easy thing you could do is to explain how LLMs are adequate as
>> thinking machines, search engines, knowledge archives, …
How much practical experience do you have with LLMs? Have you even tried running models locally? Then how have you not experienced yourself tweaking few parameters and gotten the same model to say one thing and its opposite just after? Through your extensive use of commercial LLMs, aren't you getting daily occurrences of confabulations? Making stuff up is what defines¹ LLMs, and that's not me saying it.
If your field is so inconsequential that reliability and faithfulness of your output has no practical merit or repercussion, I'm glad that you get some entertainment out of this. Still doesn't make it the norm, though.
Don’t misjudge me either, I am not suggesting there should not be critical comments but that if you make a critical comment you should at least have an idea what your talking about.