Is it really ok to have to negotiate with a toaster if it additionally works as a piano and a phone? I think not. The first step is admitting there is obviously a problem, afterwards you can think of ways to adapt.
FTR, I'm very much in favor of AI, but my enthusiasm especially for LLMs isn't unconditional. If this kind of madness is really the price of working with it in the current form, then we probably need to consider pivoting towards smaller purpose-built LMs and abandoning the "do everything" approach.
Nowadays, a more capable 5.1 speaker receiver is connected to the TV.
There is only one remote, for both. To increase or decreae the volume after starting the TV now, I have to:
1. wait a few seconds while the internal speakers in the TV starts playing sound
2. the receiver and TV connect to each other, audio switches over to receiver
3. wait a few seconds
4. the TV channel (or Netflix or whatever) switches over to the receiver welcome screen. Audio stops playing, but audio is now switched over to the receiver, but there is no indication of what volume the receiver is set to. It's set to whatever it was last time it was used. It could be level 0, it could be level 100 or anything in between.
5. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register.
6. Sorry, you were too impatient and fast when you switched back to TV, the receiver wants to show you its welcome screen again.
7. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register.
8. Now you can change volume up and down. Very, very slowly. Hope it's not at night and you don't want to wake anyone up.
Around now some wit usually asks if the luddites also want to build circuits from scratch or allocate memory manually? Whatever, you can use a garbage collector! Point is that good technologists will typically give up control tactically, not as a pure reflex, and usually to predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances.
I'd add with reliability, boundaries, and tolerances within the necessary values.
The problem with the TV remote is that nobody has given a damn about ergonomic needs for decades. The system is reliable, well understood, and has well known boundaries and tolerances; those are just completely outside of the requirements of the problem domain.
But I guess that's a completely off-topic tangent. LLMs fail much earlier.
Great! Agreed! So we're going to restrict LLMs to those classes of problems, right? And not invest trillions of dollars into the infrastructure, because these fields are only billion dollar problems. Right? Right!?
Great! Name another?