[EGreg]

FB’s AI head just said LLMs are a fad.

I thought about how to use them… I wish they could render an interface (HTML and JS at least, but also produce artifacts like PowerPoints).

What is really needed is for LLMs to produce some structured markup, that can then be rendered as dynamic documents. Not text.

As input, natural language is actually inferior to GUIs. I know the debate between command line people and GUI people and LLMs would seem like they’d boost the command-line people’s case, but any powerful system would actually benefit from a well designed GUI.

[dlivingston]

As someone who just spent 2 hours in my company's Confluence site, trying to track down the answer to a single question that could have been resolved in seconds by an LLM trained on an internal corporate corpus -- LLMs are very much not a fad.

[JohnFen]

LLMs are useful for particular types of things.

LLMs as the solution for every, or most, problems is a fad.

[EGreg]

How do you know the answer is right?

Because it linked you to the source?

Like a vector database would? Google offered to index sites since 1996.

[dlivingston]

We have internal search. Finding things isn't the problem. It's contextualizing massive amounts of text and making it queryable with natural language.

The question I was trying to solve was -- "what is feature XYZ? How does it work in hardware & software? How is it exposed in our ABC software, and where do the hooks exist to interface with XYZ?"

The answers exist across maybe 30 different Confluence pages, plus source code, plus source code documentation, plus some PDFs. If all of that was indexed by an LLM, it would have been trivial to get the answer I spent hours manually assembling.

[artfulmink]

The question to which you are replying still stands. How can you guarantee that the responses generated by the LLM are factually accurate? What if it refers to interfaces that don’t exist? One could argue that in your particular use case some inaccuracies can be tolerated, but in many use cases factual inaccuracies cannot be tolerated.

[EGreg]

So back to the question - how do you know the LLM didnt hallucinate an answer?

What do you think “indexed by an LLM” is?

Perhaps Anthropic with its 100K window can actually do it. But most LLM have such a small comtext window that it’s just Pinecone vector database indexing something and stuffing it in the prompt at prompt time. Come on.

[EGreg]

Here is the main reason:

Any sufficiently advanced software has deep structure and implementation. It isn’t like a poet who can just bullshit some rhymes and make others figure out what they mean.

The computer program expects some definite inputs which it exposes as an API eg a headless CMS via HTTP.

Similar with an organization that can provide this or that servicd or experience.

Therefore given this rigidity, the input has limited options at every step. And a GUI can gracefully model those limitations. A natural language model will make you think there is a lot of choice but really it will boil down to a 2018-era chatbot that gives you menus at every step and asks whether you want A, B or C.