[throwboatyface]

The one thing AI has done really well is generate all the signals of "intelligence" that SV tech folks care about. It's verbose and meaningless, confidently-asserted bullshit wrapped in the right packaging. It's like a Markov chain generator with a Stanford degree.

[afavour]

Also always sure to compliment the complainant. “You’re right! What an insightful question…”

[kgeist]

It can easily be made less verbose with the right prompt.

[jxf]

That's not a great argument for it being impressive, though, which is the original remark in this thread.

A car that unpredictably explodes and kills all its occupants, but which can be made safe by installing a widget, is not impressive (or at least, not in a good way).

[kgeist]

It's verbose because it was finetuned to be "helpful" (the way OpenAI sees it). You can fix it with a system prompt, or finetune the base model with the format you want. Same with grounding it with RAG. Sure if you take a vanilla LLM and make no effort to adapt it to your app's needs, it's going to have subpar results. At least, verbosity is not an inherent problem of LLMs, it's a specific issue of a specific finetune. Hallucinations are a real problem indeed. However, being wrong and being very confident about your answer is something LLMs share with humans. LLMs can already have value if they're wrong less often than the average human (and some benchmarks suggest so).

[userbinator]

Unfortunately, "average human" is a very low bar.

For example, 100 is defined as the average IQ, but it's almost certain that every human who comments on HN has an IQ much above that.

It's also problematic when LLMs are better not because they're getting better, but the average human is declining.