[Workaccount2]

Usually when I encounter sentiment like this it is because they only have used 3.5 (evidently not the case here) or that their prompting is terrible/misguided.

When I show a lot of people GPT4 or Claude, some percentage of them jump right to "What year did Nixon get elected?" or "How tall is Barack Obama?" and then kind of shrug with a "Yeah, Siri could do that ten years ago" take.

Beyond that you have people who prompt things like "Make a stock market program that has tabs for stocks, and shows prices" or "How do you make web cookies". Prompts that even a human would struggle greatly with.

For the record, I use GPT4 and Claude, and both have dramatically boosted my output at work. They are powerful tools, you just have to get used to massaging good output from them.

[parineum]

> or that their prompting is terrible/misguided.

This is the "You're not using it right" defense.

It's an LLM, it's supposed to understand human language queries. I shouldn't have to speak LLM to speak to an LLM.

[Filligree]

That is not the reality today. If you want good results from an LLM, then you do need to speak LLM. Just because they appear to speak English doesn't mean they act like a human would.

[jiggawatts]

People don’t even know how to use traditional web search properly.

Here’s a real scenario: A Citrix virtual desktop crashed because a recent critical security fix forced an upgrade of a shared DLL. The output is a really specific set of errors in a stack trace. I watched with my own two eyes an IT professional typed the following phrase into Google: “Why did my PC crash?”

Then he sat there and started reading through each result… including blog posts by random kids complaining about Windows XP.

I wish I could say this kind of thing is an isolated incident.

[Aeolun]

I mean, you need to speak German to talk to a German. It’s not really much different for LLM, just because the language they speak has a root in English doesn’t mean it actually is English.

And even if it was, there’s plenty of people completely unintelligible in English too…