[fnordpiglet]

Yeah I think a key is LLMs in business are not generally useful alone. They require classical computing techniques to really be powerful. Accurate computation is a generally well established field and you don’t need an LLM to do optimization or math or even deductive logical reasoning. That’s a waste of their power which is typically abstract semantic abductive “reasoning” and natural language processing. Overlaying this with constraints, structure, and augmenting with optimizers, solvers, etc, you get a form of computing that was impossible more than 5 years prior and is only practical in the last 9 months.

On the crypto stuff yeah I get it - especially if you’re not in the weeds of its use. A lot of people formed opinions from GPT3.5, Gemini, copilot, and other crappy experiences and haven’t kept up with the state of the art. The rate of change in AI is breathtaking and I think hard to comprehend for most people. Also the recent mess of crypto and the fact grifters grift etc also hurts. But people who doubt -are- stuck in the past. That’s not necessarily their fault and it might not even apply to their career or lives in the present and the flaws are enormous as you point out. But it’s such a remarkably powerful new mode of compute that it in combination with all the other powerful modes of compute is changing everything and will continue too, especially if next generation models keep improving as they seem to be likely to.

[jeffreygoesto]

That text applies to basically every new technology. Point is that you can't predict it's usefulness in 20 years from that.

To me it still looks like a hammer made completely from rubber. You can practice to get some good hits, but it is pretty hard to get something reliable. And a beginner will basically just bounce it around. But it is sold as rescue for beginners.