[JBorrow]

Boy, I can’t wait for the foundation of my house to disappear because the LLM mis-classified a drilling report as non-hazardous.

What’s the deal here with liability and accountability? That’s a serious problem when considering using these for anything other than toy problems.

[bongodongobob]

You don't actually think the LLM is reviewing those 30k documents do you? You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs or whatever. I don't get why this crowd is so goddamn unimaginative with LLMs.

[svieira]

> You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs

Wherein you discover that unless you ask it to consider the fact that PDFs are ... very hard to parse [1] [2] you get something that misses whole blocks of text or turns them into something they aren't and the rest of the program misses chunks of the document.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filin...

[bongodongobob]

Why are you expecting they are all very different? They're all likely very similar.

[svieira]

Because presuming that all of them are produced by the same utility is a _presumption_. They could be - but they could also be produced by many different vendors using many different methods all of them simply conforming to the specification "a PDF with HIGH LEVEL DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA".

[goatlover]

Because I've heard of enough lazy uses of LLMs to be suspicious. Auditing the program means being sure that the info pulled from those documents is reviewed properly. Also, a complete lack of regard for other people's privacy.

[bongodongobob]

No idea where privacy enters in here.

[jakderrida]

>Boy, I can’t wait for the foundation of my house to disappear because the LLM mis-classified a drilling report as non-hazardous

LMAO! It's so hilarious that people like you forget that the alternative is relying on bureaucracies managed by people that get things wrong more often and are both too lazy and too stubborn to process your application to review your drilling report again.

If using both human-level and AI-level analysis is cheaper and much more accurate (but still imperfect), I'm willing to settle for a better system than oppose all change and die holding out for a perfect system.

[JBorrow]

What are 'people like me'? It's not like I know nothing about large language models, I just think using them for civil engineering is a bad idea...