[vidarh]

I do contract work on fine-tuning efforts, and I can tell you that most humans aren't designed to be public-facing either.

While LLMs do plenty of awful things, people make the most incredibly stupid mistakes too, and that is what LLMs needs to be benchmarked against. The problem is that most of the people evaluating LLMs are better educated than most and often smarter than most. When you see any quantity of prompts input by a representative sample of LLM losers, you quickly lose all faith in humanity.

I'm not saying LLMs are good enough. They're not. But we will increasingly find that there are large niches where LLMs are horrible and error prone yet still outperform the people companies are prepared to pay to do the task.

In other words, on one hand you'll have domain experts becoming expert LLM-wranglers. On the other hand you'll have public-facing LLMs eating away at tasks done by low paid labour where people can work around their stupid mistakes with process or just accepting the risk, same as they currently do with undertrained labor.

[intended]

I have a side point here - There is a certain schizoid aspect to this argument that LLMs and humans make similar mistakes.

This means that on one hand firms are demanding RTO for culture and team work improvements. While on the other they will be ok with a tool that makes unpredictable errors like humans, but can never be impacted by culture and team work.

These two ideas lie in odd juxtaposition to each other.

[vidarh]

I think this goes exactly to the point that a whole lot of things become acceptable once they become cheap enough.

[intended]

Since this is a comparison, what has been made comparatively cheaper?

[jacobr1]

We aren't talking about skilled knowledge work in Silicon Valley campuses. We are talking about work that might already have been outsourced so some cube-farm in the Philippines. Our routine office work that probably could already have been automated away by a line of business app in the 1980s, but is still done in some small office in Tulsa because it doesn't make sense to pay someone to write the code when 80% of the work is managing the data entry that still needs to be done regardless.

This more marginal labor is going to be more easy to replace. Also plenty of the more "elite" type labor will too, as it turns out it is more marginal. Already glue and boilerplate programming work is going this way, there is just so much more to do, and the important work of figuring out what should be done, that it hasn't displaced programmers yet. But it will for some fraction. WYSIWG type websites for small business has come a long way and will only get better, so there will be less need for customization on the margin. Or light design work (like take my logo and plug into into this format for this charity tournament flyer).

[intended]

Ok.

Well, I can see the direction you are going. I am unconvinced though - it hasn't thread the needle.

Reason being

1) They are doing both in cube farms in the PHP, RTO + replacement by GenAI.

2) In high tech, they are also trying achieve these contradictory goals. RTO + Increased GenAI capability to reduce manpower needs.

I can see a desire to reduce costs. I cant see how RTO to improve team work sits with using LLMs to do human work.

[salad-tycoon]

That’s a lot of weight on RTO and why it’s being implementing. A company is fully able to have you RTO, maybe even move, and fire you next day/month/year and desiring increased teamwork is not mutually exclusive of preparing for lay offs. Plus, I imagine at these companies there are multiple hands all doing things for their own purpose and metrics without knowing what the other hand is doing.Mid level Jan’s Christmas bonus depends on responding to exit interviews measurements showing workers leaving due to lack of teamwork, Bobs bonus depends on quickly implementing the code.

[sdesol]

> While LLMs do plenty of awful things, people make the most incredibly stupid mistakes too

I am 100% not blaming the LLM, but rather VCs and the media for believing the VCs. Once we get over the hype and people realize there isn't a golden goose, the better off we will be. Once we accept that LLM is not perfect and that it is not what we are being sold, I believe we will find a place for it that will make a huge impact. Unfortunately for OpenAI and others, I don't believe they will play as big of a role as they would like us to believe/will.

[vidarh]

Yikes, that was an unfortunate auto-correct and too late to edit. "LLM losers" was meant to be "LLM users".

[tim333]

I thought you were maybe a bit rude there!

[vidarh]

Yeah, not my intent. I use LLMs a lot myself too...