[a3w]

Are any products using LLMs on the horizon, except for code completion? I have been a power user, hoping my workflows would improve. About every workflow got slower with statistical AI, and I am back to using logical AI like wolframalpha and bayesians.

[mark242]

There are entire categories of saas and enterprise vendors that are about to be completely blown away.

For example -- not long ago, when you wanted to do l10n/i18n for your business, you'd have to go through a pretty painful process of integrating with eg translations.com. If you're running an ecommerce site with a lot of new products (and product descriptions) coming online quickly, that whole process would be painful and expensive.

Fast forward to today -- a well-crafted prompt to Llama3.1 within a product pipeline makes that vendor completely obsolete. Now, you could argue that this kind of automation isn't new, you could have done it with an api call to Google translate or something similar, and sure, that's possible, but now you have one single interface into a very broad, capable brain to carry out any number of tasks.

If I was a vendor whose business was at all centered around language or data ETL or anything that involves taking text and doing something with it, I would be absolutely terrified at someone writing a 20-line python script with a good system prompt that would make my entire business's reason for being evaporate.

[swatcoder]

That's not the state of today at all, and probably doesn't represent the near or medium future.

Using the unmonitored output of a LLM-translation service for your commercial content, outputting in languages you can't read, represents a big reduction in quality assurance and greatly increases the risk of brand embarrassment and possibly even product misrepresentation, while leaving you with no recourse to blame or shift liability.

> If I was a vendor whose business was at all centered around language or data ETL or anything that involves taking text and doing something with it, I would be absolutely terrified at someone writing a 20-line python script with a good system prompt that would make my entire business's reason for being evaporate.

The more likely future is that existing translation houses will increasingly turn to LLM-assistance to raise the efficiency and lower the skill threshold for their staff, who still deliver the actual key values of quality assurance and accountability. This will likely drive prices down and greatly reduce how many people are working as translators in these firms, but it's an opportunity for them, not a threat.

LLM's don't seem to be on track to be the foolproof end-user tools that the earyl hype promised. They don't let us magically do everything ourselves and (like crypto being imcompatible with necessary regulations), they don't offer all the other assurances that orgs need when they hire vendors. But they can very likely accelerate trained people in certain cases and still have an impact on industry through specialty vendors that build internal workflows around them.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

<< That's not the state of today at all, and probably doesn't represent the near or medium future.

Thank you for saying this. I briefly wondered if my particular company is just way behind or particularly dysfunctional and disorganized ( a possibility for sure ). I do agree with you observation on LLMs effectively lowering entry level skill ( yesterday I was able to dissect xml file despite it not being something I could normally do without any prep work and despite mildly unusual - I thought - formatting choices by vendor ). There was still a fair amount of back and forth for what some enthusiast would call 'perfect prompt' and interesting bugs that had to be addressed, but, having seen the daily mess at my company does not exactly make me a full blown evangelist. I see it more as a get to the wrong answer faster. That is the part that concerns me.

[incrudible]

This sums up my view on AI and machine autonomy in general. The human added value is accountability. For a similar reason, outsourcing to faceless off shore companies usually does not work out.

There is nothing to suggest that AI will not require an expert in the loop in the future. Every single one of these products has a disclaimer that it will produce false and misleading results.

Of course, there are only so many experts needed for a given problem domain to fulfill all the demand, but that is true even without automation.

[chinabot]

You may be right, but I would approach this with an open mind. Whether the trajectory of AI development remains an asymptote to human intelligence or surpasses it entirely, the increasing investment, involvement of diverse stakeholders, and growing stakes suggest that virtually every job role may face disruption or, at the very least, re-evaluation.

[kevinmershon]

phone self-service systems, tutoring services, contract review, recruiting. Just to name a few

[ben_w]

> contract review

Yeah, no.

As part of a hilariously bad set of actions by a corporation that I had to threaten with legal action, I decided to try seeing what ChatGPT had to say, knowing in advance all the problems with it in this field, and… it was pretty much what I expected — enough to be interesting and get the general vibe right, but basically every specific detail that I could look up independently without legal training of my own, were citations of things that didn't exist.

I'd just about trust them on language tutoring, but even then only on the best supported languages.

Use them as enthusiastic free interns-to-juniors depending on the field. At some point, they'll be better, but not in predictable ways or on a predictable schedule.

But they are pretty general in their abilities — not perfectly general, but pretty general — so when they can do any of what you've suggested to a standard where they can make those categories unemployable, they're likely to perform all other text-based (not language-based, has to be text but doesn't have to be words) economic activity to a similar standard.

[handfuloflight]

Have you tried Claude (3.5 Sonnet)?

[ben_w]

No, just Haiku 3.5, but I do like Anthropic's trained choice of personality more than the one I get from ChatGPT.

[ToucanLoucan]

One word: spam.

AI has absolutely revolutionized spam and spam detection. Spammers can now generate absolutely unheard of amounts of complete bullshit. And on the other side, spam detection services and algorithms are getting better and better at detecting it, sorting it, and filtering it based on user preferences. Tons of people are enjoying openly AI generated content; and the content that isn't enjoyed by people is instead enjoyed by other AI bots, driving up the engagement rates. That behavior too though is being monitored by other AI, which then prompts spammers to improve their AI so they can avoid that AI and get their stuff seen by engagement AI.

So we have server farms full of computers that are making complete shit that is then thoroughly enjoyed by other server farms full of computers to drive up engagement numbers while still other server farms full of computers are working to detect the fraud and remove it.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we're still hurtling towards climate collapse. But that's okay, we're finally looking into building nuclear reactors again. To power more data centers.

The future is fucking stupid.

[Hashex129542]

AI is spam itself. If you go reddit, you can see lot of bots working for an Agenda.