[ToucanLoucan]

Except we put up with network lag because it's an understandable, if undesirable, caveat to an otherwise useful technology. No one would ever say that because a network is sometimes slow, that it is then preferable to not have computers networked. The benefits clearly outweigh the drawbacks.

This is not true for many applications of LLM. Generating legal documents, for example: it is not acceptable that it hallucinate laws that do not exist. Recipes: it is not acceptable that it would tell people to make pizza with glue, or mustard gas to remove stains. Or, in my case: it is not acceptable for a developer assisting AI to hallucinate into existence libraries that are not real and not only will not solve my problem, but that will cause me to lose hours of my day trying to figure out where to get said library.

If pneumatic tires failed to hold air as often as LLM's hallucinate, we wouldn't use them. That's not to say a tire can't blow out, sure they can, happens all the time. It's about the rate of failure. Or hell, to bring it back to your metaphor, if your network experienced high latency at the rate most LLM's hallucinate, I might actually suggest you not network computers, or at the very least, I'd say you should be replaced at whatever company you work for since you're clearly unqualified to manage a network.

[lolinder]

The benefits of networking outweigh the drawbacks in many situations, but not all, and good engineers avoid the network in cases where the lag would be unacceptable (i.e., real-time computing applications such as assembly line software). The same applies to LLMs—even if we're never able to get the rate of failure down below 5%, there are some applications that that would be fine for.

The important thing isn't that the rate of failure be below a specific threshold before the technology is adopted anywhere, the important thing is that engineers working on this technology have an understanding of the fundamental limitations of the computing paradigm and design accordingly—up to and including telling leadership that LLMs are a fundamentally inappropriate tool for the job.

[ToucanLoucan]

I mean, agree. Now tell me which applications of LLM that are currently trending and being sold so hard by Silicon Valley meet that standard? It's not none, certainly, but it's a hell of a lot less than exist.

[butlike]

If it's not acceptable to hallucinate laws for writing legal documents, then writing legal documents is probably an unacceptable use case.

Also, how do you mitigate a lawyer writing whatever they want (aka: hallucinating) when writing legal documents? Double-checking??

[scott_w]

Lawyers can already be sanctioned for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM&pp=ygUObGVnYWwgZ...

[mdp2021]

> Also, how do you mitigate a lawyer writing whatever they want (aka: hallucinating) when writing legal documents? Double-checking??

Of course they are supposed to double and triple and multiple check as they think and write, documentation and references at hand, _exactly_ how you are supposed to do from trivial informal context on towards critical ones - exactly the same, you check the detail and the whole, multiple times.

[ToucanLoucan]

A licensing body, and consequences for the failure to practice law correctly.

[PittleyDunkin]

> If it's not acceptable to hallucinate laws for writing legal documents

Legislators pass incoherent legislation every day. "hallucination" is the de-facto standard for human behavior (and for law).