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by zkry 528 days ago
I'm pretty sure most people, developers especially, have had magical, life-changing experiences with LLMs. I think the problem is that they can't cant do these things reliably.

I get this sentiment from a lot of AI startups, that they have a product which can do amazing things, but due to its failure modes makes it almost useless as, to use an analogy from self-driving cars, the users have to still constantly pay attention to the road: you don't get a ride from Baltimore to New York where you can do whatever you please, you get a ride where you're constantly babysitting an autonomous vehicle, bored out of your mind, forced to monitor the road conditions and surrounding vehicles, lest the car make a mistake costing you your life.

To take the analogy farther, after experimenting with not using LLM tools, I feel that the main difference between the two modes of work is similar to driving a car and being driven by an autonomous care: you exert less mental effort, not, you get to your destination faster.

Another point of the analogy are things like Waymo. They really can do a great job of driving autonomously. But, they require a legible system of roads and weather conditions. There are LLM systems too that when given a legible system to work in can do a near perfect job.

1 comments

I mean… I agree that LLMs give only superficial value, but your analogy is plain wrong.

I drove 3600 km Norway to Spain in 2018 with only adaptive cruise. Then again in 2023 with autonomous highway driving (the kind where you keep a hand on the wheel for failure mode) and it was amaaaazing how big the difference was.

Wait, can you say more about that? That doesn't match my intuitions very well, so I'd like to understand what made it such a big difference to you.

Were you using Tesla Autopilot? If I were using Autopilot, I'd have to be constantly watching out for its mistakes, which would probably be equally or more stressful compared to using adaptive cruise.

I get how I could be wrong on that front. I guess what I was trying to say was that there needs to be legible, predictable infrastructure for these AI systems to work well. I actually think that an LLM workflow in a constrained, well understood environment would be amazingly good too.

I've been driving a lot in Istanbul lately and I'm not holding my breath for autonomous vehicles any time soon.