[bigstrat2003]

Nobody is complaining that LLMs aren't perfect Culture minds. People disagree with the premise that they are useful tools given their current capabilities. Your portrayal of those with whom you disagree is such a strawman that it might as well be set to a soy-vs-wojak meme.

[mordymoop]

They clearly are useful tools given their current capabilities. It just depends on what you’re using them for. You don’t use a screwdriver to drive nails, and you don’t go to HardwareNews to complain when your screwdriver isn’t working as a hammer.

I’m currently using them to port a client-side API SDK into multiple languages. This would be a pain in the ass time consuming task but is a breeze with LLMs because the exact behavior I want is clearly defined and relatively deterministic, and it’s also straightforward to test that I’m getting what I intend. The LLM thus gets done in 3 days what would take me 3 weeks (or more) to do by hand.

If the complaint is that it can’t do X, where X is something that would clearly require full AGI and likely true superintelligence — in this case expecting instantaneous, correct code that solves novel problems on the first try - then I have to insist that people are actually expecting Claude to be a Culture Ship Mind, implicitly. They just don’t realize that what they’re asking for his hard, which is itself a psychologically interesting fact, I suppose.

[simonw]

"People disagree with the premise that they are useful tools given their current capabilities."

I will argue the opposite of that forever. They're very evidently useful, if you take the time to learn how to apply them.