[Sysreq2]

A lot of people are talking about tool use and writing internal scripts, and yeah, that’s kind of an answer. Really though I think the author is highlighting that LLMs are not being used efficiently at the present moment.

LLMs are great at certain tasks. Databases are better at certain tasks. Calculators too. While we could continually throw more and more compute at the problem, growing layers and injecting more data, wouldn’t it make more sense to just have an LLM call its own back-end calculator agent? When I ask it for obscure information maybe it should just pull from it’s own internal encyclopedia database.

Let LLMs do what they do well, but let’s not forget the decades that brought us here. Even the smartest human still uses a calculator, so why doesn’t an AI? The fact that it writes its own JavaScript is flashy as hell but also completely unnecessary and error prone.

[13years]

> Really though I think the author is highlighting that LLMs are not being used efficiently at the present moment.

Yes, that is a key point. It isn't to say they are useless tools, but that they aren't intelligent tools and that has significant meaning for what tasks we think they are appropriate for.

Unfortunately, nearly everyone has misinterpreted the intent as showing LLMs can't use tools. The point is about how LLMs work differently than most think that they do.