[lukev]

I'd like to believe you, but there's credible evidence that (e.g) DOGE has been using LLMs to cut funding for NSF or HHS using prompts in the vein of "is this grant woke."

Which is obviously stupid. So if stupid people are using these things in stupid ways, that seems bad.

[tbrownaw]

Given that that's a task you want to do, it's at least the right kind of task (language processing) for an LLM. The proposals from the comment starting this thread aren't.

If grant classification is trying to drive a car non-stop (including not stopping for gas) from NY to LA, stuffing LLMs into weapons is more like trying to drive that same car from NY to London. They're just not the proper kind of tool for that, and it's not the same class of error.

[AlecSchueler]

If people on Hacker News are uncertain about what is and isn't a suitable task for these models then the non technical people making these decisions surely are as well.

[tbrownaw]

You're saying that weapons are designed by incompetents, and that enthusiasts have a reasoned understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the latest thing they're going "ooh shiny" about.

[AlecSchueler]

I'm not.

[lukev]

That's fundamentally not a language processing task. That's a decision making task with a huge impact on individual scientists and the scientific community. Not something that should be delegated to a machine, no matter how sophisticated.