[gerdesj]

I totally understand where you are coming from and my personal take is LLMs are to "stuff" as a drill driver is to a screw driver. They are a tool, just a tool. ... bear with ...

I over floored several rooms in my house (UK, '20s build) with plywood before laying insulation, heating mats and laminate floor boards for the final finish. I don't have a staple gun so I screwed the boards down at roughly 600mm c/c across the floorboards and 300mm along them.

What the blazes has that got to do with LLMs?

Well, I used a nearly inappropriate method for a job and blasted through it nearly as fast as the best method! If I had used a manual screwdriver I would have been at it nearly forever and ended up with a very limp wrist. I do own an old school ratchet screwdriver and that would have speeded things up but still been slow. I did use yellow passivated screws with sharp threads and a notch to initiate biting into the wood - rather more expensive than a staple or a nail.

So I burned through my tokens (screws instead of nails/staples) faster than if I had used a pneumatic nail/staple gun.

Anyway. LLMs are tools. They can be good tools in the right hands or rip your fingers off in the wrong hands.

[socialcommenter]

Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...

[gerdesj]

Quite. My larger drill driver will wrench your wrist unless you know how to set the speed/mode/etc correctly and know how to brace yourself correctly.

At the moment, I think that a LLM needs skilled hands too. Have a casual chat - that's fine but for work ... be aware.

I recently dumped a wikimedia (our knowledge base is a wiki) formatted table into a LLM (on prem) and asked it to sort the list on the first column. It lost a few rows for some reason. No problem - I know how my tools work but it was a bit odd!