| The idea about various fads that "not envisioning use for it is just a past bias", is seldom true. What people want has not changed for millennia and it is unlikely to change soon. Most of the things that are useful have already been imagined millennia ago, even if at that time nobody had any idea about how one could develop any technology for building such things in reality. For instance in the Ancient Greek literature there are descriptions of artificial robots for doing the hard work, means for flying etc. The past bias can block indeed one to envision the usefulness of some things, but only when those things are not a goal in themselves, but they are only intermediates for achieving things that are already known to be useful and the past bias prevents the user to realize that there exists an alternate path to the useful goals, instead of the known traditional path. LLMs are indeed tools that can be used to achieved some useful goals, so in some cases a user may not realize how they can be used, due to past bias. There is no doubt that there are a few applications for which LLMs are very useful, but for experienced people, even if they have never used LLMs yet, it is easy to recognize with certainty that some of the proposed applications for LLMs will never be useful for them. For example, I would never use an LLM for searching the Web or for summarizing documents. What I recognize as important in a Web search or in a document differs too much from what typical humans would recognize, for an LLM to have any chance to generate equivalent results. The only reason why I may find useful to put some questions to a big LLM is because it is likely that it may have had access during training to documents to which I do not have access. Thus the answer might provide some clues about other sources than those known to me. Instead of this, I would very much prefer to use a traditional search tool on the training set, but the LLM may be a poor substitute for its training set, which is better than nothing. For now, the most lucrative application for LLMs is as coding assistants. Here there is no past bias, because since the earliest times of automatic computers, people have hoped for methods that would allow the generation of computer programs with minimum input from a human. I do not think that there is anyone who would dispute that LLMs have allowed a much greater progress than before in this direction. Here what are frequently disputed are only the correct strategies of using LLMs for this purpose, because it is obvious that they are frequently misused and those who do not understand programming, like most managers, have completely unrealistic ideas about what can be done and what should be done with LLMs. |