Comment by throw310822 2 days ago
Intelligence is everything. These things are intelligent- already superhuman in speed and a few limited domains, soon they're going to exceed humans in almost every respect. The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like.
I don't understand this attitude and I am not sure where it comes from- either from generic skepticism, or from some sort of psychological refusal.(*) It's just obvious to me that you're completely wrong and you'll have a hard wake up, eventually.
* "I know how this works and it's just numbers all the way down" is not an argument of any validity, just to be clear- everything eventually is just physics, blind mechanics.
Check out operations research.
The amount of “work” done there is staggering and yet adoption appears abysmal, using such solutions with success only happens as part of a really “well oiled” machine.
And what about the simple difficulty going from 99% to 99.9%. What percentage are we even talking about today? We don’t know, but very rich people think it is cool and blindly keep investing more billions.
You're entirely free to go on and on about how amazing the emperor's clothes are. Nobody can stop you. :)
It's fine to chase hype for hobbyist or starter projects, but part of being an engineer is understanding how things actually work and what their limitations are.
It's not a virtue to deify a statistics model and make it your entire personality.
My non-tech company already uses LLMs where we used to contract software people (for 2 years now - no unresolveable issues). I myself also used LLMs to write an app which is used by people on the production floor now (I'm not a programmer and definitely don't know kotlin).
Maybe LLMs can't work on huge code bases yet, but for writing bespoke software for individuals who need a computer to do xyz but can't speak the language, it already is working wonders.
Being dismissive of LLMs while sitting above their current scope of capabilities gives strong Microsoft 2007 vibes; "The iPhone is a laughable device that presents no threat to windows mobile".
If you're (1) doing something basic and (2) don't care about correctness or quality or reliability and (3) don't need to change or maintain it, then by all means, use it. It's literally no different than copying off StackOverflow (and probably being generated from it.)
If you aren't an engineer, I get why you think it's magic. Everything is magic when you don't understand how it works.
Nobody thought the iPhone was magic. It was an instant hit because the capabilities were immediate and obvious, and Apple had a long history of being able to execute.
If you find it useful, by all means, use it. But this is the new blockchain.
"The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like."
I think the idea that the United States "owns" Grok 3 would be news to Musk and the idea it "owns" ChatGPT would be news to Altman.