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- cross-posted to:
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Screenshot of this question was making the rounds last week. But this article covers testing against all the well-known models out there.
Also includes outtakes on the ‘reasoning’ models.
LLMs are not children. Children can have experiences, learn things, know things, and grow. Spicy autocomplete will never actually do any of these things.
I started experimenting with the spice the past week. Went ahead and tried to vibe code a small toy project in C++. It’s weird. I’ve got some experience teaching programming, this is exactly like teaching beginners - except that the syntax is almost flawless and it writes fast. The reasoning and design capabilities on the other hand - ”like a child” is actually an apt description.
I don’t really know what to think yet. The ability to automate refactoring across a project in a more ”free” way than an IDE is kinda nice. While I enjoy programming, data structures and algorithms, I kinda get bored at the ”write code”-part, so really spicy autocomplete is getting me far more progress than usual for my hobby projects so far.
On the other hand, holy spaghetti monster, the code you get if you let it run free. All the people prompting based on what feature they want the thing to add will create absolutely horrible piles of garbage. On the other hand, if I prompt with a decent specification of the code I want, I get code somewhat close to what I want, and given an iteration or two I’m usually fairly happy. I think I can get used to the spicy autocomplete.
I like the idea of referring to LLMs as “spicy autocomplete”.
I’m sure AI will do those things at some point. Nobody expected the same of our microorganism ancestors.
LLMs can’t learn. It’s one of their inherent properties that they are literally incapable of learning. You can train a new model, but you can’t teach new things to an already trained one. All you can do is adjust its behavior a little bit. That creates an extremely expensive cycle where you just have to spend insane amounts of energy to keep training better models over and over and over again. And the wall of diminishing returns on that has already been smashed into. That, and the fact that they simply don’t have concepts like logic and reasoning and knowing, puts a rather hard limit on their potential. It’s gonna take several sizeable breakthroughs to make LLMs noticeably better than they are now.
There might be another kind of AI that solves those problems inherent to LLMs, but at present that is pure sci-fi.
Our microorganism ancestors also did all those things, and they were far beyond anything an LLM can do. Turning a given list of words into numbers, doing a string of math to those numbers, and turning the resulting numbers back into words is not consciousness or wisdom and never will be.
Neither is moving electrolytes around fat barriers.
You think microorganisms can reason? Wow, AI haters are grasping for straws.
Honestly, I don’t understand Lemmy scoffing at AI and thinking the current iteration is all it ever will be. I’m sure some thought that the automobile technology would not go anywhere simply because the first model was running at 3mph. These things always takes time.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing AI, but I think there is a huge potential in years to come, for better or worse. And it is especially important to never underestimate something, especially by AI haters, because of what destructive potential AI has.
The straw I’m grasping at in this example is a reasonably well-accepted scientific consensus, but you do you.