Comment by stefan_

EDIT: wait, I think you're tptacek's parent. I was not talking about your post, I was talking about the post I linked to. I'm leaving my reply here but there's some serious confusion going on.

> theres someone assassinating me as an "anti-LLM person"

Is this not true? That's the vibe the comment gives off. I'm happy to not say that in the future if that's not correct, and if so, additionally, I apologize.

I myself was pretty anti-LLM until the last month or so. My opinions have shifted recently, and I've been trying to sort through my feelings about it. I'm not entirely enthusiastically pro, and have some pretty big reservations myself, but I'm more in the middle than where I was previously, which was firmly anti.

> "very obviously untrue things"

At the time I saw the post, I had just tabbed away from a ChatGPT session where it had relied on searching the web for some info, so the contrast was very stark.

> "kind of hilarious"

I do think that when people say that LLMs occasionally hallucinate things, and are therefore worthless, when others make false claims about them for the purpose of suggesting we shouldn't use them, that it is kind of funny. You didn't directly say this in your post, only handwaved towards it, but I'm talking about the discourse in general, not you specifically.

> And you call yourself "charitable"

I am trying to be charitable. A lot of people reached for some variant of "this person is stupid," and I do not think that's the case, or the good way to understand what people mean when they say things. A mistake is a mistake. I am actively not trying to simply dismiss arguments on either side of here, but take them seriously.