Comment by ofjcihen
6 days ago
Honestly it’s really unfortunate that LLMs seem to have picked up the same hype men that attached themselves to blockchains etc.
LLMs are very useful. I use them as a better way to search the web, generate some code that I know I can debug but don’t want to write and as a way to conversationally interact with data.
The problem is the hype machine has set expectations so high and refused criticism to the point where LLMs can’t possibly measure up. This creates the divide we see here.
I think LLM hype is more deserved and different from that of blockchain.
There's still a significant barrier to entry to get involved with blockchain and most people don't even know what it is.
LLMs on the other hand have very low barrier to at least use- one can just go to google, ChatGPT etc and use it and see its effectiveness. There's a reason why in the last year, a significant portion of school students are now using LLMs to cheat. Blockchains still don't have that kind of utilization.
I agree with all of these points.
Honestly I think that makes the argument stronger though that it’s unfortunate they jumped on.
I think I agree with the general thrust but I have to say I've yet to be impressed with LLMs for web search. I think part of that comes from most people using Google as the benchmark, which has been hot garbage for years now. It's not hard to be better than having to dig 3 sponsored results deep to get started parsing the list of SEO spam, let alone the thing you were actually searching for.
But compared to using Kagi, I've found found LLMs end up wasting more of my time by returning a superficial survey with frequent oversights and mistakes. At the final tally I've still found it faster to just do it myself.
I will say I do love LLMs for getting a better idea of what to search for, and for picking details out of larger blocks.
I find search engines like Google and Bing are so overly keen on displaying any results that they'll ignore your search parameters and return something else instead.
Thus, I find LLMs quite useful when trying to find info on niches that are close to a very popular topic, but different in some key way that's hard to express in search terms that won't get ignored.
> I think part of that comes from most people using Google as the benchmark, which has been hot garbage for years now.
Honestly, I think part of the decline of Google Search is because it's trying to increase the amount of AI in search.
It’s part of it. It was on the decline and then for some reason Google decided that the best way to handle their dumpster fire was to chuck gasoline cans into it.
There's not much riding on convincing the broader public that AI is the real deal before it's proved itself beyond the shadow of any doubt. There's nothing they can do to prepare at this point.