Comment by rstuart4133

> Aside from a narrow set of tasks like translation, grammar, and tone-shifting, LLMs are a dead end.

I consider myself an LLM skeptic, but gee saying they are a "dead end" seems harsh.

Before LLM's came along computers understanding human language was graveyard academics when to end their careers in. Now computers are better at it and far faster than most humans.

LLM's also have an extortionary ability to distill and compress knowledge, so much so that you can download a model whose since is measured in GB, and it seems to have a pretty good general knowledge of everything of the internet. Again, far better than any human could do. Yes, the compression is lossy, and yes they consequently spout authoritative sounding bullshit on occasion. But I use them regardless as a sounding board, and I can ask them questions in plain English rather than go on a magical keyword hunt.

Merely being able to understand language or having a good memory is not sufficient to code or do a lot else, on it's own. But they are necessary ingredients for many tasks, and consequently it's hard to imagine a AI that can competently code that doesn't have an LLM as a component.