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Comment by bensyverson

6 hours ago

> the technology in its current state still isn't fit for purpose.

This is a broad statement that assumes we agree on the purpose.

For my purpose, which is software development, the technology has reached a level that is entirely adequate.

Meanwhile, sports trivia represents a stress test of the model's memorized world knowledge. It could work really well if you give the model a tool to look up factual information in a structured database. But this is exactly what I meant above; using the technology in a suboptimal way is a human problem, not a model problem.

There's nothing in these models that say its purpose is software development. Their design and affordances scream out "use me for anything." The marketing certainly matches that, so do the UIs, so do the behaviors. So I take them at their word, and I see that failure modes are shockingly common even under regular use. I'm not out to break these things at all. I'm being as charitable and empirical as I can reasonably be.

If the purpose is indeed software development with review, then there's nothing stopping multi-billion dollar companies from putting friction into these sytems to direct users towards where the system is at its strongest.

  • The LLM vendors are selling tokens. Why would they put friction into selling more tokens? Caveat emptor.