Comment by gerdesj
3 days ago
I totally understand where you are coming from and my personal take is LLMs are to "stuff" as a drill driver is to a screw driver. They are a tool, just a tool. ... bear with ...
I over floored several rooms in my house (UK, '20s build) with plywood before laying insulation, heating mats and laminate floor boards for the final finish. I don't have a staple gun so I screwed the boards down at roughly 600mm c/c across the floorboards and 300mm along them.
What the blazes has that got to do with LLMs?
Well, I used a nearly inappropriate method for a job and blasted through it nearly as fast as the best method! If I had used a manual screwdriver I would have been at it nearly forever and ended up with a very limp wrist. I do own an old school ratchet screwdriver and that would have speeded things up but still been slow. I did use yellow passivated screws with sharp threads and a notch to initiate biting into the wood - rather more expensive than a staple or a nail.
So I burned through my tokens (screws instead of nails/staples) faster than if I had used a pneumatic nail/staple gun.
Anyway. LLMs are tools. They can be good tools in the right hands or rip your fingers off in the wrong hands.
Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...
Quite. My larger drill driver will wrench your wrist unless you know how to set the speed/mode/etc correctly and know how to brace yourself correctly.
At the moment, I think that a LLM needs skilled hands too. Have a casual chat - that's fine but for work ... be aware.
I recently dumped a wikimedia (our knowledge base is a wiki) formatted table into a LLM (on prem) and asked it to sort the list on the first column. It lost a few rows for some reason. No problem - I know how my tools work but it was a bit odd!