Comment by DrewADesign

18 hours ago

Personally, I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications. I think when the economics make more sense, product designers will make things that people actually want to use that will pretty transparently handle whatever model interactions are necessary, when it makes sense. As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment, and b) be obstinate, obtuse, or argumentative, or generally just be something that I have to explain things to. I think a lot of tech folks are far more biased than they realize by the “ooh, neato” factor when imagining how nontechnical people might want to use things. And the weight of these tools just feels wrong for what a lot of people use them for: the thing that plays whatever music I feel like hearing absolutely does not need to be able to generate a volumes of fanfic about the movie that song was in. It’s abstractly impressive that something could do that, but it’s just not useful.

17 comments

DrewADesign

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phist_mcgee  18 hours ago

>As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment

This is EXACTLY what people like/are addicted to about chatbots.

My sister-in-law bombed an interview and asked AI about her answers to the interviewer's questions, chatgpt or whatever it was told her that her answers weren't bad, but that the interviewer could not see the gold in her responses. She said she felt much better.

I see this effect with all the non-tech people in my life

  • oska  5 hours ago

    I prefix many of my LLM chat sessions with this line

    > Chat rules : no sycophancy or over-agreeableness

    (But even with that rule it's still necessary to be discerning about the responses you get and to push back against points made, or words used)

engineer_22  17 hours ago

> I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications.

I use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

  • consumer451  16 hours ago

    > I use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

    Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts become more accurate.

    Of course, if I want a real answer I happen to go to claude.ai, set it to a the best model, wait for a minute, and use many watts of energy. Slow agentic search that takes many seconds, and is greatly subsidized, is certainly better. This should not be a surprise, should it?

    I think it was on a sub like r/singularity that I saw a post along the lines of "of course most people think that 'AI' sucks, as normies are interacting with 8T param models."

    tone: genuinely confused about the world, not criticizing

    • engineer_22  6 hours ago

      Your comment about watts stuck out to me. I became curious how much power we might be talking about.

      I’m into Claude for $20/mo (petty bourgeois tier), let’s assume for sake of examination this is only paying for power, infrastructure already amortized

      Price of grid power approx $0.15/kWh

      $20 / ($0.15/kWh * 30 days) = 4.4 kWh per day.

      This same amount of energy can lift a 2-ton SUV 1/2 mile into the air. To me this seems astounding.

      If only half the $20 pays for power it’s still quite impressive.

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  • kajman  17 hours ago

    I've found LLMs useful for surfacing popular recommendations. I also get the overwhelming feeling that it's all very early days still when the machine mixes together whatever was crawled into the weights with a web search or two and dumps it into a markdown blurb.

    I totally agree with the above that a more polished and less obvious use of LLMs integrated back into search engines may be more useful, but will definitely be more usable.