Technology

You wanna know who really bags on LLMs? Actual AI developers. I work with some, and you've never heard someone shit all over this garbage like someone who works with neural networks for a living.

Management: "No, that doesn't work, because employees spend so much time doing the actual work that they lack the vision to know what's good for them. Luckily for them I am not distracted by actual work so I have the vision to save them by making them use AI."

If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Eggs-mothafucking-zackly!!!

There are no daily pressure campaigns to convince you to use a laptop or a smartphone. The value of those are self-evident.

AI on the other hand... -_-

Agree with all points. Additionally, compilers are also incredibly well specified via ISO standards etc, and have multiple open source codebases available, eg GCC which is available in multiple builds and implementations for different versions of C and C++, and DQNEO/cc.go.

So there are many fully-functional and complete sources that Claude Cowork would have pulled routines and code from.

A C compiler in two weeks is a difficult, but doable, grad school class project (especially if you use lex and yacc instead of hand-coding the parser). And I guarantee 80 hours of grad student time costs less than $20k.

Frankly, I'm not impressed with the presentation in your anecdote at all.

It's even simpler than that: using an LLM to write a C compiler is the same as downloading an existing open source implementation of a C compiler from the Internet, but with extra steps, as the LLM was actually fed with that code and is just re-assembling it back together but with extra bugs - plagiarism hidden behind an automated text parrot interface.

A human can beat the LLM at that by simply finding and downloading an implementation of that more than solved problem from the Internet, which at worse will take maybe 1h.

The LLM can "solve" simple and well defined problems because its basically plagiarizing existing code that solves those problems.

https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/ has a good overview how bad it really is

Also, software development is already the best possible use case for LLMs: you need to build something abiding by a set of rules (as in a literal language, lmao), and you can immediately test if it works.

In e.g. a legal use case instead, you can jerk off to the confident sounding text you generated, then you get chewed out by the judge for having hallucinated references. Even if you have a set of rules (laws) as a guardrails, you cannot immediately test what the AI generated - and if an expert needs to read and check everything in detail, then why not just do it themselves in the same amount of time.

We can go on to business, where the rules the AI can work inside are much looser, or healthcare, where the cost of failure is extremely high. And we are not even talking about responsibilities, official accountability for decisions.

I just don’t think what is claimed for AI is there. Maybe it will be, but I don’t see it as an organic continuation of the path we’re in. We might have another dot com boom when investors realize this - LLMs will be here to stay (same as the internet did), but they will not become AGI.

I also often get assigned projects where all the tests are written out beforehand and I can look at an existing implementation while I work…

Don't forget that there are tons of C compilers in the dataset already

They will never realize that, they will blame any failures on others naturally. They truly believe they are better than everyone else, that their superior ability led them to invest in a company that increased in value enough for them to become filthy rich.

Surrounded by yes men and woman that agree with everything they say and tell them what a genius they are. Of course any ill outcome isn't their fault.

Eh, as the world goes to shit there will always be desperate people willing to work for them, probably cheaper than before even with the AI failures, so they wouldn't care.

Might be a minute. The brain damage that lets them think they've "earned" those billions kinda hides the work of others. Especially the poors.

We can't to wait for them to realize this themselves. We need to demonstrate this by actively creating a society which excludes them.

One big problem with management is their inability to listen. Folks say shit over and over but management seems deaf because we're not people to be listened to. We're the help. And management acts like they know better.

The trick is to tell them you've been using it more than they have and that it's not as good as chatGPT for task A, but that for task B claude does okay 25% of the time so we'll need to 4x the timeline in order to get a good claude output based on that expected value.

But not as good as your personal local LLM that you've been training on company data. No one else can use it because it's illegal to clone. (your personal local LLM is your brain)

next time, tell your boss that Claude should replace him, not you.

Ralph Wiggum loop that shit

Numbers go up, Claude won’t bother you 👍🏻

I don't think LLMs will become AGI, but... planes don't fly by flapping their wings. We don't necessarily need to know how animal brains work to achieve AGI, and it doesn't necessarily have to work anything like animal brains. It's quite possible if/when AGI is achieved, it will be completely alien.

One of the best written comments I've seen about this. LLMs are cool for what they can do, but anyone comparing them to AGI is just shilling and trying to make a fortune off of selling pickaxes in a gold rush with the only gold being fools gold.

From reading all the comments from the community, it’s amazing (yet not surprising) that all these managers have fallen for the marketing of all these LLMs

This is probably related to automation bias and wishful thinking

I agree with almost all of your comment. The only part I disagree on is:

How can we attempt to recreate the human brain into AGI when we are not close to mapping out how our brains work in a way to translate that into code, let alone other more simple brains in the animal kingdom.

An implementation of AGI does not need to be inspired from the human brain, or any existing organic brain. Nothing tells us organic brains are the optimal way to develop intelligence. In fact, I'd argue it's not.

That being said, it doesn't change the conclusion: We are nowhere near AGI, and LLMs being marketed as such is absolutely a scam.

The original creator of Twitter and now creator of Bluesky and whatever this thing that's falling off the rails is.

Basically another billionaire living in his own little bubble and huffing his own farts too much.

Naw. This is clearly just 1 monkey.