Post #3261874

2024-01-14 15:22 UTC

Just to be sure I'm not being unfair, I searched for writeups of LLM uses. Here's a representative example of the genre: https://www.techopedia.com/12-practical-large-language-model-llm-applications They mention 12 use cases. Some are done better with simpler, cheaper models or non-ML techniques (1, 4, 6, 8, 12). Some are wildly speculative (2, 9, 10). But that leaves 4 items that I want look at carefully: content creation, customer support, sales automation, and writing code. Those are at least superficially plausible places where LLMs and large image models could have practical uses. 2/

Replies (1)

@williampietri@sfba.social 2024-01-14 15:35

First, though an important philosophical point: LLMs are fancy autocomplete. You give them a set of words, they'll predict the next word based on the enormous corpuses they've been trained on. This can give them the appearance of sentience. People will talk as if they "understand" things. They don't. It's the million-monkeys-with-typewriters thing, but the monkeys have seen enough English text that the next word is statistically consistent with the previous words. Humans are subject to to pareidolia, and we really like to anthropomorphize things. It's not just thunder, it's a guy with a name and a look and a personality and a whole family. It's not just a bit of winter where we celebrate with our dearest; it's a fat guy in a red suit with specific facial hair. So although the text can feel human, we'll have to work hard to think of ChatGPT as a bit of unfeeling machinery, not our plastic pal who's fun to be with. 3/

Open ##3261875