I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly multitools, knives, flashlights, and pens.
I think the key to this is how you really feel about it. If you are genuinely happy with the arrangement, and aware you will eventually need to move on, that can be okay. If you start to feel any self-esteem issue, like you’re being taken advantage of, it’s time to get out and find something better. Always respect yourself.
I write software for a living and I have worked directly with LLM backend code. You aren’t wrong about the exceptions, but I think they actually reinforce my main point. If you play with the parameters you can make all kinds of things happen, but all of those things are still driven by the existing information it already has or can find. It can mash things together in random new ways, but it will always work with components that already exist. There is no awareness of context or meaning that would allow it to make intelligent choices about what it mashes together. That will always be driven by the patterns it already knows, positively or negatively.
It’s like doing chemistry by picking random bottles from the shelf and dumping them into a beaker to see what happens. You could make an amazing discovery that way, but the chances of it happening are very, very low. And even if it does happen, there’s an excellent chance that you won’t recognize it.
I’m in favor of using LLMs for tasks that involve large-scale data analysis. They can be quite helpful, as long as the user understands their limitations and performs due diligence to validate the results.
Unfortunately what we are mostly seeing are cases where LLMs are used to generate boilerplate text or code that is assembled from a vast collection of material that someone who actually knew what they were doing had previously created. That kind of reuse is not inherently bad, but it should not be confused with what competent writers or coders do. And if LLMs really do take over a lot of routine daily tasks from people, the pool of approaches to those tasks will stagnate, and eventually degenerate, as LLMs become the primary sources of each others’ solutions.
LLMs may very well change the world, but not it in the ways most people expect. Companies that have invested heavily in them are pushing them as the solutions to the wrong problems.
LLMs are not capable of creating anything, including code. They are enormous word-matching search engines that try to find and piece together the closest existing examples of what is being requested. If what you’re looking for is reasonably common, that may be useful. If what you’re looking for is obscure, you may get things that don’t apply. And the LLM cannot tell the difference. They can be useful but, unlike an LLM, you need to understand the context to use them safely.
I think the most interesting thing about LLMs is actually what they tell us about the repetitive nature of most of what we do.
Why does anyone still bother to read sentences that begin with “Trumps says…”. Whatever it is, you know it’s going to not only be a lie, but a particularly unconvincing lie. The only times he doesn’t lie are when he says something that isn’t true because he doesn’t understand the subject.
A free press should report such things as “Trump inaccurately claims…”.
We are screwed.