Talking About Large Language Models
This will hardly seem like a controversial opinion, but LLM are overhyped. Its certainly impressive to see the things people do with them, but they seem pretty cherry-picked to me. When I sat down with ChatGPT for a day to see if it could help me with literally any project I&#x27;m currently actually interested in doing it mostly failed or took so much prompting and fiddling that I&#x27;d rather have just written the code or done the reading myself.<p>You have to be very credulous to think for even a second that anything like a human or even animal mentation is going on with these models unless your interaction with them is anything but glancing.<p>Things I tried:<p>1) there are certain paradigms I find useful for game programming. I tried to use ChatGPT to implement these systems in my favorite programming language. It gave me code that generally speaking made no sense. It was very clear that it did not understand how code actually works. Eg: I asked it to use a hash table to make a certain task more efficient and it just created a temporary hash table in the inner loop which it then threw away when the loop was finished. The modification did not make the code more efficient than the previous version and missed the point of the suggestion entirely, even after repeated attempts to get it to correct the issue.<p>2) I&#x27;m vaguely interested in exploring SU(7) for a creative project. Asked to generate code to deal with this group resulted in clearly absurd garbage that again clearly indicated that while ChatGPT can generate vaguely plausible text about groups it doesn&#x27;t actually understand anything about them. Eg: ChatGPT can say that SU(7) is made of matrices with unit norm but when asked to generate examples failed to generate any with this property.<p>3) A very telling experiment is to ask ChatGPT to generate logo code that draws anything beyond simple shapes. Totally unable to do so for obvious reasons.<p>Using ChatGPT convinced me that if this technology is going to disrupt anything, its going to be _search_ rather than _people_. Its just a search engine with the benefit that it can do some simple analogizing and the downside that it has no idea how anything in the real world works and will confidently produce total garbage without telling you.