IMO around December of last year LLM output (for coding at least, not for everything) went from "almost 100% certainly slop" to "probably not slop, if you asked for the right thing while being aware of context limitations".
A lot of people seem stuck with their older (correct at the time) views of them still always producing slop.
FWIW I am more of an AI doomer (in the sense that I think the economic results from them will be disastrous for knowledge workers given our political realities) than booster, but in terms of utility to get work done they did pass a clear inflection point quite recently.
I think LLMs currently need to be used by someone who knows what they are doing to produce value, but the jump they made from being endless slop machines to useful tools in the right hands is enough for me to assume it is only a matter of time until they will be useful tools in the hands of even the untrained masses.
I wish this wasn't true because I think it will economically upend the industry in which I have a career, but sadly the universe doesn't care what I wish.
> assume it is only a matter of time until they will be useful tools in the hands of even the untrained masses.
IMO this vastly overestimates how good the "untrained masses" are at thinking in a logical, mathematical way. Apparently something as basic as Calculus II has a fail rate of ~50% in most universities.
There's nothing "basic" about Calculus II. Calculus is uniquely cursed in mathematical education because everything that comes before it is more or less rooted in intuition about the real world, while calculus is built on axioms that are far more abstract and not substantiated well (not until later in your mathematical education). I expect many intelligent, resourceful people to fail it and I think it says more about the abstractions we're teaching than anything else.
But also, prompting LLMs to give good results is nowhere near as complex as calculus.
Most people on here don’t belong to that group of people. So ofc they can find a way to create value out of a thing that requires some tinkering and playing with.
The question is can the techniques evolve to become technologies to produce stuff with minimal effort - whilst only knowing the bare minimum. I’m not convinced personally - it’s a pipe dream and overlooks the innate skill necessary to produce stuff.
If they truly did, there wouldn't be a huge amount of humans whose role is basically "Take what users/executives say they want, and figure out what they REALLY want, then write that down for others".
Maybe I've worked for too many startups, and only consulted for larger companies, but everywhere in businesses I see so many problems that are basically "Others misunderstood what that person meant" and/or "Someone thought they wanted X, they actually wanted Y".
The multi-decade existence of roles like "business analysts" and "product owners" (and sometimes "customer success") is pretty strong evidence that this is not the case.
> I wish this wasn't true because I think it will economically upend the industry in which I have a career, but sadly the universe doesn't care what I wish.
I mean, yes. I'm worried about my career too, but for different reasons. I don't think these things are actually good enough to replace me, but I do think it doesn't matter to the people signing the cheques.
I don't believe LLMs are producing anything better than slop. I think people's standards have been sinking for a long time and will continue to sink until they reach the level LLMs produce
The problem isn't just LLMs and the fact they produce slop, it's that people are overall pretty fine with slop
I'm not though, so there's no place for me in most software business anymore
But I look at software from the perspective of them as being objects.
Since it’s intangible people can’t see within. So something can look pretty even if underlying it all, it’s slop.
However, there is an implicit trade off - mounting slop makes you more vulnerable from a security standpoint, bugs etc which can destroy trust and experience of using the software. This can essentially put the life of a business at risk.
People aren’t thinking so much about that risk - because it hasn’t happened to anyone large substantially. What I think about is will slop just continue to mount unchecked? Or are people expecting there to be improvements that enable oneself to go back and clean up the slop with more powerful tooling?
If the latter does not come about, I think we will see more firms come under stress.
Overall though, I think too much focus is on the acceleration of output. I never think that’s the most important thing. It’s secondary to having a crystal clear vision. The problem is to have a clear vision requires doing a lot of grunt work - it trains and conditions your mind to think a particular kind of way.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
I voted against Trump 3 times. But people outside of the US should definitely act as if they cannot trust the US. Because they can't. I mean ffs we collectively elected him twice.
As someone outside the US I certainly feel this way.
The underlying point is that the American public voted for this. They saw his first term, a million people dead from covid, and thought to themselves "I want more of that guy". And if they can elect this person, what might the next one look like?
In one short year every country on earth has put the US in the "unreliable trade partner" box. (Even Canada. Canada!). That damage will last for decades. The big winner here? China. They're hoovering up goodwill all over the place.
Killing USAid not only killed a major purchaser of US farm surplus, it woke up a lot of grass-roots agencies to the need to diversify funding. Lots of soft-influence lost overnight, and it's not easily coming back.
I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies.
> it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!)
There are plenty of pre-LLM tools that can fix grammar issues.
> Can you please share what and how gets degraded?
I'm not the person you asked, but IMO LLMs suck the style and voice out of the written word. It is the verbal equivalent of photos that show you an average of what people look like, see for example:
As definitionally average the results are not bad but they are also entirely unremarkable, bland, milquetoast. Whether or not this result is a degradation will vary, of course, as some people write a lot worse than bland.
> which might have fixed in that a few racey tests can now run a thousands times, but it wasn't the right place and so the race still exist.
One somewhat related thing I've noticed from all the major LLMs is a tendency to 'fix' multithreading race conditions by inserting delay calls of seemingly random amounts of milliseconds to 'give things time to settle'.
It kinda makes sense why they do it because I've seen similar human generated code over the years, but it doesn't instill a lot of confidence in unreviewed 'vibecoded' systems.
I see it get into a loop where I explain bugs and it confidently tells me they're fixed without touching the issues. After multiple bad outputs, telling it that I don't trust it and it has to run everything by me for approval solves the problem. Continued guidance each time it tells me what I "thinks" it knows is required to make it work properly.
Already was well before AI, the difference now is that a few big AI providers risk becoming the ultimate rent-seekers that will increasingly capture all of the value of that commodified knowledge whether the original knowledge generators want that or not. There is no opt out, everything will be vacuumed up into the machine mind.
This will almost certainly lead to vastly increased amounts of wealth inequality (on top of the already unsustainable levels we have today) and possibly a very messy societal disintegration (this is theoretically avoidable, but I am not convinced it is practically avoidable given our current socioeconomic/political realities).
> It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
This is how it should work, but I still think it is important to discuss these failures in the context of AI risks.
One of the largest real-world dangers of AI (as we define that now) is that it is often confidently wrong and this is a terrible situation when it comes to human factors.
A lot of people are wired in such a way that perceived confidence hacks right through their amygdala and they immediately default to trust, no matter how unwarranted.
> The US government [...] could find that amount of money every year.
Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.
My wife and I parental lock each other’s iPhones. I have social media but have to go to my PC to check it. This friction makes a world of difference.
I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are blocked on my phone. We had an overall good time but these moments stuck out.
The way we do this is just we set a passcode for the others phone but I configure my own settings and she hers. This has been available and worked for us for nearly a decade.
> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever.
To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.
Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.
30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms.
50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines.
The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.
Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.
Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.
But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.
When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.
> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.
Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.
Remember when that type of behavior was rude? I had a conversation with a couple in 2011 and they had told me that they saw Steve Jobs and his wife at a restaurant and Steve was on his phone most of the time and how rude it seemed. I've thought about that periodically over the years as I've seen the addiction grow and become commonplace and especially as I've seen those same habits develop in myself.
I remember going on dates a few years later, 2014/15, and the phone usage during the dates seemed rude and slightly offended me. Now it's so common it's not even really noteworthy.
I've never felt the need for parental controls, I just refuse to open those sites or install the related apps. Are they really such a draw for you?
At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.
A lot of people seem stuck with their older (correct at the time) views of them still always producing slop.
FWIW I am more of an AI doomer (in the sense that I think the economic results from them will be disastrous for knowledge workers given our political realities) than booster, but in terms of utility to get work done they did pass a clear inflection point quite recently.
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