@knightlie @LouisIngenthron @f4grx @jeffjarvis ...LLMs are quite good with.... language (no surprises here), summarizing, proposing an alternative wording, analysing text are things GPT4 does well. Also with web browsing enabled it works quite well as an alternative to search, more interactive, in natural language, although ofcourse unreliable (my opinion/experience)

@ErikJonker @knightlie @f4grx @jeffjarvis Also, corollary to that, they're incredible at translating between languages, which up to this point has been a very expensive and error-prone human process.

@LouisIngenthron @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis finally, an actual use that may be generally beneficial outside of “making my job a bit easier.”

@knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis I mean, making people's jobs easier isn't a bad thing. It's a close race between that and war for what drives our species to innovate the most.

@knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis

I use it for software engineering; it's able to fill in entire functions that would have been relatively simple, but very tedious, for me to do.

LLMs are also amazing at teaching you a new skill for which you already have some domain knowledge. I.e. I used an LLM to help me learn enough python to build and train my own LLMs in less than two days. Now, I needed the domain knowledge to recognize when the LLM was wrong, but it still vastly accelerated my learning.

The LLM I trained was used to identify certain types of materials from a web crawler. This kind of tool would be incredibly useful to researchers, by helping them narrow down an endless volume of data into a smaller manageable subset of "likely relevant" data.

On top of that, I can't say too much about this, but I work with a company that makes medical simulators for training surgeons, and we're using ML to help identify and generate information for training purposes.

Then there's the generative image AI. I'm a shitty artist, so when I'm prototyping games, these allow me to add it placeholder graphics that aren't pure shit. If the game idea proves viable, then I can invest to pay an actual artist to replace them before launch. The lack of shitty programmer art helps me stay motivated and excited about the project and costs me nothing.

I'm sure I could go on, but I think I've made my point.

@LouisIngenthron @knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis I have a friend whose job is to write the specs for software so coders will produce the correct product. Sounds like the coders are out of a job.

@jhavok @knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis Not quite. Right now, the algos are trained on as much data as they can find, which includes some truly terrible examples. Therefore, if you just let it run loose without a knowledgeable human to work with, it just produces crap that won't even compile, much less run, for anything but the most basic examples.

That's a big reason why AI works so much better as a companion tool to improve humans' efficiency, rather than an outright replacement.

@LouisIngenthron @knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis I would think a programming LLM would only be trained on material that compiles, and would thus innately contain the logic required for code to compile.

@jhavok @knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis It is, yes, but some of that code invokes functions that have now been deprecated for years. Just because it once compiled doesn't mean it still will.

And that's before you get to the fact that the AI is actively combining code based on patterns, not just regurgitating it.

@knightlie @ErikJonker @f4grx @jeffjarvis
Yeah, it's not a fact machine. That's like trying to use photoshop to edit a text document.