There are a handful of use cases I’ve seen generative AI be useful
- Searching
- Partner programming (how do I…)
- Chatbot (as a novelty thought, gets boring quick, and the only great ways of controlling it in a way that would be safe for business is by adding more ai)
And a few more probably.
I spent about 6 months deep diving into how it all worked. I was having dread that it would take my job and was determined to learn about it. What I learned is that there are many many serious pitfalls that seem to be more or less ignored or unknown by businesses and people covering it.
I won’t say it’s as bad as blockchain, there are usages for it, but the hype is pretty damn close. Business thinking it will save them billions and they can start getting rid of developers. Tech bros lining up to say it’s going to bring on the singularity.
Eh. It’s cool. I wouldn’t say it’s going to bring the second coming of Jesus.
Searching
Literally the worst possible usage. They’re syntax generators, not search engines, and not knowledge fonts.
Gpt is fantastic at search. Like, check its work but it’ll check hundreds of pages of results way faster than you can.
I don’t know how to say this in a less direct way. If this is your take then you probably should look to get slightly more informed about what LLMs can do. Specifically, what they can do if you combine them with with some code to fill the gaps.
Things LLMs can do quite well:
- Generate useful search queries.
- Dig through provided text to determine what it contains.
- Summarize text.
These are all the building blocks for searching on the internet. If you are talking about local documents and such retrieval augmented generation (RAG) can be pretty damn useful.
That’s not entirely fair either though… They can incorrectly summarize, omit important information, or just make stuff up.
Ask it to search or list all of Bach’s children and you can see the wheels completely fall off. It was inventing people with actual fake birth and death dates and also gave me some of Handel’s children!
What do you mean by “it”? The chatGPT interface? Could be, but then you are also missing the point I am making.
After all, chatGPT is just one of the possible implementations of LLMs and indeed not perfect in how they implemented some things like search. In fact, I do think that they shot themselves in the foot by implementing search through bing and implementing it poorly. It basically is nothing more than a proof of concept tech demo.
That doesn’t mean that LLM’s are useless for tasks like searching, it just means that you need to properly implement the functionality to make it possible. It certainly is possible to implement search functionality around LLMs that is both capable and can be reviewed by a human user to make sure it is not fucking up.
Let me demonstrate. I am doing some steps that you would normally automate with conventional code:
I started about by asking chatGPT a simple question.
*“I want to provide a list of all the children bach had. What would be a suitable google query”
It then responded with.
“To compile a comprehensive list of Johann Sebastian Bach’s children, a suitable Google query would be: “List of Johann Sebastian Bach’s children names”. This query is specific enough to indicate that you’re looking for a detailed list, including the names of all the children, which should yield targeted results.”
The following step I did manually, but is something you would normally have automated. I put the suggested query in google, I quickly grabbed the first 5 links and then put the following in chatGPT.
The top 5 results in google are the pages I provided below. Browse to each page, and answer the query “List of Johann Sebastian Bach’s children names”. Just answer the query, but let me know if there is conflicting information on the page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_family
https://www.classicfm.com/composers/bach/guides/children/
https://www.bachonbach.com/100-bach-faq-and-soon-there-are-500-bach-faq/faq-26-what-were-the-names-of-all-of-johann-sebastian-bach-s-kids/
https://www.spiritsound.com/music/bachchildren.html
https://www.grahamsmusic.net/post/bach-s-wives-and-childrenIt then proceeded to give me the following answer
Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 children in total. With his first wife, Maria Barbara Bach, he had seven children, four of whom survived into adulthood: Catharina Dorothea, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard. With his second wife, Anna Magdalena Wilcke, he had 13 children, of whom six survived into adulthood: Gottfried Heinrich, Elisabeth Juliane Friederica, Johanna Carolina, Regina Susanna, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian
Going over the search results myself seems to confirm this list. Most importantly, except for the initial input, all of this can be automated. And of course, a lot of it can be done better, as I didn’t want to spend too much time.
It’s decent for generating ideas or names for fiction. I’ve used it for tabletop stuff a couple of times to give me NPC names or lists of personality traits, and it’s good sometimes for breaking writers block when I get stuck on some detail and I can’t figure out what word I want to use or what to name something. You can usually get it to give you some sort of okay suggestions, but the volume of ideas is usually enough to spark a better idea for me. The only weird thing I’ve noticed is that GPT4 (or whatever flavor bing/copilot is currently using) REALLY likes alliteration to a degree that is downright corny. It’s kinda weird but sort of funny honestly.
This article is not saying a lot tbh
For real, it almost felt like an LLM written article the way it basically said nothing. Also, the way it puts everything in bullet points is just jarring to read.
Oh, wow. It really isn’t. Axios usually does really good reporting, but that looks more like the outline / notes for a story than something ready to publish.
I strongly dislike generative LLMs (I refuse to call them AI) for a host of reasons, but the biggest reason has less to do with the tech and more to do with the people / upper brass who are trying to replace human jobs with them and expecting it to just work (while salivating at the thought of pocketing the salary of the displaced human employee).
I don’t think the article really calls that out explicitly, but they are saying it’s not living up to the hype. As far as progress goes, I suppose that’s a good first step.
improving and integrating the technology is raising harder and more complex questions than first envisioned
Many people not only envisioned but predicted these problems as soon as the hype cycle began.
Interesting article. I’d have loved to see some stats on how LLM investment and LLM startups are doing.
Frankly, corporations seem to have no idea how to use LLMs. They want them to be a public facing company representative, which is exactly what LLMs can’t do well. Where they accel is as an assistant.
Want to figure out what scale you’re playing a song in? It’s great at that. I’ve had it give me chords to go with scales too, or even asked for some scale options based on the feeling of the sound.
It’s also great for looking for terms in other languages. I’ve got some ranged weapon abilities in my tabletop rpg. I knew i wanted one of them to be called pistolero, but I didn’t know the terms fusilero or escopetero, and might not have found them on my own, but chatgpt came up with them right away.
I’ve also learned that it’s great at looking up game guides and providing hints that aren’t spoilers without giving the puzzle away. I had it generate results for the Lady’s Maze in Planescape: Torment and the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. Amazing hints without giving it away.
If you have your own brain and want to off-load some simple queries, it’s great. If you want to use it in place of a human brain to talk to customers, you’re barking up the wrong gpt.
