this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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I think just about everyone who is not an executive at a tech company is highly skeptical of AI.
You'd hope, and yet I've had people on Lemmy give me shit for being overtly anti-llm
My problem with LLMs is that they're expert pattern matchers and little else.
Ask them the integral from 1-5 of ln(x) and they're sure to screw it up.
They'll give you something that sounds like the right answer, but their explanations are nonsense.
Cold readings, like a psychic, is how I recently heard them referred to as.
I hate that it’s being shoved into anything and everything right now, but saying you’re “overtly anti-llm” seems a bit over dramatic to me. LLMs are a tool like anything else. Used properly and in the right situation, they can be very helpful.
They're mostly not being used for that and they come at a huge cost
Remember how a few years ago 3d displays and VR were being shoved in everyone's faces? I can see the current "AI" trend going the same way.
VR is still cool and will probably always be cool, but I doubt it'll never be mainstream. 3D was just awkward, and they really just wanted VR but the tech wasn't there yet.
I own neither, yet I've been considering VR for a few years now, just waiting for more headsets to have proper Linux support before I get one.
Likewise, I'm not paying for LLMs, but I do use the ones my workplace provides. They're useful sometimes, and it's nice to have them as an option when I hit a wall or something. I think they're interesting and useful, but not nearly as powerful as the big corporations want you to think.
There's a difference between healthy skepticism and invalid, knee-jerk opposition.
LLMs are a useful tool sometimes, and I use them for refining general ideas into specific things to research, and they're pretty good at that. Sure, what they output isn't trustworthy on its own, but I can pretty easily verify most of what it spits out, and it does a great job of spitting out a lot of stuff that's related to what I asked.
For example, I'm a SW dev, so I'll often ask it stuff like, "compare and contrast popular projects that do X", and it'll find a few for me and give easily-verifiable details about each one. Sometimes it's wrong on one or two details, but it gives me enough to decide which ones I want to look more deeply into. Or I'll do some greenfield research into a topic I'm not familiar with, and it does a fantastic job of pulling out keywords and other domain-specific stuff that help refine what I search for.
LLMs do a lot less than their proponents claim, but they also do a lot more than detractors claim. They're a useful tool if you understand the limitations and have a rough idea of how they work. They're a terrible tool if you buy into the BS coming from the large corps pushing them. I will absolutely push back against people on both extremes.
I mean there is place in between highly skeptical and anti. I think its a faster and more convenient search as long as it gives sources and it makes creating and editing media easier. I don't like the energy usage and do like work bringing that down. Its just trying to get it to solve things on its own that seems to be pushed when we can clearly see it not working when used like that. I think the biggest issue is its crammed in as a solution and it works in the most half assed manner and they want to say that fine.
We have a lot of non-management whom are all-in and drinking the kool-ade. I'm still highly put off for a number of reasons, but an outlier.
I was just trying to figure out how to express that exact sentiment. Thank you.