this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
913 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
72524 readers
3597 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a sleep button on my laptop. Doesn't mean I would use it.
I'm just trying to say you're saying the feature that everyone kind of knows doesn't work. Chatgpt is not trained to do calculations well.
I just like technology and I think and fully believe the left hatred of it is not logical. I believe it stems from a lot of media be and headlines. Why there's this push From media is a question I would like to know more. But overall, I see a lot of the same makers of bullshit yellow journalism for this stuff on the left as I do for similar bullshit on the right wing spaces towards other things.
Again with dismissing the evidence of my own eyes!
I wasn't asking it to do calculations, I was asking it to put the data into a super formulaic sentence. It was good at the first couple of rows then it would get stuck in a rut and start lying. It was crap. A seven year old would have done it far better, and if I'd told a seven year old that they had made a couple of mistakes and to check it carefully, they would have done.
Again, I didn't read it in a fucking article, I read it on my fucking computer screen, so if you'd stop fucking telling me I'm stupid for using it the way it fucking told me I could use it, or that I'm stupid for believing what the media tell me about LLMs, when all I'm doing is telling you my own experience, you'd sound a lot less like a desperate troll or someone who is completely unable to assimilate new information that differs from your dogma.
What does "I give it data to put in a formulaic sentence." mean here
Why not just share the details. I often find a lot of people saying it's doing crazy things and never like to share the details. It's very similar to discussing things with Trump supporters who do the same shit when pressed on details about stuff they say occurs. Like the same "you're a troll for asking for evidence of my claim" that trumpets do. It's wild how similar it is.
And yes asking to do things like iterate over rows isn't how it works. It's getting better but that's not what it's primarily used for. It could be but isn't. It only catches so many tokens. It's getting better and has some persistence but it's nowhere near what its strength is.
I would be in breach of contract to tell you the details. How about you just stop trying to blame me for the clear and obvious lies that the LLM churned out and start believing that LLMs ARE are strikingly fallible, because, buddy, you have your head so far in the sand on this issue it's weird.
The solution to the problem was to realise that an LLM cannot be trusted for accuracy even if the first few results are completely accurate, the bullshit well creep in. Don't trust the LLM. Check every fucking thing.
In the end I wrote a quick script that broke the input up on tab characters and wrote the sentence. That's how formulaic it was. I regretted deeply trying to get an LLM to use data.
The frustrating thing is that it is clearly capable of doing the task some of the time, but drifting off into FANTASY is its strong suit, and it doesn't matter how firmly or how often you ask it to be accurate or use the input carefully. It's going to lie to you before long. It's an LLM. Bullshitting is what it does. Get it to do ONE THING only, then check the fuck out of its answer. Don't trust it to tell you the truth any more than you would trust Donald J Trump to.
This is crazy. I've literally been saying they are fallible. You're saying your professional fed and LLM some type of dataset. So I can't really say what it was you're trying to accomplish but I'm just arguing that trying to have it process data is not what they're trained to do. LLM are incredible tools and I'm tired of trying to act like they're not because people keep using them for things they're not built to do. It's not a fire and forget thing. It does need to be supervised and verified. It's not exactly an answer machine. But it's so good at parsing text and documents, summarizing, formatting and acting like a search engine that you can communicate with rather than trying to grok some arcane sentence. Its power is in language applications.
It is so much fun to just play around with and figure out where it can help. I'm constantly doing things on my computer it's great for instructions. Especially if I get a problem that's kind of unique and needs a big of discussion to solve.