this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Do we really need this technology to exist though? It's unreliable and very niche as far as I have seen.
People say that it speeds up certain tasks, but it's so unreliable that you need to error-check the whole thing afterwards.
It's a new technology barely out of infancy. Of course it's unreliable and niche. You could say the same thing about any technological advance in history.
The very nature of how it functions is unreliable. It's a statistical probabilistic model. It's great for what it was designed to do but imagining that it has any way of rationalising data is purely that, just imagination. Even if let's say we accept that it makes an error rate at the same rate as humans do (if it can even identify an error reliably), there's no accountability in place that ensures that it would check the correctness like a human would.
I understand perfectly how LLMs work, and I made no claims about what they can do. Taking them on their own capabilities (text generation, inspiration, etc), not what some lying-through-their-teeth marketer said, is there a reason to say they 'shouldn't exist'?
OP didn't phrase it as "should they exist" but as "do we need them to exist".
And personally i think not, we don't need them. In text generation they are good... inspiration? They are more of an inspiration killer imo.
We don't NEED any particular technology to exist. That's a weird distinction to make.
Different minds work differently.
No, mankind certainly needs a lot of techonologies (maybe just out of built dependency) either to mantain our living standards or just plainly to ensure that we produce and distribute enough resources for everyone to survive.
We need LLMs as much as we needed 3D movies or augmented reality.
als brechmittel.
Endlich hab jemand eine echte Nutzung für LLMs gefunden.
Take any of those technologies that we depend on today, and go back to the decade they were invented. Practically none of them would have been considered 'needed' either. It takes time for technology to mature and be adopted. I'll grant that the crazy pro-AI shills aren't helping things any
You could say that. But you could also say that none of these other technological advances got pushed through this badly while being obviously not ready for ~~widespread~~ use.
And also, can you really say that though? Most other technological advances had a pretty clear distinction from the older way of doing things.
I can certainly agree with you that most current advertised use cases of LLMs are total bullshit, yes. My point is just that asking if it deserves to exist based on its shortfalls is weird, when it's barely existed a few years. It just shouldn't be getting pushed as much as it is