It’s a nice fact that LLMs are pretty smart and useful now but suck at writing good prose. Suggests writing well really is very hard.
It’s a nice fact that LLMs are pretty smart and useful now but suck at writing good prose. Suggests writing well really is very hard.
i don't know any LLMs smarter than humans but i definitely know humans dumber than LLMs
phoebe added
Pre-trained language models (LM), by contrast, are capable of directly generating prose that may be responsive to an information need, but at present they are *dilettantes* rather than domain experts – they do not have a true understanding of the world, they are prone to hallucinating, and crucially they are incapable of justifying their utterances... See more
Donald Metzler • Rethinking Search: Making Domain Experts out of Dilettantes
Benjamin Searle added
In this analogy, LLMs become better than humans at writing. But it’s still widely understood that learning to write is good for you (maybe writing is “the best way to think”) so people send their kids to writing camp and humble-brag about writing in their free time. But in the end, most writing was done for the mundane purpose of making text
... See moredynomight • Historical analogies for large language models
sari added
The potential of LLMs goes far beyond a natural language interface... The least it could do is intelligently give me a starting point for typing in a prompt. The tyranny of the blank textbox is real.
Austin Z. Henley • Natural language is the lazy user interface
sari added
Even if LLMs don’t get smarter (though I suspect they will, and soon) new capabilities and modes of interacting with AIs, like agents and massive context windows, will help LLMs do dramatic new feats.
Ethan Mollick • Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
Johann Van Tonder added
Ethan Mollick
"A key challenge of (LLMs) is that they do not come with a manual! They come with a “Twitter influencer manual” instead, where lots of people online loudly boast about the things they can do with a very low accuracy rate, which is really frustrating..."
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
Johann Van Tonder added
A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more
Steven Johnson • Revenge of the Humanities
Brian Wiesner and added
- Robert, who looks at ~1,000 pieces of writing a day, has discovered that the best predictor for the quality of a writing piece is the writer
Chris Best • Writers Writing, Readers Reading, Creators Creating
sari added