Technology

reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs.

LLMs are only ever going to be a single component of an AI system. We’ve only had LLMs with their current capabilities for a very short time period, so the research and experimentation to find optimal system patterns, given the capabilities of LLMs, has necessarily been limited.

I personally believe it's possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle "AI" in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy.

That’s a separate problem. Unless it results in decreased research into improving the systems that leverage LLMs, e.g., by resulting in pervasive negative AI sentiment, it won’t have a negative on the progress of the research. Rather the opposite, in fact, as seeing which uses of AI are successful and which are not (success here being measured by customer acceptance and interest, not by the AI’s efficacy) is information that can help direct and inspire research avenues.

LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation.

Clarification: LLMs are not reliable at this task, but we have patterns for systems that leverage LLMs that are much better at it, thanks to techniques like RAG, supervisor LLMs, etc..

When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn't as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.

TBH, so would a random person in such a situation (if they produced anything at all).

As an example: how often have you heard about a company’s marketing departments over-hyping their upcoming product, resulting in unmet consumer expectation, a ton of extra work from the product’s developers and engineers, or both? This is because those marketers don’t really understand the product - either because they don’t have the information, didn’t read it, because they got conflicting information, or because the information they have is written for a different audience - i.e., a developer, not a marketer - and the nuance is lost in translation.

At the company level, you can structure a system that marketers work within that will result in them providing more correct information. That starts with them being given all of the correct information in the first place. However, even then, the marketer won’t be solving problems like a developer. But if you ask them to write some copy to describe the product, or write up a commercial script where the product is used, or something along those lines, they can do that.

And yet the marketer role here is still more complex than our existing AI systems, but those systems are already incorporating patterns very similar to those that a marketer uses day-to-day. And AI researchers - academic, corporate, and hobbyists - are looking into more ways that this can be done.

If we want an AI system to be able to solve problems more reliably, we have to, at minimum:

• break down the problems into more consumable parts
• ensure that components are asked to solve problems they’re well-suited for, which means that we won’t be using an LLM - or even necessarily an AI solution at all - for every problem type that the system solves
• have a feedback loop / review process built into the system

In terms of what they can accept as input, LLMs have a huge amount of flexibility - much higher than what they appear to be good at and much, much higher than what they’re actually good at. They’re a compelling hammer. System designers need to not just be aware of which problems are nails and which are screws or unpainted wood or something else entirely, but also ensure that the systems can perform that identification on their own.