Fuck AI

note, I think models used for finding cures to diseases and other sciences are a good thing. I'm referring to the general populace LLM hype

The good news: These models are never LLMs, because LLMs can never be anything else than bullshit generators.

The bad news: The first studies of actual performance seem to indicate a similar pattern in hospitals to what is seen with the AI hype all the time: While people often perceive themselves to be more efficient, actual efficiency might in fact drop. It turns out that four Polish hospitals that started using machine learning models to detect cancer actually found fewer instances of cancer as a result, not more. It might of course improve as the technology gets better, and it could supplement instead of replace human expertise. But the story "AI is amazing for detecting cancer" is sadly not as clear-cut as we have been lead to believe.

Edit: read comments below!

It's just rich fucks being rich fucks

I mean, as someone who kinda struggles with words sometimes, it can be a little helpful with like formalizing language for official documents and stuff but the hype is just another capital bubble.

If LLMs had any degree of accuracy guarantee then they would be useful.

I often think, "I could let an LLM do this and save me time, if it worked...". But it's always been a professional bullshit generator.

Can't trust it to make even a simple list, so you always end up doing double work.

Number must go up.

These products are looking to be sold... and propping up the entire economic bubble in the meantime.

Whether they "work" is entirely besides the point.

Some of the LLM deployments are just stupid as well. Take the way AWS is using Claude as part of the Q CLI offering. You would assume such a model would at a bare minimum be able to reference and refer to AWS' own public documentation and knowledgebase data. But no, it doesn't even have access or the ability to read AWS public website unless you copy and paste the text into your chat session. That's just so fucking stupid I can't understand it.

As a result, it's all too common to get the model to just make shit up about how an AWS service functions, and if you ask it how do you know that? It will admit that it actually doesn't know and just made it up.

The only thing I've found it useful for is very limited and basic python scripts, but even then you have to be careful since it's not very good at that either.

Some people say everything was more interesting when you still needed to learn and know things, figure out stuff and work for it. And today everything is just provided as a service, people know shit about things they just use on a surface level and have no control over, or understanding of...

A lot of people are stupid and marketing works really well on them so the rest of us get subjected to it

AI chatbots aren't a new thing. You can find them going back decades. That's why there was so much hype for them becoming usable by the masses.

I think the math and science behind the inner works are interesting. The fact that you can feed in stuff and get things that make sense (not meaning they're accurate, just that they are usually grammatically good). If you don't find that sort of thing interesting then sure, the rest is absolutely crazy, but not really unexpected for humans who anthropomorphize everything.