I’m sympathetic to the instinct to push back on the absurd boosterism (these things are an existential threat to humanity this year), it’s fucking annoying.
But they can do plenty of useful stuff reliably. It’s not “be generally intelligent”, which they are just nothing even remotely close to, but know you don’t dig the LLM hype from that comment? Yeah, they get that every time.
I have tried to use LLMs, namely GPT4 and Llama-2, for sentiment analysis. They did quite poorly. I asked them to identify which sentiments from a list are found in a given text, with output formatted as a comma-separated list. In response I usually got just that. But sometimes I got a prose explanation of the sentiment, a list containing different keywords than requested, a list formatted differently than I wanted, or nothing useful at all.
Sentiment analysis is easy. It wasn't the end goal, just a "hello world" example to verify my tools were set up correctly. I ran into unsolvable problems in the tutorial.
I have no use for tools which do amazing things sometimes but which cannot be reasoned about and cannot be prevented from producing garbage. Maybe other people will find uses for them, though. I'll keep an open mind and check back in five years.
But they can do plenty of useful stuff reliably. It’s not “be generally intelligent”, which they are just nothing even remotely close to, but know you don’t dig the LLM hype from that comment? Yeah, they get that every time.