The thing LLMs are really really good at, is sounding authoritative.
If you ask it random things the output looks amazing, yes. At least at first glance. That's what they do. It's indeed magical, a true marvel that should make you go: Woooow, this is amazing tech: Coming across as convincing, even if based on hallucinations, is in itself a neat trick!
But is it actually useful? The things they come up with are untrustworthy and on the whole far less good than previously available systems. In many ways, insidiously worse: It's much harder to identify bad information than it was before.
It's almost like we designed a system to pass turing tests with flying colours but forgetting that usefulness is what we actually wanted, not authoritative, human sounding bullshit.
I don't think the LLM naysayers are 'unimpressed', or that they demand perfection. I think they are trying to make statements aimed at balancing things:
Both the LLMs themselves, and the humans parroting the hype, are severely overstating the quality of what such systems produce. Hence, and this is a natural phenomenon you can observe in all walks of life, the more skeptical folks tend to swing the pendulum the other way, and thus it may come across to you as them being overly skeptical instead.
If you ask it random things the output looks amazing, yes. At least at first glance. That's what they do. It's indeed magical, a true marvel that should make you go: Woooow, this is amazing tech: Coming across as convincing, even if based on hallucinations, is in itself a neat trick!
But is it actually useful? The things they come up with are untrustworthy and on the whole far less good than previously available systems. In many ways, insidiously worse: It's much harder to identify bad information than it was before.
It's almost like we designed a system to pass turing tests with flying colours but forgetting that usefulness is what we actually wanted, not authoritative, human sounding bullshit.
I don't think the LLM naysayers are 'unimpressed', or that they demand perfection. I think they are trying to make statements aimed at balancing things:
Both the LLMs themselves, and the humans parroting the hype, are severely overstating the quality of what such systems produce. Hence, and this is a natural phenomenon you can observe in all walks of life, the more skeptical folks tend to swing the pendulum the other way, and thus it may come across to you as them being overly skeptical instead.