One day you wake up, and find that you now need to negotiate with your toaster. Flatter it maybe. Lie to it about the urgency of your task to overcome some new emotional inertia that it has suddenly developed.
Only toast can save us now, you yell into the toaster, just to get on with your day. You complain about this odd new state of things to your coworkers and peers, who like yourself are in fact expert toaster-engineers. This is fine they say, this is good.
Toasters need not reliably make toast, they say with a chuckle, it's very old fashioned to think this way. Your new toaster is a good toaster, not some badly misbehaving mechanism. A good, fine, completely normal toaster. Pay it compliments, they say, ask it nicely. Just explain in simple terms why you deserve to have toast, and if from time to time you still don't get any, then where's the harm in this? It's really much better than it was before
It reminds me of the start of Ubik[1], where one of the protagonists has to argue with their subscription-based apartment door. Given also the theme of AI allucinations, that book has become even more prescient than when it was written.
This comparison is extremely silly. LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, show me Russian <-> Japanese translation software that doesn't use AI and comes anywhere close to the performance and reliability of LLMs. "Please close the castle when leaving the office". "I got my wisdom carrot extracted". "He's pregnant." This was the level of machine translation from English before AI, from Japanese it was usually pure garbage.
> LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise.
Is it really ok to have to negotiate with a toaster if it additionally works as a piano and a phone? I think not. The first step is admitting there is obviously a problem, afterwards you can think of ways to adapt.
FTR, I'm very much in favor of AI, but my enthusiasm especially for LLMs isn't unconditional. If this kind of madness is really the price of working with it in the current form, then we probably need to consider pivoting towards smaller purpose-built LMs and abandoning the "do everything" approach.
We are there in the small already. My old TV had a receiver and a pair of external speakers connected to it. I could decrease and increase the receiver volume with its extra remote. Two buttons, up and down. This was with an additional remote that came with the receiver.
Nowadays, a more capable 5.1 speaker receiver is connected to the TV.
There is only one remote, for both. To increase or decreae the volume after starting the TV now, I have to:
1. wait a few seconds while the internal speakers in the TV starts playing sound
2. the receiver and TV connect to each other, audio switches over to receiver
3. wait a few seconds
4. the TV channel (or Netflix or whatever) switches over to the receiver welcome screen. Audio stops playing, but audio is now switched over to the receiver, but there is no indication of what volume the receiver is set to. It's set to whatever it was last time it was used. It could be level 0, it could be level 100 or anything in between.
5. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register.
6. Sorry, you were too impatient and fast when you switched back to TV, the receiver wants to show you its welcome screen again.
7. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register.
8. Now you can change volume up and down. Very, very slowly. Hope it's not at night and you don't want to wake anyone up.
Yep, it's a decent analogy: Giving up actual (user) control for the sake of having 1 controller. There's a type of person that finds it convenient. And another type that finds it a sloppy piss-poor interface that isn't showing off any decent engineering or design. At some point, many technologists started to fall into the first category? It's one thing to tolerate a bad situation due to lack of alternatives, but very different to slip into thinking that it must be the pinnacle of engineering excellence.
Around now some wit usually asks if the luddites also want to build circuits from scratch or allocate memory manually? Whatever, you can use a garbage collector! Point is that good technologists will typically give up control tactically, not as a pure reflex, and usually to predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances.
> predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances
I'd add with reliability, boundaries, and tolerances within the necessary values.
The problem with the TV remote is that nobody has given a damn about ergonomic needs for decades. The system is reliable, well understood, and has well known boundaries and tolerances; those are just completely outside of the requirements of the problem domain.
But I guess that's a completely off-topic tangent. LLMs fail much earlier.
>LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise
Great! Agreed! So we're going to restrict LLMs to those classes of problems, right? And not invest trillions of dollars into the infrastructure, because these fields are only billion dollar problems. Right? Right!?
Only toast can save us now, you yell into the toaster, just to get on with your day. You complain about this odd new state of things to your coworkers and peers, who like yourself are in fact expert toaster-engineers. This is fine they say, this is good.
Toasters need not reliably make toast, they say with a chuckle, it's very old fashioned to think this way. Your new toaster is a good toaster, not some badly misbehaving mechanism. A good, fine, completely normal toaster. Pay it compliments, they say, ask it nicely. Just explain in simple terms why you deserve to have toast, and if from time to time you still don't get any, then where's the harm in this? It's really much better than it was before