• baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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    5 months ago

    I don’t get the hype around LLM, it is a terrible way to search. It has never give me anything useful on any of my search, ever.

    Most of the time asking chatgpt anything non-trivial, it will just spit out gibberish that doesn’t mean anything.

    Who in their right mind would look at these terribly stupid thing and think: Yeah! This garbage is going to advance humanity.

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      I don’t get the hype around LLM, it is a terrible way to search

      I’ll be playing devil’s advocate here just for a moment (despite the huge ecological, moral, political and economical costs) :

      • what LLM does provide is a looser linguistic interface. That means instead of searching for exact words, one can approximately search for the “idea”. That means instead of hitting just the right keywords that an expert might know, one can describe a partial solution, a very rough guess of what the problem might be, and possibly get a realistic sounding answer. It might be wrong yet it might still be a step in the right direction.

      So… yes I also don’t think the hype is justified but IMHO it’s quite clear that providing a solution that makes an interface easier to get some OK-looking result would appeal to masses. That means a LOT of people get their hopes up about potential empowerment and a few people ride that bubble making money on promises.

      PS: for people interested in the topic but wanting to avoid the generative aspect I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search is a good starting point.

    • amenji@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Have you tried perplexity.ai? Using it to do some programming and it’s quite good so far. It’s basically LLM + Search Engines.

      You can also use it to use different models (not just with ChatGPT).

      Sometimes even run the code itself (Python for my case) and see if it’s valid.

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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        5 months ago

        Last time I tried ChatGPT it cannot even do a trie in Haskell, so I don’t see any way it is useful for me, unfortunately. IIRC, I was testing with some trivial modification of a trie, but I do not remember at this point.

        Maybe it is useful for college homework, but I have yet to find any problem it can solve beyond college. But I would love to learn more, since you have more experience with it. :)

        Edit: I tried a problem I encountered couple month ago on https://perplexity.ai. I want to implement a parser in Haskell that do not halt on error, but record the error and keeps going.

        It should take 2 lines with mtl, and the AI gives me a more verbose answer that is also completely wrong.

        So… I don’t see how they are helpful, honestly. Sorry.

    • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Can’t say I have the same experience. Other than for old niche content, the sources cited from asking perplexity.ai (I just use it since it’s free, no idea how it compares to others) tend to be exactly what I’m after.