i generally regard, “i will think less of you” type comments as a joke, because of how ridiculous the sentiment is, but this sort of stuff is perverse on the fedi
alright, i have to declare this as a strong opinion — #LLMs are better at alt-text than people are
the goal of alt text is to let a person “without eyes” see the picture, to get the same experience as someone who can see fine
but often, almost always, human-written alt text is either too succinct to be helpful, or just an extension of the post itself, and so doesn’t help an impaired person understand what’s in it
i've been getting into the things #LLMscan't do well, because i think it says a lot about what they're useful for, and it helps build a mental model around how they work
I've had occasion to ask an AI about a thing twice lately (a recent online phenomenon, and a book recommendation). Both times I asked both Gemini and ChatGPT, and both times one gave a reasonable if bland answer, and the other (a different one each time) gave a plausible but completely fictional ("hallucinated") answer.
When do we acknowledge that LLMs, and "AI" in general, aren't quite ready to revolutionize the world?
I really like the convention of using ✨ sparkle iconography as an “automagic” motif, e.g. to smart-adjust a photo or to automatically handle some setting. I hate that it has become the defacto iconography for generative AI. 🙁
Like words, molecular sequences in biological components are tokens that can be manipulated by #LLMs:
“Here, using large language models (LLMs) trained on biological diversity at scale, we demonstrate the first successful precision editing of the human genome with a programmable gene editor designed with AI.”
Lots of people who work in #AI have, in their head, an idea about what sort of interaction with an #LLMmight give them pause. The thing that might make them start to suspect that something interesting is happening.
Here's mine:
User: Tell me a cat joke.
LLM: Why did the cat join a band? He wanted to be a purr-cussionist.
I was listing something on eBay, and they encourage starting with an existing listing—presumably to increase the amount of detail and decrease the amount of work.
When I selected the same model, I got a default description that was extremely robotic and wordy while just repeating the spec sheet. I thought it sounded LLM-generated; sure enough when I went to edit it, there is a big shiny “write with AI” button.
If you have documents with the answers you're looking for, why not search the documents directly? Why are you embedding the documents then using #RAG (Retrieval Augmenter Generation) to make a large language model give you answers? An LLM generates text, it doesn't search a DB to give you results. So just search the damn DB directly, we already have great search algorithms with O(1) retrieval speeds! #LLMs are so stupid.
Our upcoming “Build Your First #Python Package!” workshop has a section on how #LLMs like #ChatGPT can be used to support tasks such as documenting and formatting your code to improve usability and maintainability. We’ll also considering the ethical and logistical challenges, pitfalls and concerns associated with using #AI based tools in software development.
“But this doesn’t save any time!” 3 useful questions when trying #LLMs:
Is there another way to get results I want? Don't give up right away.
Does AI make this task less or more annoying? Sometimes supervising drudge work feels better even if it's not faster; other times you'd still rather do it yourself.
Are results likely to improve as LLMs get better? If so, add a calendar reminder to try again in a few months. Or, keep a list of things you want to re-try post GPT-5 class models. #GenAI
Here is an example of how bad #LLMs are with math. I asked about velocity in the context of Agile process. The answer?
“Sure! Let's say that an Agile development team has completed four iterations, each lasting two weeks. In the first iteration, they delivered 12 user stories; in the second, they delivered 10; in the third, they delivered 9; and in the fourth, they delivered 8. The total number of user stories completed by the end of the fourth iteration is 49 (12 + 10 + 9 + 8)”.
#AI and #LLMs have transformed computing indeed: we moved from a completely deterministic approach to telling computers what to do to one where we mumble various spells and incantations and hope they achieve something.
Google Gemini aims for a 10 mil tokens context. It's so large that you can put books, docs, videos. They all fit in this context size. Will this replace RAG?
Don't think so because:
-💸 money; you still pay per token
-🐢 slow response time
-🐞 a huge context is hard to debug
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#PromptEngineering#TechnicalWriting#SoftwareDocumentation#Productivity: "Many tech writers have a constant fear that AI will take our jobs. I often think, what I’m doing isn’t rocket science. Any person with some education can do it. And yet, just as engineers struggle to write, tech writers frequently struggle with AI tools. They don’t understand how to use them effectively. Even though “prompt engineering” is often a ridiculed term online, again and again I hear feedback from TWs about AI not being useful to them, or they simply don’t have interest in AI, as if it’s irrelevant to their work. This blows me away. When I can ramp up on a product in an hour and write a user guide in a couple of days, and code a doc publishing script that automates even more tasks, how can AI not be useful? How can it not be essential?
An often repeated saying is that AI tools won’t replace us, we’ll be replaced by those who know how to use AI tools. I feel like this is more and more true. Consider this scenario: You hire a roofer to install a new roof, which mainly involves removing the old shingles and installing new ones. One roofer arrives with a hammer. It will take this roofer 2 weeks to do the job. Another roofer arrives with a pneumatic roofing nailer power tool. It will take this roofer 3 days to do the job. The cost of the first roofer is 4 times that of the second. The output is pretty much the same. Which roofer do you hire?
It’s the same with tech writers. Suppose you have a large project. One tech writer can create the documentation using AI tools in a quarter of the time, while the other will take 75% longer. Which tech writer do you hire?
Fortunately, I think tech writers can learn how to use AI tools as power tools. Especially with more awareness and knowledge about effective prompting techniques, tech writers can become much more productive using AI." https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/ai-is-accelerating-me
imagine a construction company that put out a statement, “we’re going to stop using power tools because there’s a lot of workplace injuries”. That would be crazy. Sure, i get that with a circular saw, it LOOKS like you just have to pull a trigger, but there’s actually a bit more to using it safely. You train your workers #LLMs#AI