Seeing value in LLM answers is apophenia. It's an understandable human condition but still.

There can be value in SO answers, there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything.

There's immense value in ChatGPT's answers, you just need to accept that it's fallible.

I think most of the critique is coming from the people that made their mind up already or used only GPT-3.5 in the past.

Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a) "ChatGPT is stupid! Also, plagiarism! No value!" b) " I wrote a carelessly bad prompt and it responded with a seemingly bad answer!" c) " This confirms my biases!"

I find that when I provide it with enough context and a set of requirements (as I would with a non-AI engineer), it's very good at problem solving.

How does the issue of plagiarism bear on its utility? That’s like saying it’s impossible to get value out of listening to a torrented mp3.

I’m not sure understanding is an inherent issue either. When I Google ”weather lisbon,” Google spits out a number. The app doesn’t ”understand” anything, but it still helps me plan my day.

> automated plagiarism without understanding anything

I'm old enough to remember the memes campaigning to rename "software engineering" to "googling StackOverflow"

> there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything.

Conjecture. We lack a mechanistic understanding of "understanding", so you can't make this claim. Human answers are also fallible, so how do you know that human cognition isn't also statistical pattern matching similar to what's used in LLMs?

> Prompting LLMs correctly to get high quality answers is a skill.

That's like saying "reading the future from chicken entrails is a skill".

I don’t know how to square this with the fact that I routinely ask GPT-4 for code and get back answers that are in fact correct. You’re making it sound like it’s purely random, like I’m just getting back a string of zhrueksnbd8373&;! or something.

But that is what you get, it's just dressed up to sound like the answer. But it's not the answer , it can not be. If it accidentally is the answer, that's an accident, nothing more. See my example above about dangling commits...

> If it accidentally is the answer, that's an accident, nothing more.

Accuracy rates much, much higher than chance are not accidental. While you're pointing to a valid failing of LLMs, you're not using the correct words to describe it.

yes, it is nonsense, all of it, we agree.

All of what you wrote is nonsense? Ok then.

No, all that LLMs produce is nonsense.

> That's like saying "reading the future from chicken entrails is a skill".

If I could read the future from chicken entrails with as high a reply accuracy as I get from ChatGPT, then I would fully endorse that too.

Or the times Stack Overflow is correct, but the answer is from 12 years ago so you don't trust it and move on.