Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • The problem with being a pragmatic LLM user is that you have on one side corporate America shoe-horning the tech in mediocre products none wants, and on the other side a large portion of the internet who loathe it but don’t use it and don’t even know what it does. Those conversations never go anywhere man. You’re talking to someone who thinks accuracy of 57% on SpreadsheetBench means the model gives wrong answers 42% of the time.

    Hate to agree with Microsoft but yeah, Excel is probably a great place to introduce an LLM. It’s in that sweet spot between natural language and light programming, in an environment with math baked in so you don’t really care about the model’s accuracy or exact recall. All the data is here, and the model only has to manipulates cell numbers and writes formulas in this dumbed down language.

    I’m sure you can get away with pretty small models too. It doesn’t need super human knowledge to implement 90% of common Excel use cases, and i suspect in real world scenarios the accuracy must be pretty interesting.







  • Funny, I would propose the exact opposite. OpenAI is doomed, they are committed to spending more money than they can ever hope to earn, and already have a hard time raising anything covering their operating expenses, let alone the training of new innovative models. Their life will only keep getting harder and they’ll never have it as good as they did in 2023.

    On the other hand, alternative models get better every day and have tokens that cost a fraction of those from large model makers. Some of what you call ChatGPT “wrappers” actually have solid and healthy business models and are burning reasonable amounts of cash (reasonable for VC backed businesses anyway). They’ll just switch to cheaper models when price pressure tells them to and they’ll be fine.




  • He’s pretty explicit in that regard. He even added an interesting point at the start of the article : most people he knows who actually work with AI and know shit about it are not boosters. It’s an important distinction that Ed doesn’t ignore.

    He is against the over hype of “AGI” and skeptical of the hundreds of billions that have been poured into it for sinister reasons. He’s not denying that the tech has uses, but rather confronting the value of those uses with their actual, non subsidized cost.