Image for a second that I said you shouldn’t pull teeth with a wrench.
Your response would’ve been equally appropriate.
Wrenches are absolutely awesome at applying torque. What are LLM’s absolutely awesome at? I can’t come up with anything except producing convincing slop en masse.
I think you’re missing the subtle distinction between “can” and “should.”
To answer your question, I have friends that find them entertaining, and at least one who uses them in projects to do stuff, but don’t know the details. Have you considered that something you don’t understand might not be useless and evil? Your personal ignorance says nothing about a subject.
I’m not about to call myself the end all be all expert on LLM’s, but I’m a 20 year IT veteran in system administration and I keep up with tech news daily. I am the perfect market for new tech: I have a lot of disposable income, I’m tech obsessed and always looking for optimisations in my job as well as in my personal life. Yet outside of summaries (and even there I wouldn’t trust them) and boilerplate code that I could’ve copypasted from stack overflow I can’t think of a good reason to burn as much energy and money as the purveyors of LLM’s are. The ratio between expense and gains is WAY out of whack for these things and I’ll bet the market will correct itself in the not too distant future (in fact I have, I’m shorting NVDA).
I understand what these plausible next word generators are and how they work in broad strokes. Have you considered that you can’t tell what someone does or doesn’t understand by a comment?
By the way, you’re smarmy enough to tell me I shouldn’t be asking LLM’s for advice, but in the same thread you’re asking how to run a local unrestricted LLM to ask for not-entirely-legal advice? Funny that.
