LLMs are amazing!

LLMs are powerful. That's for sure. But I am not sure most people understand how powerful they are.

Let me be a bit arrogant here: I think most people do not understand technology. And with 'most people', I mean the general public. People who do not work in IT.

They look at what ChatGPT can do, compare that to what they have been promised by SF movies for decades, and think "Meh... nothing to see here."

It's hard to appreciate the complexity of an LLM and a system like ChatGPT if you have no clue about the underlying principles.

Let's not talk about how hard it is to keep a website like https://chatgpt.com in the air for millions of concurrent users, and keep things secure. That alone is a massive undertaking most companies fail at.

But the underlying mechanism of understanding human language, knowing the intent of a users prompt and then coming up with a good response is actually mindboggling.

And how do people respond who know a little bit about technology? "Pfff. It's just a prediction engine that looks at the statistically most obvious next word."

Well, yeah, that is true. But that's only part of the story. There is so much more to it. If you take a step back and look at a typical conversation with the latest models, you'd be amazed at how good it is to hold a conversation. It does make mistakes, sure. But don't we all?

It's hard not to anthropomorphize these systems: they feel very human when we interact with them. And that alone is amazing. But the fact that they can come up with the right answer most of the time, in such a timely fashion, is nothing short of a miracle.

I am not saying the systems are perfect. They are not, not by far. They still hallucinate, and come up with weird answers. But the fact they can come up with answers at all is quite astonishing.

So, let's give these systems a break and don't downplay them. That's just as unfair as claiming they are the answer to all questions around live, universe and everything. Because that one has already been sorted out: it's 42.