[looseyesterday]

I am a product designer and literally every conversation I have now has everyone asking can we use an LLM here? They will be everywhere before long.

[postsantum]

We had a similar situation with blockchain a few years ago

[rqtwteye]

The difference is that LLM has a lot of use cases where it can be enormously productive. Blockchain has never had such a use case.

[SanderNL]

I literally never had any conversation about using blockchain at work or in our personal lives and I don't know anybody that did. This hype is nothing like blockchain.

[danielbln]

The difference is the answer to "can we use it with blockchain" was: "uhhh, maybe? somehow?", whereas for LLMs it's "yeah sure, I can think of these 10 use cases, half of which we can probably implement today if we use an API".

[Jeff_Brown]

Haha yes. But at the time, experts' opinions of where it would go ranged from not much to a big expansion in the size of the banked population and the space of contracts that can be written, with a lot of probability mass at nothing. AI experts themselves today estimate a range from we destroy ourselves to nearly infinite wealth, with a lot* probability mass at we destroy ourselves.

* It might be on the order of 1%, but it would be insane for a rational actor to ignore a 1% probability of self-destruction.

[sidewndr46]

I'm just imagining conversations where you suggest something like "We could add a checkbox so the user can toggle off this feature if they find it problematic." and someone responds with "Could we use Chat GPT for that?"

[have_faith]

Someone needs to remake http://conferencecall.biz but with lots of AI references thrown in.

[sanxiyn]

I guess asking "can we use an LLM here" is natural, but how often is the answer yes?

[marginalia_nu]

A more interesting question is should we use an LLM here.

There's undeniably a lot of work being done in this area, but so much of it is just ill conceived shovelware in an attempt to make it big in the gold rush.

We get like a dozen "Show HN" posts a day where there's a service that basically prefixes an input with a prompt and bounces it off ChatGPT and returns the response.

There's also no doubt interesting products to be built using this new technology. But I don't think it's going to be made by just gluing 2-3 APIs together. If you can do that, someone else can do it too. That's not a business model. Being the first to do something means very little.

[armchairhacker]

"Can you do this without an LLM, using just regular coding?"

LLM to solve math problems, implement API requests, etc. = hard no

LLM to solve challenging constraint problems or statistical problems where we already have a good solution (A*, heuristics, really clever algorithms) = no

LLM to solve challenging problems where we don't have a good solution (medical diagnostics, legalese, manual translation of badly-formatted data) = yes... (people will disagree but if the LLM does these better than a human, it does these better than a human - and if not, the humans will almost definitely benefit from using an LLM)

LLM to do something with natural language, like implement a chatbot, explain something, cheap therapy = hard yes

[onion2k]

how often is the answer yes?

Always, if the next question is "how much?"

[croes]

Will be fun time if all mind of software integrates this black boxes. Every update will have a risk of breaking things without the possibility to test like with unit tests.