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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1547 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 18, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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For those of you who have asked recent LLMs questions in your area of expertise, how accurate are the responses? What is your field and what models are you using?

I'm in the biomedical engineering field. I last used ChatGPT-4o months ago and found the answers to be quite terrible, like what I might expect from someone who only watched a youtube video on the topic. Reading it felt uncanny valley in a way that reminded me vaguely of watching a movie scene with cheap green-screen effects — I could feel the lack of substance viscerally. It left a bad impression and, with my slightly Luddite disposition, I largely ignored LLMs for anything but coding since.

I recently needed a good layman explanation for a project and asked Grok 3. I came away genuinely impressed. I asked it to expand on certain points more rigorously and even formulated a few questions that would be appropriate for a graduate level course, and it did all of this so well it even improved my own understanding of some aspects. When I get time, I’ll try to poke and prod to see if I can find gaps or limits, but it has genuinely changed my view of LLMs. Previously, I felt like they were only really good for coding and expected they would hit diminishing returns, but I’m less sure now.

I've only ever used the free tiers, but ChatGPT loves to hallucinate new Apache Spark configurations. Gemini, surprisingly, knows even less.

I have paid ChatGPT and it hallucinates profusely too, see my other comment above. Had this issue many times, not with Apache Spark specifically but with many other libraries and APIs - it just decides "it'd be nice to have this setting" and just invents it out of thin air, and I spent half an hour trying to hunt it down and going to the source to finally find out it never existed.

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