site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4253 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anyone have a quick start guide for doing useful things with LLMs and AI in general, and how to do useful things with them. All I've done is ask stupid questions to Bing Chat, which I find no more useful than a search engine, and sometimes less useful.

Also any way to download, train, and run them, so I can train the biases out of them?

I've built multiple LLM based projects that run in production so I might have some answers. Basically all automation of really repetitive but simple cognitive work. Don't expect the LLM to do all for you, use some prompt engineering, some regex, some external ML, some programming to glue it all together.

If you're a programmer it's use cases are quite obvious. It can write code for you. But also you can do NLP tasks from your wildest dreams. Clean extremely messy and inconsistent user data that no regex in the world could solve? done. Create a semantic search engine in 5 minutes? Done. Anything NLP application based is just a solved problem now.

If you want to run a local LLM go see what /r/LocalLLama recommends and or what's popular on hugging face right now. Even though I would say that if you are asking this question at the end of 2023 you probably have been living under a cave and should learn basic programing first before you have a shot at training your own LLMs.

I suggest you get a feel for openais llms first in the playground and see where your mind takes you. Talk to gpt and use it as a search engine and you will get a rough idea of it's capabilities.

It’s interesting how useful LLMs seem for programming. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the first thing software engineers optimized their new toy to do was write code. It’s like how there are so many moves about movies.

I think also software engineers are especially attuned to inefficiencies in productivity in a way regular white-collar workers are blind/indifferent to. Software engineers imo are 10-100x more efficient at doing the same work than even other marginally technical white-collar workers like data analysts do (I'm sure there is a lot of productivity in just knowing how to use concurrent/asynchronous programming, on top of programming at all).

Software devs are the only people increasing their wpm, installing window mangers, use the cli, makes custom keyboard shortcuts, leveraging scripts and automation whenever feasible (sometimes to their detriment) etc.

You see a lot of efficiency exploration in finance, consulting, and some doctors. The last field is mine and you see a lot of people desperately trying to figure out how to apply LLMs to save time or increase throughput, and I've heard tons of stories about finance and consulting people doing similar things prior to LLMs.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats