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95% accuracy VS 70% accuracy, both numbers are pulled out of someone's ass and serves little to the discussion at hand. How did you measure that, or rather since you didn't, what's the point of sharing this hypothetical 25% difference?

And how funny that you comment seems to land perfectly together with this about people having very different experiences with using LLMs:

> I am still trying to sort out why experiences are so divergent. I've had much more positive LLM experiences while coding than many other people seem to, even as someone who's deeply skeptical of what's being promised about them. I don't know how to reconcile the two.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898532




It works very well (99.9%), when the problem resides at a familiar territory of the user's knowledge. When i know enough about a problem, i know how to decompose it into smaller pieces, and all (most?) smaller pieces have been already solved countless of times.

When a problem is far outside of my understanding, A.I. leads me towards a wrong path more often than not. Accuracy is terrible, because i don't know how to decompose the problem.

Jargon plays a crucial role there. LLM's need to guided using as much correct jargon of the problem as possible.

I have done this for decades on people. I read a book at some point that the most sure way for people to like you, is to speak to them in words they usually use themselves. No matter the concepts they are hearing with their ears, if the words belong belong in their familiar vocabulary they are more than happy to discuss anything.

So when i meet someone, i always try to absorb as much of their vocabulary as possible, as quickly as possible, and then i use it to describe ideas i am interested in. People understand much better like that.

Anyway, the same holds true for LLM's, they need to hear the words of the problem, expressed in that particular jargon. So when a programmer wants to use a library, he needs to absorb the jargon used in that particular library. It is only then that accuracy rates hit many nines.


I will walk around the gratuitous rudeness and state the obvious:

No, the pretend above 95% accuracy is not as good as the up to 50% rates of hallucinations reported by OpenAI for example.

The difference in experiences is easily explainable in my opinion. Much like some people swear by mediums and psychics and other easily see through it: it's easy to see what you want to see when a nearly random experience lands you a good outcome.

I don't appreciate your insinuation that I am making up numbers and I though it shouldn't go unanswered but do not mistake this for a conversation. I am not in the habit of engaging with such demeaning language.


> gratuitous rudeness

It is "Gratuitous rudeness" to say these numbers without any sort of sourcing/backing are pulled from someone's ass? Then I guess so be it, but I'm also not a fan of people speaking about absolute numbers as some sort of truth, when there isn't any clear way of coming up with those numbers in the first place.

Just like there are "extremists" claiming LLMs will save us all, clearly others fall on the other extreme and it's impossible to have a somewhat balanced conversation with either of these two groups.




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