LLMs Are Dumber Than a House Cat

Can they replace you anyway?

All the images are by the author via Midjourney and DALL-E.

Frustration? Confusion? Perhaps “lack of elegance” is a better expression. It’s the pain you feel when you witness a top-tier scientist marvel at technology they already understand.

AI influencers play the amazement card to gain clicks, but for scientists and engineers, it’s a different story. Magic is supposed to fade as soon as you uncover the trick.

That’s why it stings to see researchers at Microsoft and beyond using words like “impossible,” “insane,” and “astonishing” to describe GPT-4 months after its release.

Not to pick on Sebastian Bubeck in particular, but if auto-complete-on-steroid can “blow his mind,” imagine the effects on the average user.

Developers and data practitioners use LLMs every day to generate code, synthetic data, and documentation. They too can be misled by inflated capabilities. It’s when humans over-trust their tools that mistakes happen.

TL;DR: This is an anti-hype take where you’ll understand how LLMs work, why they’re…