Fuck AI

Everything I said was very much correct.

LLMs are fairly primitive tools, they arent super complex and they do exactly what they say they do.

The hard part is wrapping that up in an API that is actually readable for a human to interact with, because the lower level abstract data of what an LLM takes in and spits out arent useful for us.

And then even harder is wrapping THAT API in another one that makes the input/output USEFUL for a human to interact with

You have layers upon layers of abstraction overtop of the tool to make it go from just a bunch of raw float values a human wouldnt understand, to becoming a tool that does a thing

That "wrapper" is what one calls the "platform".

And making a platform that doesnt fuck it up is actually very very hard, and very very easy to get wrong. Even a small tweak to it can substantially shift how it works

Think of it a lot like an engine in a car. The LLM is the engine, which on its own is not actually super useful. You have to actually connect that engine to something to make it do anything useful.

And even just doing that isnt very useful if you cant control it, so we take the engine and wrap it up in a bunch of layers of stuff that allow a human to now control it and direct it.

But, turns out, when you put a V6 engine inside a car, even a tiny little bit of getting the engineering wrong can cause all sorts of problems with the engine and make it fail to start, or explode, or fall out of the car, or stall out, or break, or leak... and unlike car engines, these engines are very very new and most engineers are still only just now starting to break ground on learning how to control them well and steer them and stop them from tearing themselves out of the car, lol.

So, to bring this back to the original post:

Most LLMs (engines) are actually pretty good nowadays, but the problem was Clawdbot (a specific brand of car manufacturer) super fucked up the way they designed their car so the car itself had a very very stupid engineering mistake. IE in this case, the brakes didnt work well enough and the car drove off a cliff.

That has nothing to do with how good the engine is or is not, the engine was just doing its job. The problem was with some other part of the car entirely, the part of the car Clawdbot made that wraps around the engine.

Nah there have been huge advancements in the past few months, you are definitely out of touch if you havent witnessed them

Recent models have gotten WAY better at "second guessing" themselves, and not acting nearly so confidently wrong.

I don’t think we’ve overcome the halfglass of wine issue

That isnt an LLM issue at all, that has nothing to do with LLMs in fact. Thats a problem with Stable Diffusion which is an entirely different kind of AI, but yeah that issue is fundamental to what stable diffusion is.

with most of the “improvements” being seen coming from basically better engineering

I mean, thats not much different from any other tech, a LOT of advanced tech we have today is dozens and dozens of separate bits of engineering all working in tandem to create something more meaningful.

Your smartphone has countless different and distinct advancements on different types of technology that come together to make a useful device, and if you removed any one of those pieces from it, it would be substantially less useful as a tool.

So yeah, I personally will very much count the other pieces of the puzzle, advancing, as the system as a whole advancing.

LLMs today compared to ones a year ago are quite a bit better, by a large degree, and the tooling around them has also improved a lot. The proliferation of Model Context Protocol Tools is proving to be a massive part of the system as a whole becoming something actually very useful.