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Comment by fnordpiglet

We have built quite a few highly useful LLM applications in my org that have reduced cost and improved outcomes in several domains - fraud detection, credit analysis, customer support, and a variety of other spaces. By in large they operate as cognitive load reducers but also handle through automation the vast majority of work since in our uses false negatives are not as bad as false positives but the majority of things we analyze are not true positives (99.999%+). As such the LLMs do a great job at anomaly detection and allow us to do tasks it would be prohibitively expensive with humans and their false positive and negative rates are considerably higher than LLMs.

I see these statements often here about “I’ve never seen an effective commercial use of LLMs,” which tells me you aren’t working with very creative and competent people in areas that are amenable to LLMs. In my professional network beyond where I work now I know at least a dozen people who have successful commercial applications of LLMs. They tend to be highly capable people able to build the end to end tool chains necessary (which is a huge gap) and understand how to compose LLMs in hierarchical agents with effective guard rails. Most ineffectual users of LLMs want them to be lazy buttons that obviate the need to think. They’re not - like any sufficiently powerful tool they require thought up front and are easy to use wrong. This will get better with time as patterns and tools emerge to get the most use out of them in a commercial setting. However the ability to process natural language and use an emergent (if not actual) abductive reasoning is absurdly powerful and was not practically possible 4 years ago - the assertion such an amazing capability in an information or decisioning system is not commercially practical is on the face absurd.

parent fnordpiglet 2 years ago

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