Have you ever employed anyone?

People, when tasked with a job, often get it right. I've been blessed by working with many great people who really do an amazing job of generally succeeding to get things right -- or at least, right-enough.

But in any line of work: Sometimes people fuck it up. Sometimes, they forget important steps. Sometimes, they're sure they did it one way when instead they did it some other way and fix it themselves. Sometimes, they even say they did the job and did it as-prescribed and actually believe themselves, when they've done neither -- and they're perplexed when they're shown this. They "hallucinate" and do dumb things for reasons that aren't real.

And sometimes, they just make shit up and lie. They know they're lying and they lie anyway, doubling-down over and over again.

Sometimes they even go all spastic and deliberately throw monkey wrenches into the works, just because they feel something that makes them think that this kind of willfully-destructive action benefits them.

All employees suck some of the time. They each have their own issues. And all employees are expensive to hire, and expensive to fire, and expensive to keep going. But some of their outputs are useful, so we employ people anyway. (And we're human; even the very best of us are going to make mistakes.)

LLMs are not so different in this way, as a general construct. They can get things right. They can also make shit up. They can skip steps. The can lie, and double-down on those lies. They hallucinate.

LLMs suck. All of them. They all fucking suck. They aren't even good at sucking, and they persist at doing it anyway.

(But some of their outputs are useful, and LLMs generally cost a lot less to make use of than people do, so here we are.)