alt Hacker NewsIf you make the example any more complicated, it makes sense.
A lathe operator isn’t any good if they don’t frequently operate lathes.
A articulated robot implementer needs frequent experience implementing robots to be any good.
That doesn’t mean lathes or robots are useless. Nor does it mean they have failed as products because they require expertise.
I do think it raises questions as to whether vast swathes of the population will be effective at using LLMs. Are they scissors, or a lathe?
Everybody seems to want them to be scissors, or at least to treat them as such, but even still the reason everyone can use scissors so well is because they’ve practiced with them, right? You’re probably a lot better at using scissors now than the first time you did it, the functionality is just so simple it’s harder to notice.
To me learning to use LLMs is the same as doing anything else, you have to practice and put in the hours to get good. Maybe some harnesses will eventually allow LLMs to function more as scissors than lathes. This seems to be what Microsoft is trying to do by embedding Copilot in all their products and saying “choose the UI that works best for you”. If that doesn’t end up working we’ll need another paradigm for “non-technical” users to effectively operate computer assistants