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kubb parent
Or will they ever be reliable. Your question is already making an assumption.
vFunct
Its perfectly reliable for the things you know it to be, such as operations within its context window size.

Don't ask LLMs to "Write me Microsoft Excel".

Instead, ask it to "Write a directory tree view for the Open File dialog box in Excel".

Break your projects down into the smallest chunks you can for the LLMs. The more specific you are, the more reliable it's going to be.

The rest of this year is going to be companies figuring out how to break down large tasks into smaller tasks for LLM consumption.

diggan
They're reliable already if you change the way you approach them. These probabilistic token generators probably never will be "reliable" if you expect them to 100% always output exactly what you had in mind, without iterating in user-space (the prompts).
kubb OP
I also think they might never become reliable.
flir
There is a bar below which they are reliable.

"Write a Python script that adds three numbers together".

Is that bar going up? I think it probably is, although not as fast/far as some believe. I also think that "unreliable" can still be "useful".

diggan
But what does that mean? If you tell the LLM "Say just 'hi' without any extra words or explanations", do you not get "hi" back from it?
TeMPOraL
That's literally the wrong way to use LLMs though.

LLMs think in tokens, the less they emit the dumber they are, so asking them to be concise, or to give the answer before explanation, is extremely counterproductive.

diggan
I was trying to make a point regarding "reliability", not a point about how to prompt or how to use them for work.
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kubb OP
Sometimes I get "Hi!", sometimes "Hey!".
diggan
Which model? Just tried a bunch of ChatGPT, OpenAI's API, Claude, Anthropic's API and DeepSeek's API with both chat and reasonee, every single one replied with a single "hi".
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dist-epoch
I remember when people were saying here on HN that AIs will never be able to generate picture of hands with just 5 fingers because they just "don't have common sense"

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