There have been multiple things which have gone wrong with AI for me but these two pushed me over the brink. This is mainly about LLMs but other AI has also not been particularly helpful for me.

Case 1

I was trying to find the music video from where a screenshot was taken.

I provided o4 mini the image and asked it where it is from. It rejected it saying that it does not discuss private details. Fair enough. I told it that it is xyz artist. It then listed three of their popular music videos, neither of which was the correct answer to my question.

Then I started a new chat and described in detail what the screenshot was. It once again regurgitated similar things.

I gave up. I did a simple reverse image search and found the answer in 30 seconds.

Case 2

I wanted a way to create a spreadsheet for tracking investments which had xyz columns.

It did give me the correct columns and rows but the formulae for calculations were off. They were almost correct most of the time but almost correct is useless when working with money.

I gave up. I manually made the spreadsheet with all the required details.

Why are LLMs so wrong most of the time? Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources? I just don’t understand the point of even making these softwares if all they can do is sound smart while being wrong.

  • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net
    15·
    2 days ago

    Why are LLMs so wrong most of the time? Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?

    Well that’s the thing. LLMs don’t generally “process” data as humans would. They don’t understand the text they’re generating. So they can’t check their answers against reality.

    (Except for Grok 4, but it’s apparently checking its answers to make sure they agree with Elon Musk’s Tweets, which is kind of the opposite of accuracy.)

    I just don’t understand the point of even making these softwares if all they can do is sound smart while being wrong.

    As someone who lived through the dotcom boom of the 2000s, and the crypto booms of 2017 and 2021, the AI boom is pretty obviously yet another fad. The point is to make money - from both consumers and investors - and AI is the new buzzword to bring those dollars in.