It’s the first day of 2025. If there’s anyone paying attention, this blog has come back to life once again. Why?
Previously I hinted at some personal challenges that were seemingly surmounted, freeing up emotional and cognitive energy. That was a false dawn. Lots of other issues cropped up in work and life. Nothing cataclysmic but definitely draining. No need to detail them here. Some are resolved and some are ongoing.
I need an outlet though to provide some release. I’m also aiming to generate some supplemental material for the overall technical portfolio. Why?
The answer, as to everything in technology for 2024, is LLMs. In my day job, I work on MLOps for data intensive workloads in the medical informatics space. (I’m easy to find on LinkedIn if you need details.) Being in tech long term, I’m also just generally interested.
I’m of the “promise and peril” persuasion in relation to LLMs. Skeptical of much of the perilous hype but hopeful regarding some of the technology promise. Simon Willison has a great recap of lessons learned about LLMs in 2024 and possibly says it best (apologies for the heavy quoting):
A drum I’ve been banging for a while is that LLMs are power-user tools—they’re chainsaws disguised as kitchen knives. They look deceptively simple to use—how hard can it be to type messages to a chatbot?—but in reality you need a huge depth of both understanding and experience to make the most of them and avoid their many pitfalls.
If anything, this problem got worse in 2024.
We’ve built computer systems you can talk to in human language, that will answer your questions and usually get them right! … depending on the question, and how you ask it, and whether it’s accurately reflected in the undocumented and secret training set.
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There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire!
There is so much space for helpful education content here, but we need to do do a lot better than outsourcing it all to AI grifters with bombastic Twitter threads.
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I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents. There is genuine value to be had here, but getting to that value is unintuitive and needs guidance.
Those of us who understand this stuff have a duty to help everyone else figure it out.
So I’m back to, among other things, dig into this LLM stuff with purpose and intent.