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.
…
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.
…
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.
