I initially started with natural language processing (small language models?) in school, which is a much simpler form of text generation that operates on words instead of whatever they call the symbols in modern LLMs. So when modern LLMs came out, I basically registered that as, “oh, better version of NLP,” with all its associated limitations and issues, and that seems to be what it is.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty neat, and I can certainly see some interesting use-cases, but it’s really not how I want to interface with computers. I like searching with keywords and I prefer the process of creation more than the product of creation, so image and text generation aren’t particularly interesting to me. I’ll certainly use them if I need to, but as a software engineer, I just find LLMs in all forms (so far) annoying to use. I don’t even like full text search in many cases and prefer regex searches, so I guess I’m old-school like that.

I’ll eventually give in and adopt it into my workflow and I’ll probably do so before the average person does, but what I see and what the media hypes it up to be really don’t match up. I’m planning to set up a llama model if only because I have the spare hardware for it and it’s an interesting novelty.