I'm in the same boat. Markov chains are a lot of fun, but LLMs are way too formulaic. It's one of those things where AI bros will go, "Look, it's so good at poetry!!" but they have no taste and can't even tell that it sucks; LLMs just generate ABAB poems and getting anything else is like pulling teeth. It's a little more garbled and broken, but the output from a MCG is a lot more interesting in my experience. Interesting content that's a little rough around the edges always wins over smooth, featureless AI slop in my book.

slight tangent: I was interested in seeing how they'd work for open-ended text adventures a few years ago (back around GPT2 and when AI Dungeon was launched), but the mystique did not last very long. Their output is awfully formulaic, and that has not changed at all in the years since. (of course, the tech optimist-goodthink way of thinking about this is "small LLMs are really good at creative writing for their size!")

I don't think most people can even tell the difference between a lot of these models. There was a snake oil LLM (more snake oil than usual) called Reflection 70b, and people could not tell it was a placebo. They thought it was higher quality and invented reasons why that had to be true.

Orange site example:

Like other comments, I was also initially surprised. But I think the gains are both real and easy to understand where the improvements are coming from. [ . . . ]

I had a similar idea, interesting to see that it actually works. [ . . . ]

Reddit:

I think that's cool, if you use a regular system prompt it behaves like regular llama-70b. (??!!!)

It's the first time I've used a local model and did [not] just say wow this is neat, or that was impressive, but rather, wow, this is finally good enough for business settings (at least for my needs). I'm very excited to keep pushing on it. Llama 3.1 failed miserably, as did any other model I tried.

For story telling or creative writing, I would rather have the more interesting broken english output of a Markov chain generator, or maybe a tarot deck or D100 table. Markov chains are also genuinely great for random name generators. I've actually laughed at Markov chains before with friends when we throw a group chat into one and see what comes out. I can't imagine ever getting something like that from an LLM.

GPT-2 was peak LLM because it was bad enough to be interesting, it was all downhill from there

Agreed, our chat server ran a Markov chain bot for fun.

In comparison to ChatGPT on a 2nd server I frequent it had much funnier and random responses.

ChatGPT tends to just agree with whatever it chose to respond to.

As for real world use. ChatGPT 90% of the time produces the wrong answer. I've enjoyed Circuit AI however. While it also produces incorrect responses, it shares its sources so I can more easily get the right answer.

All I really want from a chatbot is a gremlin that finds the hard things to Google on my behalf.

Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer????? Amidst all of us mortals??

I’m a senior software engineer

ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

uh, wait:

but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either

whoops no, sorry, can't do it.

jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you're saying) is a big part of everything that's wrong with industry.

I’m a senior software engineer

Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don't think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don't have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn't mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

I’m a senior software engineer

Good. Thanks for telling us your opinion's worthless.

~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.