Navigating the Capabilities and Pitfalls of Language Models

Nicholas Carlini joined Bryan and Adam to talk about his terrific blog post on his many pragmatic uses of LLMs to solve real problems. He has great advice about when to use them (often!) and what kinds of problems they handle well. LLMs aren't great at many things, but used well they can be an amazing tool.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest, Nicholas Carlini as well as by listeners Mike Cafarella, p5commit, and chrisbur.

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Nicholas' blog: How I Use "AI"
• The McLaughlin Group
• Surge 2011 ~ Closing Plenary ~ Theo Schlossnagle
• Microsoft's Tay chatbot
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry vs. Siri
• Sal Khan on LLMs
• Google's awful AI ad
• Google pulls ad

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!