That it speaks English? Being human, I think a lot of us tend to forget what an incredibly difficult problem natural language processing is.

I'm always a little baffled when people discount the abilities of LLMs, when meanwhile I'm blown away that I'm having a perfectly valid, seemingly-human-level conversation with a machine. Yes, all of the problems with things like inaccuracy, hallucinations and bias need to be called out and highlighted, but if you had showed me a ChatGPT transcript a year ago I would have thought you were bluffing, that it was really a "human behind the curtain".

Point being, the person didn't ask for the system to output "console.log((retrieveHNFrontPage()).stories[0].title". The person simply asked "What is the general sentiment of the comments on the current top hacker news story?" And you might argue that there is some parsing logic you could implement to pull out "current top hacker news story" and translate that to code, but the fact is that currently nothing is better than an LLM at taking practically any natural language request and turning it into an actionable piece of code.

It is very impressive indeed and something that was not possible before. Im blown away by it, played a bit with it and still do from time to time and yet I move on with my life not caring too much, I wish I did. At work I got signed up for copilot trial and am dreading it a bit as I don’t really have time or a real need for it currently. On the other hand when done with work I want to spend as much time away from modern technology as I can.

Returning to the story, again Im blown away by this project and what’s possible with LLMs, will give it a go a few times but will probably continue to take notes manually and not rely too much on tools like these except for when I explocitly need it.