Large Language Models

Large language models are a form of machine learning, or AI, that can be used for generating text in response to written prompts
Who’s heard about ChatGPT and other similar models?
One of the kinds of text these models can generate is code
The very simplistic version of how these models work is that they look at a string of words and figure out what words are most likely to come next
They learn this by looking at millions of examples from the internet
Since there is lots of code written by software developers on the internet they are pretty good at generating code
And since there are lots of lessons on how to learn to code on the internet they can also be good generating text that explains code

There are a variety of meaningful ethical concerns about using LLMs
- The use a lot of energy to train and run and therefore put a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere
- They use millions of peoples work without credit or payment, arguably in violation of copyright and licenses
- And since they parrot what’s on the internet they often include a lot of bias and bigotry
That said, LLMs can be useful for learning and you are welcome to use them for this in this course
Using them to directly answer the exercises won’t help you learn, because humans need practice to learn
That’s why we have exercises
But that’s easy for me to say, so let’s hear from someone actively learning to code - Hero from Coding with Strangers
(there is some swearing in this video, so if you’re not comfortable with that you’re welcome to step out for ~60 seconds)

I’m assuming that you’re all here to learn, so I recommend listening to Hero and at least not using LLMs to directly answer the exercises
We won’t be policing LLM content in submissions
But the exercises do need to be answered using the approaches we learned in class and often LLMs will use a different approach
So what are useful ways to use them?
You can prompt them to explain things you don’t understand and they will parrot relevant advice from material on the web
This can be easier, especially for folks learning to code, than trying to search for a specific site that has the answer
You can also use them to help debug your code, which we’ll talk about more when we talk about debugging

Once you’ve finished the course you can use them to automate things you already know how to do
In our experience in my lab these models typically do about 90% of each simple task correctly
That means that the end result rarely works, but if you know how to fix what is wrong it can still be a time saver
But you have to know enough to fix the things that don’t work and to check and make sure that the code is actually doing what you want
And sometimes they’re really wrong
The other day I asked GitHub copilot for help with a complex version control command and it gave me a command that would have unrecoverably deleted all of the work I’d done in the last hour

Notes