Not only have I been following a lot of the open models, you may find it surprising I have extensively tested some of them and coerced them to generate deterministic responses across different machines as a method to prove responses are not tampered with, as well as developing ways to run them in remotely attestable secure enclaves to ensure people that use them for sensitive applications can have provable privacy with end to end encryption.
I will admit that I find deploying and hacking on the tech itself super interesting. Hell I founded a machine learning company and got a paper published with the AAAI for my cheap bulk training data acquisition techniques back in 2012 before most cared about this stuff.
I even think there are a ton of great and exciting use cases for this tech. Like identifying cancer in large photographic datasets, etc. I have a lot of hope about medical applications in particular.
All that said, I just don't think LLMs are remotely competitive or useful at the type of threat modeling, security engineering, and auditing work I do on average. They are the wrong tool for my job, which require a level of actual reasoning that LLMs are nowhere near capable of right now, or are likely to be any time soon. Maybe they could help with a script here and there which might save me a few hours a month, but for 95%+ of it, they would just waste my time regurgitating the same industry standard bad advice and approaches that I am trying to change while making me duller at writing code by hand when I need to.
As contrast though, I would not fire someone for using LLMs for learning or inspiration as long as they consistently prove they fully understand and can explain every line of every PR they submit, can pair program or usefully contribute to engineering discussions without LLMs, and maintain a competitive level of quality with the rest of the team. Not everyone has to make the same tool choices I do, as long as they can hold their own in a team with me and are not dumb enough to regurgitate AI slop they don't understand.
It is amusing you use vegans as an example. I am not a vegan, but I often describe myself as something of a digital vegan that is very very selective about what tools I use and what I expect from them such as why I also don't use a smartphone or GPS.
I will admit that I find deploying and hacking on the tech itself super interesting. Hell I founded a machine learning company and got a paper published with the AAAI for my cheap bulk training data acquisition techniques back in 2012 before most cared about this stuff.
I even think there are a ton of great and exciting use cases for this tech. Like identifying cancer in large photographic datasets, etc. I have a lot of hope about medical applications in particular.
All that said, I just don't think LLMs are remotely competitive or useful at the type of threat modeling, security engineering, and auditing work I do on average. They are the wrong tool for my job, which require a level of actual reasoning that LLMs are nowhere near capable of right now, or are likely to be any time soon. Maybe they could help with a script here and there which might save me a few hours a month, but for 95%+ of it, they would just waste my time regurgitating the same industry standard bad advice and approaches that I am trying to change while making me duller at writing code by hand when I need to.
As contrast though, I would not fire someone for using LLMs for learning or inspiration as long as they consistently prove they fully understand and can explain every line of every PR they submit, can pair program or usefully contribute to engineering discussions without LLMs, and maintain a competitive level of quality with the rest of the team. Not everyone has to make the same tool choices I do, as long as they can hold their own in a team with me and are not dumb enough to regurgitate AI slop they don't understand.
It is amusing you use vegans as an example. I am not a vegan, but I often describe myself as something of a digital vegan that is very very selective about what tools I use and what I expect from them such as why I also don't use a smartphone or GPS.