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277 points gk1 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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rossdavidh ◴[] No.44400209[source]
Anyone who has long experience with neural networks, LLM or otherwise, is aware that they are best suited to applications where 90% is good enough. In other words, applications where some other system (human or otherwise) will catch the mistakes. This phrase: "It is not entirely clear why this episode occurred..." applies to nearly every LLM (or other neural network) error, which is why it is usually not possible to correct the root cause (although you can train on that specific input and a corrected output).

For some things, like say a grammar correction tool, this is probably fine. For cases where one mistake can erase the benefit of many previous correct responses, and more, no amount of hardware is going to make LLM's the right solution.

Which is fine! No algorithm needs to be the solution to everything, or even most things. But much of people's intuition about "AI" is warped by the (unmerited) claims in that name. Even as LLM's "get better", they won't get much better at this kind of problem, where 90% is not good enough (because one mistake can be very costly), and problems need discoverable root causes.

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bigstrat2003 ◴[] No.44401352[source]
This is an insightful post, and I think maybe highlights the gap between AI proponents and me (very skeptical about AI claims). I don't have any applications where I'm willing to accept 90% as good enough. I want my tools to work 100% of the time or damn close to it, and even 90% simply is not acceptable in my book. It seems like maybe the people who are optimistic about AI simply are willing to accept a higher rate of imperfections than I am.
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1. nlawalker ◴[] No.44402048[source]
It's very scenario dependent. I wish my dishwasher got all the dishes perfectly clean every time, and I wish that I could simply put everything in there without having to consider that the wood stuff will get damaged or the really fragile stuff will get broken, but in spite of those imperfections I still use it every day because I come out way ahead, even in the cases where I have to get the dishes to 100% clean myself with some extra scrubbing.

Another good example might be a paint roller - absolutely useless in the edges and corners, but there are other tools for those, and boy does it make quick work of the flat walls.

If you think of and try to use AI as a tool in the same way as, say, a compiler or a drill, then yes, the imperfections render it useless. But it's going to be an amazing dishwasher or paint roller for a whole bunch of scenarios we are just now starting to consider.