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277 points gk1 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.268s | 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.

replies(4): >>44401352 #>>44401613 #>>44402343 #>>44406687 #
1. wlonkly ◴[] No.44406687[source]
> In other words, applications where some other system (human or otherwise) will catch the mistakes.

The problem with that is that when you move a human from a "doing" role to a "monitoring" role, their performance degrades significantly. Lisanne Bainbridge wrote a paper on this in 1982 (!!) called "Ironies of Automation"[1], it's impressive how applicable it is to AI applications today.

Overall Bainbridge recommends collaboration over monitoring for abnormal conditions.

[1] https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...