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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 1 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Workaccount2 ◴[15 Jul 25 12:54 UTC] No.44570646[source]▶
People like communicating in natural language.

LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them.

That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.

*I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply love computers.

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layer8 ◴[15 Jul 25 13:36 UTC] No.44571025[source]▶
People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.
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hnfong ◴[15 Jul 25 15:21 UTC] No.44572101{3}[source]▶
You can set the temperature of LLMs to 0 and that will make them deterministic.

Not necessarily reliable though, and you could get different results if you typed an extra whitespace or punctuation.

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1. sealeck ◴[15 Jul 25 15:59 UTC] No.44572528{4}[source]▶
Even then, this isn't actually what you want. When people say deterministic, at one level they mean "this thing should be a function" (so input x always returns the same output y). Some people also use determinism to mean they want a certain level of "smoothness" so that the function behaves predictably (and they can understand it). That is "make me a sandwich" should not return radically different results to "make me a cucumber sandwich".

As you note, your scheme significantly solves the first problem (which is a pretty weak condition) but fails to solve the second problem.