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My favorite ironical spin of the LLM hypetrain is that our predecessors spent so much time in getting everything 100% correct from the ground up and parts of th

My favorite ironical spin of the LLM hypetrain is that our predecessors spent so much time in getting everything 100% correct from the ground up and parts of the current generation seem to decide "nah, screw it, mostly correct is fine". And of course, I'm horrified by bad decisions politicians and managers seem to make.

wongarsu 3y ago
People keep saying they want computers to have "human level intelligence". I'm not quite sure what exactly that would entail, but if there's one thing I know about humans it's that they are performing jobs "mostly correct" and make a lot of mistakes.
capableweb 3y ago
> our predecessors spent so much time in getting everything 100% correct from the ground up What predecessors are you talking about here? The internet is barely held together with duct tape and servers running only because of minute by minute injection of WD50 straight into the fan bearings. There is so much cruft everywhere that is being relied on daily in production systems that most people lost count by now on how much horrible code and setups they've seen in the life.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  Back in 2014, I left my job as a one-man IT department and started working at AWS. Pretty quickly, I found myself joking that I used to know how the Internet worked, but now I didn't know how it keeps working. I spent over five years at AWS, and have worked at other major tech companies since. I continue to not know how the Internet keeps working -- it's basically always on fire, and held together only because of a lot of people who are actively firefighting.
quadrature 3y ago
>"nah, screw it, mostly correct is fine" This isn't new, a big chunk of systems you use everyday are based on probabilistic models and heuristics that work most of the time. LLMs reach very broadly and make the trade off very apparent.

wongarsu 3y ago

People keep saying they want computers to have "human level intelligence". I'm not quite sure what exactly that would entail, but if there's one thing I know about humans it's that they are performing jobs "mostly correct" and make a lot of mistakes.

capableweb 3y ago

> our predecessors spent so much time in getting everything 100% correct from the ground up What predecessors are you talking about here? The internet is barely held together with duct tape and servers running only because of minute by minute injection of WD50 straight into the fan bearings. There is so much cruft everywhere that is being relied on daily in production systems that most people lost count by now on how much horrible code and setups they've seen in the life.

jwestbury 3y ago
Back in 2014, I left my job as a one-man IT department and started working at AWS. Pretty quickly, I found myself joking that I used to know how the Internet worked, but now I didn't know how it keeps working. I spent over five years at AWS, and have worked at other major tech companies since. I continue to not know how the Internet keeps working -- it's basically always on fire, and held together only because of a lot of people who are actively firefighting.

quadrature 3y ago

>"nah, screw it, mostly correct is fine" This isn't new, a big chunk of systems you use everyday are based on probabilistic models and heuristics that work most of the time. LLMs reach very broadly and make the trade off very apparent.