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I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. It seems like they’ve accelerated our capabilities- previously tiresome and difficult-to-automate things are easi

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. It seems like they’ve accelerated our capabilities- previously tiresome and difficult-to-automate things are easier- but have done very little for our fundamental understanding. We have a tool, but cannot dissect it and explain how it fits together. LLM’a themselves don’t appear (happy to be wrong here) to actually have improved our understanding our NLP and associated theory. Yeah, it can parse a sentence and bang out some JSON/sql/mid-tier-essay, but these models (so far) aren’t helping us figure out how and why, and I think that understanding is critical to progress further. Anthropic seems to be trying to push a bit further on that front at least, but for all we know, they might just turn into another scummy OpenAI on us.

jcgrillo 3y ago
I think in order for something to properly be a tool it needs to behave deterministically. I don't need to understand every particular of how it works internally, but as the user I need to be able to rely on consistent, predictable results. Otherwise it's worse than useless. Hand tools, machine tools, programming languages, vehicles, CAD/CAM/CAE tools are all like this. You may have to do some learning to become proficient in the tool, but once you're proficient in its use it's very unlikely to ever truly surprise you. Generally those "surprising" experiences are pretty traumatic--hopefully only emotionally (if you've ever experienced a chainsaw kick back you know what I mean). So I'm not sure how I could use an LLM as a tool, but maybe I'm just not a sufficiently proficient user? It seems like they're just too full of "surprises".