6 ms·
You'd still have to describe to an LLM what to do, which strikes me as about equivalent complexity to simply writing the code in the first place (which is, afte
by DinaCoder99 3y ago
You'd still have to describe to an LLM what to do, which strikes me as about equivalent complexity to simply writing the code in the first place (which is, after all, a formal description of how a program should behave, even if we perceive it as of a complexity which should not be strictly necessary). The big wins have been simply leveraging LLMs to apply common patterns to multiple codebases (albeit in a buggy and haphazard fashion), but it's still up to humans to compose these patterns into meaningful programs and validate that it's actually functioning as expected or desired. Humans still have far superior understanding of what software is, how it functions, what our intentions are using software, and how to derive good software from bad—we know what a bug is intuitively in a way that LLMs have not been able to demonstrate at all.
However, being able to rewrite a program with formally well-defined behavior (i.e. code) should be in an LLM's capability, but LLMs are a long ways away from demonstrating semantically coherent coding skills, just the ability to regurgitate common patterns (often filled with bugs and/or incoherent semantics).
- fragmede 3y agoWe'll have to see what Google's most advanced model with the ridiculously larger context window can do, once it's fully released into the wild. Refactoring an entire code base is presumably asking too much, but it'll be able to do small refactoring since the released model can do that, so we'll have to see where its upper limits are. Of course, to get it better at refactoring, everyone has to write blog posts on refactoring to feed the machine.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoWhy blog posts? Wouldn't the codebase "self evolve" based on the proficiencies of other published code?
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoAn LLM is only an Internet search engine with a fancier interface, it doesn't actually reason about anything. There is no "semantic" anything about an LLM's output.
- jzombie 3y agoNon-RAG LLMs don't search the internet, nor even have the capability to do so.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI don't personally detect sentience, yet — but about 5% of my inputs result in some sort of interpretation and/or reasoning (sometimes I have to think for days "why did LLM.xyz make such a strange connection..?" only to realize the schizotypisms of machine aren't often wrong (just different).
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoPeople ascribe sentience and emotion to a smiley face picture, and that is just two dots and a curved line. That's just what people do, we are hard-wired to see social cues even if there are none.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoAbsolutely false, at the core of every LLM is a highly compressed text corpus from an Internet search engine. (The wonder here isn't that an LLM succeeds at text retrieval tasks, the wonder is how highly compressed the index turns out to be. But maybe we just severely overestimate our own information complexity.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jzombie 3y agoSo, you're saying an LLM is a just a database that does text retrieval?
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoYes, using a statistical model which is in effect a very lossy compressor.