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I don’t mind LLMs in the ideation and learning phases, which aren’t reproducible anyway. But I still find it hard to believe engineers of all people are eager t
by klabb3 2y ago
I don’t mind LLMs in the ideation and learning phases, which aren’t reproducible anyway. But I still find it hard to believe engineers of all people are eager to put a slow, expensive, non-deterministic black box right at the core of extremely complex systems that need to be reliable, inspectable, understandable…
- childintime 2y agoYou mean, like humans have been for many decades now. Edit: I believe that LLM's are eminently useful to replace experts (of all people) 90% of the time.
- datameta 2y agoChange "replace" to "supplement" and I agree. The level of non-determinism is just too great at this stage, imo.
- beepbooptheory 2y agoI don't know if they "eminently" anything at the moment, thats why you feel the need to make the comment, right?
- layer8 2y agoPeople believed that about expert systems in the 1980s as well.
- majormajor 2y ago> Edit: I believe that LLM's are eminently useful to replace experts (of all people) 90% of the time. What do you mean by "expert"? Do you mean the pundit who goes on TV and says "this policy will be bad for the economy"? Or do you mean the seasoned developer who you hire to fix your memory leaks? To make your service fast? Or cut your cloud bill from 10M a year to 1M a year?
- lxgr 2y agoExperts of the kind that will be able to talk for hours about the academic consensus on the status quo without once considering how the question at hand might challenge it? Quite likely. Experts capable of critical thinking and reflecting on evidence that contradicts their world model (and thereby retraining it on the fly)? Most likely not, at least not in their current architecture with all its limitations.
- brookst 2y agoYou find it hard to believe that non-deterministic black boxes at the core of complex systems are eager to put non-deterministic black boxes at the core of complex systems?
- beepbooptheory 2y agoCan you actually like follow through with this line? I know there are literally tens of thousands of comments just like this at this point, but if you have chance, could you explain what you think this means? What should we take from it? Just unpack it a little bit for us.
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- therealcamino 2y agoI took it to be a joke that the description "slow, expensive, non-deterministic black boxes" can apply to the engineers themselves. The engineers would be the ones who would have to place LLMs at the core of the system. To anyone outside, the work of the engineers is as opaque as the operation of LLMs.
- croshan 2y agoAn interpretation that makes sense to me: humans are non-deterministic black boxes already at the core of complex systems. So in that sense, replacing a human with AI is not unreasonable. I’d disagree, though: humans are still easier to predict and understand (and trust) than AI, typically.
- sdesol 2y agoWith humans we have a decent understanding of what they are capable of. I trust a medical professional to provide me with medical advice and an engineer to provide me with engineering advice. With LLM, it can be unpredictable at times, and they can make errors in ways that you would not imagine. Take the following examples from my tool, which shows how GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can screw up. In this example, GPT-4o cannot tell that GitHub is spelled correctly: https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=6c9bada92&model=GPT-4o&samples=5 https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=6c9bada92&model=GPT-4o&samples... In this example, Claude cannot tell that GitHub is spelled correctly: https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=905f4a9af74c25f&model=Claude+3.5+Sonnet&samples=5 https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=905f4a9af74c25f&model=Claude+3... I still believe LLM is a game changer and I'm currently working on what I call a "Yes/No" tool which I believe will make trusting LLMs a lot easier (for certain things of course). The basic idea is the "Yes/No" tool will let you combine models, samples and prompts to come to a Yes or No answer. Based on what I've seen so far, a model can easily screw up, but it is unlikely that all will screw up at the same time.
- wslh 2y ago100% agree. While I can’t find all the sources right now, [1] and its references could be a good starting point for further exploration. I recall there being a proof or conjecture suggesting that it’s impossible to build an "LLM firewall" capable of protecting against all possible prompts—though my memory might be failing me [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07283 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07283
- numpad0 2y agoI think I've come to terms with it: engineering and making money from engineering are two completely unrelated things, the latter don't even need technology(but scamming is unethical)
- blitzar 2y agoZero dollars isn't cool. You know what is? Hundreds of billions of dollars. (quote rescaled for engineering wealth and LLM wealth)
- zh2408 2y agoHuman itself is like a slow, expensive, non-deterministic black box...
- ein0p 2y agoLLMs can be fully deterministic BTW, depending on the sampling method used. Some methods do not have a random component. As to the rest, yeah - they aren't inspectable or understandable yet.