3 ms·

>>It seems like quite a paradox to build something but to not know how it actually works and yet it works. This doesn't seem to happen very often in classical p

>>It seems like quite a paradox to build something but to not know how it actually works and yet it works. This doesn't seem to happen very often in classical programming, does it? Well, it is meant to be "unknowable" -- and all the people involved are certainly aware of that -- since it is known that one is dealing with the *emergent behavior* computing 'paradigm', where complex behaviors arise from simple interactions among components [data], often in nonlinear or unpredictable ways. In these systems, the behavior of the whole system cannot always be predicted from the behavior of individual parts, as opposed to the Traditional Approach, based on well-defined algorithms and deterministic steps. I think the Anthropic piece is illustrating it for the sake of the general discussion.

indigoabstract 2y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my feeling is this all started with the GPUs and the fact that unlike on a CPU, you can't really step by step debug the process by which a pixel acquires its final value (and there are millions of them). The best you can do is reason about it and tweak some colors in the shader to see how the changes reflect on screen. It's still quite manageable though, since the steps involved are usually not that overwhelmingly many or complex. But I guess it all went downhill from there with the advent of AI since the magnitude of data and the steps involved there make traditional/step by step debugging impractical. Yet somehow people still seem to 'wing it' until it works.