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Yeah, if anything it should be called an art. The term engineering makes little sense in this context, but really... Did it make sense for eg "QA Engineer" and
by ffsm8 1y ago
Yeah, if anything it should be called an art.
The term engineering makes little sense in this context, but really... Did it make sense for eg "QA Engineer" and all the other jobs we tacked it on, too? I don't think so, so it's kinda arguing after we've been misusing the term for well over 10 yrs
- groestl 1y agoWell, to get the right thing into the context in a performant way when you dealing with a huge dataset is definitely engineering.
- shakna 1y agoEngineering tends to mean "the application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends". I'm not sure there's much scientific or mathematical about guessing how a non-deterministic system will behave.
- groestl 1y agoFunny how you use a scientific term to discredit applied statistics. I've built useful non-deterministic systems many times and they had nothing to do with AI. Also, particle physics would like to have a word with you.
- shakna 1y agoGuessing, how a non-deterministic system would behave. Statistics isn't guessing. But it is guessing when the confidence interval is unknowable and constantly shifting. We're not talking relativity, we're talking about throwing pancakes at a wall to tell if there's a person behind it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SonOfLilit 1y agoThe moment you start building evaluation pipelines and running experiments to validate your ideas it stops being guessing
- simonw 1y agoRight: for me that's when "prompt engineering"/"context engineering" start to earn the "engineering" suffix: when people start being methodical and applying techniques like evals.
- passwordqwe 1y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/397/ https://xkcd.com/397/ About if it's science or not, the difference is testing it through experiment.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- grugagag 1y agoIt’s validated and filtered but isn’t it still guessing at the core? Should we call it validated guessing?
- groestl 1y agoI think a validated guess is exactly what a prediction is.
- shakna 1y agoIf it's actually validated, according to rigorous principles, it's not a guess, but a system of predictions with a known confidence interval, that allows you to know if you can be sure of something. Right now, you cannot get that far. And if you happen to... Tomorrow it will be different. Predicting tides is possible. It requires enormous amounts of data and processing to be sure of it. Right now, we've got tides, but we don't have the data from the satellites. Because the owner is constantly shifting the prompt, for good reasons of their own. So we can't be confident - or we can only be so blindly.