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> It's a little like using Bitcoin to replace currencies [...] At least, Bitcoin transactions are deterministic. Not many would want to use a AI currency (mos

by zx8080 9mo ago

> It's a little like using Bitcoin to replace currencies [...] At least, Bitcoin transactions are deterministic. Not many would want to use a AI currency (mostly works; always shows "Oh, you are 100% right" after losing one's money).

grey-area 9mo ago
Sure bitcoin is at least deterministic, but IMO (an that of many in the finance industry) it's solving entirely the wrong problem - in practice people want trust and identity in transactions much more than they want distributed and trustless. In a similar way LLMs seem to me to be solving the wrong problem - an elegant and interesting solution, but a solution to the wrong problem (how can I fool humans into thinking the bot is generally intelligent), rather than the right problem (how can I create a general intelligence with knowledge of the world). It's not clear to me we can jump from the first to the second.
- zx8080 9mo ago
  By eliminating the second one.
HappMacDonald 9mo ago
Bitcoin transactions rely on mining to notarize, which is by design (due to the nature of the proof-of-work system) incredibly non-deterministic. So when you submit a transaction, there is no hard and fast point in the future when it is "set in stone". Only a geometrically decreasing likelihood over time that a transaction might get overturned, improving by another geometric notch with every confirmed mined block that has notarized your transaction. A lot of these design principles are compromises to help support an actually zero-trust ledger in contrast to the incumbent centralized-trust banking system, but they definitely disqualify bitcoin transactions as "deterministic" by any stretch of the imagination. They have quite a bit more in common with LLM text generation than one might have otherwise thought.
- grey-area 8mo ago
  Not sure I agree, the only axis on which Bitcoin is non-deterministic is that of time - the time to confirmation is not set in stone. Outcomes are still predictable though and follow strict rules. It’s a fundamentally different product, LLMs are fuzzy word matchers and produce different outcomes even for the same input every time, they inject variance to make them seem more human. I think we’re straying off topic here though.

by zx8080 9mo ago

grey-area 9mo ago

Sure bitcoin is at least deterministic, but IMO (an that of many in the finance industry) it's solving entirely the wrong problem - in practice people want trust and identity in transactions much more than they want distributed and trustless. In a similar way LLMs seem to me to be solving the wrong problem - an elegant and interesting solution, but a solution to the wrong problem (how can I fool humans into thinking the bot is generally intelligent), rather than the right problem (how can I create a general intelligence with knowledge of the world). It's not clear to me we can jump from the first to the second.

zx8080 9mo ago
By eliminating the second one.

HappMacDonald 9mo ago

Bitcoin transactions rely on mining to notarize, which is by design (due to the nature of the proof-of-work system) incredibly non-deterministic. So when you submit a transaction, there is no hard and fast point in the future when it is "set in stone". Only a geometrically decreasing likelihood over time that a transaction might get overturned, improving by another geometric notch with every confirmed mined block that has notarized your transaction. A lot of these design principles are compromises to help support an actually zero-trust ledger in contrast to the incumbent centralized-trust banking system, but they definitely disqualify bitcoin transactions as "deterministic" by any stretch of the imagination. They have quite a bit more in common with LLM text generation than one might have otherwise thought.

grey-area 8mo ago
Not sure I agree, the only axis on which Bitcoin is non-deterministic is that of time - the time to confirmation is not set in stone. Outcomes are still predictable though and follow strict rules. It’s a fundamentally different product, LLMs are fuzzy word matchers and produce different outcomes even for the same input every time, they inject variance to make them seem more human. I think we’re straying off topic here though.