5 ms·
LLM models are a distribution. Unlike a python script or turning machine, a LLM model is capable of generating any series of tokens. Developers need stop reason
by dataviz1000 6mo ago
LLM models are a distribution. Unlike a python script or turning machine, a LLM model is capable of generating any series of tokens. Developers need stop reasoning about LLM agents as deterministic and to start to think about agents in terms of Monte Carlo and Las Vegas algorithms. It isn't enough to have an agents, it also requires a cheap verifier.
If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap verifiers for LLM agents. Since LLM agents are not reliable and therefore not very useful without it, that is a trillion dollar problem.
Once a developer groks that concept, the agents stop being scary and the potential is large.
- drBonkers 6mo agoDo you have any readings you recommend to start thinking in terms of non-deterministic algorithms and cheap verifiers?
- f1shy 6mo agoNeurosymbolic programming
- whatever120 6mo agoThat’s not a particular reading
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mistrial9 6mo agofilters
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo agoIf you told a programmer 30 years ago that someday we'd switch from a deterministic to nondeterministic paradigm for programming computers, they'd ask if we'd put lead back in the drinking water.
- georgemcbay 6mo ago> they'd ask if we'd put lead back in the drinking water. With Lee Zeldin heading the EPA is anyone sure we won't?
- goatlover 6mo agoReplace fluoride with lead in the water. Blocks out all the negative effects from wind turbines. /s
- dg247 6mo agoBeen doing this 30 years now. I am asking that question. Everyone talks around it.
- 52-6F-62 6mo agoYou aren't alone. Not even a few years ago if you introduced a component to a system that would result in non-deterministic output... Hell, a single function... You would be named and shamed for it because it went against every principle you should be learning as a novice writer of software. I have used the LLM tools, and I see the real-world potential for these things. But how it's all being sold and applied now: it's upside down.
- munk-a 6mo agoWe'd just explain that management told us we had to and then they'd understand.
- com2kid 6mo agoIt has always been non-deterministic but we relied on low level engineers who knew the dark magicks to keep the horrors at bay. Bit flips in memory are super common. Even CPUs sometimes output the wrong answer for calculations because of random chance. Network errors are common, at scale you'll see data corruption across a LAN often enough that you'll quickly implement application level retries because somehow the network level stuff still lets errors through. Some memory chips are slightly out of timing spec. This manifests itself as random crashes, maybe one every few weeks. You need really damn good telemetry to even figure out what is going on. Compilers do indeed have bugs. Native developers working in old hairy code bases will confirm, often with stories of weeks spent debugging what the hell was going on before someone figured out the compiler was outputting incorrect code. It is just that the randomness has been so rare, or the effects so minor, that it has all been, mostly, an inconvenience. It worries people working in aviation or medical equipment, but otherwise people accept the need for an occasional reboot or they don't worry about a few pixels in a rendered frame being the wrong color. LLMs are uncertainty amplifiers. Accept a lot of randomness and in return you get a tool that was pure sci-fi bullshit 10 years ago. Hell when reading science fiction now days I am literally going "well we have that now, and that, oh yeah we got that working, and I think I just saw a paper on that last week."
- airstrike 6mo agoWhile you're at it, I'll take a pair of unicorns too if you can find them.
- throwaway27448 6mo agoWhat would a verifier even look like without having all of the same problems that the chatbot itself does? Are humans themselves not the cheap verifiers?
- xdavidliu 6mo agohumans are probably the least cheap thing you can have in this context
- throwaway27448 6mo agoYea, but they'll do the job. What else plausibly could? ...an LLM? Then you're back at unreliable computation.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago> If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap verifiers for LLM agents. Since LLM agents are not reliable and therefore not very useful without it, that is a trillion dollar problem. PhD thesis are for (ideally) setting up a new world standard in some research area (at the end, you build your PhD thesis out of the deep emotional shards of this completely destroyed life dream), and not for some personal self-discovery project of which you hope that it will turn you into the popular kid on the block.
- dataviz1000 6mo agoThat is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. I'm framing it as an analogous problem. What is missing is a cheap verification process.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago> That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. No decent PhD advisor would let their PhD student base their PhD thesis on such well-known concepts: a doctoral study programme is a journey into something never-seen-before (with a very high likelihood of faling and shattering your life). Anything else is failure. (Obvious exception: either he or the PhD student can convince the other one that there could be something really, really deep in, say, "superscalar out-of-order execution", "stochastic gradient descent" or UDP be found that generations of researchers overlooked, and which once discovered might necessitate rewriting all the standard textbooks about this topic).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]