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Yes, LLM agents are "magic" in the sense that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"[1] But it's not actually magic. Technical
by jacobgold 3mo ago
Yes, LLM agents are "magic" in the sense that
"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"[1]
But it's not actually magic. Technical people understand that it's just software running on computers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
- lukan 3mo agoSure, nothing is magic. You can go look how a simple LLM works and build your understanding from there. But calling it "just software" is trivializing it in my opinion. I can write software, but I cannot write software that writes software.
- jacobgold 3mo ago> But calling it "just software" is trivializing it in my opinion The bigger mistake would be trivializing the rest of the technology involved just because LLMs are the newest piece. LLMs are only "magic" because they're built on a stack that was already "magic" without them. LLMs are impossible without: - operating systems - programming languages - compilers - data centers / power grids / air conditioning - servers / switches / routers - CPUs / RAM / GPUs / SSDs - fiber networks - etc
- int_19h 3mo agoI would argue that LLMs are still magic, because, unlike the rest of this list, we still don't actually know how exactly they do what they do. We know how to build and train them, and we have general ideas about why e.g. attention is important, but if we actually knew how they tick we could do the same thing in a much smaller package (by handcoding everything).