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The vendors like to toss around terms like “thinking” or “reasoning” to encourage prospective buyers to anthropomorphize models. These challenges are a visceral
by acdha 2mo ago
The vendors like to toss around terms like “thinking” or “reasoning” to encourage prospective buyers to anthropomorphize models. These challenges are a visceral reminder that none of those marketing claims accurately describe was LLMs do: they’ll happily return things even the worst human illustrator would never hand in and make errors showing that there’s no model of the world behind anything they do.
That doesn’t mean there are no ways to use them productively but rather that you should keep in mind that the same model will happily give you code or a decision with the same level of error unless you have carefully setup a QA regimen to prevent that.
- zahlman 2mo ago> That doesn’t mean there are no ways to use them productively but rather that you should keep in mind that the same model will happily give you code or a decision with the same level of error unless you have carefully setup a QA regimen to prevent that. The standard retort seems to be "this is also true of a large proportion of humans". But I think it's clear that there are differing patterns in how humans vs. models err on various tasks.
- acdha 2mo agoExactly right: it’s not that humans were perfect-I’ve seen too many write-offs from the big consulting companies to ever say that—but that the pattern of errors is different and any intuition you have around that will not be correct in the LLM era.