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LLMs reward expertise

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Re: LLMs reward expertise

#91

Post by colechristensen »

bonoboTP wrote: post #54
colechristensen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're in the low hanging fruit stage where folks can just say "here's the problem" and "keep going" until a result is found and it will work sometimes. The low hanging fruit will run short. Ultimately mathematics is a field of subjective selections of problems and proofs as beautiful and interesting. Machines absolutely will struggle with what to study, what theorems are desirable, and when do be done with a pro…

> Machines absolutely will struggle with what to study, what theorems are desirable, and when do be done with a proof And why do you think this would be the case? I'm not talking about today but in 1-2 years. For reference o1 was released less than 2 years ago, and we've had reasonable coding agents for 9 months or so.

> why do you think this would be the case?

Mathematics is ultimately an aesthetic pursuit. Outside of a well defined goal ML models don't have any sense of taste and regardless of the scaling that's been enabled in the last year or so of capability if they haven't memorized the process of doing something they have the same limitations of inability to make choices about unknowns not trained into them.

Real synthetic intelligence seems to me to be still very far away and not a matter of making models bigger or more efficient.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#92

Post by Austiiiiii »

This is something that really needs to be formally studied.

I'm inclined to say that this matches my own experience, but I can't rule out confirmation bias on my part.

As a meticulous person generally looking for a very specific code outcome, I prompt in a way intended to get exactly the thing I have in mind, and my results reflect that. But on the other hand, I have coworkers who type ten-word prompts with very limited specificity, and they seem to get results that way as well, and that makes me wonder.

It would certainly be beneficial for my career and financial well-being for the assertion to be true, because it means I don't have to worry about being pushed out of my job by an army of $15/hr vibe coders. But the convenience of that assumption is exactly why I think it's important to be skeptical.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#93

Post by inventor7777 »

I agree. When I talk to LLMs about fields I am familiar with, I can push back on bad suggestions and ignore faulty/incorrect advice and assumptions, which is much harder for unfamiliar subjects.

Of course, simple common sense and extremely basic Googling on unfamiliar subjects can produce similar results, but it's much faster if you are truly understanding what the AI is suggesting.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#94

Post by NegativeLatency »

hvs wrote: post #87
petcat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be hung up on the part about "learning". Do you know how x86 registers work? Or atomic instructions available on ARM, SPARC, or POWER architectures? No, of course not. Because all of that got abstracted to higher-level instructions decades ago.

Yes, I do. And it wouldn't take you that long to learn, either.

I understand your point, but also imagine applying that across the whole spectrum of computing.

It's very useful that there's an intermediary that knows how that stuff works so I can build things without thinking about it in excruciating detail the whole time, I can dip down lower and learn stuff when it's relevant (like cache access and nested arrays) but I can also not do that in many situations.

There's also the argument that you can do engineering without understanding the underlying science as seen in th pyramids, the beautiful old european churches, etc

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#95

Post by zuzululu »

neilv wrote: post #44

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answ…

dont really see the point when LLM compiles english

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#96

Post by hgoel »

lionkor wrote: post #70
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

This "instant" loop is so fast because it doesn't involve the part where you learn

In a world where there are endless things to do and only limited time to get them done, not every issue needs to be a learning matter.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#97

Post by nonethewiser »

kibwen wrote: post #78
petcat wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to learn CSS anymore. Just like we don't need to learn ASM since GCC does a great job generating it from higher-level code.

I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days.

For many cases like the one described, its true.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#98

Post by nonethewiser »

bumblehean wrote: post #68
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

>Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. But that's how you learn...

Why do you think thats worth learning? Doing a few times manually sure… but to force yourself to solely rely on it is foolish. Just use the calculator.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#99

Post by nonethewiser »

lionkor wrote: post #70
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

This "instant" loop is so fast because it doesn't involve the part where you learn

Learn what? The thing the tool can do instantly? Take the win and spend your energy on bigger problems.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#100

Post by __d »

petcat wrote: post #88
kibwen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days.

It's not sarcasm. We've all accepted that code-generation has been required and accepted for decades.

Code generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic.
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