81–90 of 422 posts
No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!
> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. > Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism. Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering. Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!
It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics. Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?
More seriously, this is not a fair comparison. Adding LLM output to your source code is not analogical to quantum physics; it is analogical to letting your 5 years old child transcribe the experimentally measured values without checking and accepting that many of them will be transcribed wrong.
The internet build out left massive amounts of useful infrastructure.
The railroads left us with lots of railroads that fell into disuse and eventually left us with a complete joke of a railway system. Made a few people so rich we started calling them robber barons and talking the gilded age.
Are we going to continue to use the 60 billion dollar data centers in Louisiana when the bubble bursts? Is it valuable infrastructure or just a waste of money that gets written off?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
'potatolicious says we're going forwards : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319
adding to this, software deals with non-determinism all the time. For example, web requests are non-deterministic. They depend, among other things, on the state of the network. They also depend on the load of the machine serving the request. One way to think about this is: how easy is it for you to produce byte-for-byte deterministic builds of the software you're working on? If it's not trivial there's more non-deter…
It’s funny how people acknowledge the railroads and the similarity to AI, but then jump back to comparing it to the internet when it comes to drawing conclusions. The internet build out left massive amounts of useful infrastructure. The railroads left us with lots of railroads that fell into disuse and eventually left us with a complete joke of a railway system. Made a few people so rich we started calling them robbe…
Why not?
Tracks in the middle of nowhere are useless.
Data centers in the middle of nowhere are useful, as long as energy, cooling and uplink are cost-effective.
(Not saying Louisiana is in the middle of nowhere!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly the engineering part of software is dealing with non-determinism, by avoiding it or enforcing determinism. Take something like TCP, it's all about guaranteeing the determinism that either the message is sent and received or it is not. And we have a lot of algorithms that tries to guarantee consistency of information between the elements of a system.
But there is an underlying deterministic property in the TCP example. A message is either received within a timeout or not. How can that be extralopated with LLMs? How does a system independently know that it's arrived at a correct answer within a timeout or not? Has the halting problem been solved?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's exactly what an agent isn't . What makes an agent an agent is all the not -LLM code. When an agent generates Golang code, it runs the Go compiler, which is in the agent's architecture an extension of the agent. The Go compiler does not hallucinate.
The most common "agent" is an letting an LLM run a while loop (“multi-step agent”) [1] [1] https://huggingface.co/docs/smolagents/conceptual_guides/int...
> hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful. Nice.
It implies that some parts of the output aren’t hallucinations, when the reality is that none of it has any thought behind it.
> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. > Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism. Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering. Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!
It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics. Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?
And on the side hand, no transistors without quantum mechanics.
> hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful. Nice.
I'd rather say that LLMs live in a world that consists entirely of stories, nothing but words and their combinations. Thy have no other reality. So they are good at generating more stories that would sit well with the stories they already know. But the stories are often imprecise, and sometimes contradictory, so they have to guess. Also, LLMs don't know how to count, but they know that two usually follows one, and th…