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Natural language is an unnatural interface

varunshenoy.substack.com

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Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#2

Post by blululu »

Strong disagree. These are straw man arguments about the limitations of models. Senior executives, politicians and people in high leadership positions can see their wildest dreams realized using little more than natural language and discussions with the world’s leading experts. Satya Nadella or Joe Biden don’t enjoy and special abstractions and yet they are able to get everything they want using natural language.

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#3

Post by esafak »

blululu wrote: post #2

Strong disagree. These are straw man arguments about the limitations of models. Senior executives, politicians and people in high leadership positions can see their wildest dreams realized using little more than natural language and discussions with the world’s leading experts. Satya Nadella or Joe Biden don’t enjoy and special abstractions and yet they are able to get everything they want using natural language.

The ability to express oneself through natural language is tangentially related to its suitability as the foundation of a user interface.

A natural language should let you express your thoughts effectively. A user interface should let you accomplish the task you want effectively, within the limited capabilities of the program you are using. And it should expose those limits, not make you discover them through trial and error, as opaque, conversational interfaces do.

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#5

Post by m3kw9 »

It can only be good when the interface already knows a massive amount of context. For example the LLM in a future use case knows all your email and you just ask it to draw a time line of this thread and etc.

If you are asking it to do stuff from scratch like most of us do on ChatGPT, it’s quite a pain

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#7

Post by Kostchei »

Most of the arguments I hear from my mates-who-code about adding deterministic old school things like buttons and "ui" on top of LLMs is "sometimes it's faster and more specific"... Ok, sure, but go to voice to text, and give the llm in a voice version, to a grandma. They can just use it.

and if you, the programmer need specifics "I want to do root cause analysis of these 20 incidents, break them up into mobile and web app, then draw common threads in each type of RCS".. then write/say a better prompt that exactly details what you want. Might take 2 or 3 goes, but you will get there. Adding metadata tabs like some vector-db franken-sharepoint seems like a step back. At least from a Rich Sutton world view. Let the LLM work it out- and if it fails, improve it for a many uses cases, not just one.

IMHO (tldr- strong disagree)

Re: Natural language is an unnatural interface

#8

Post by Terr_ »

> unnatural interface

A simple example might be the problem of "pick a color". Even the best natural-language interface is going to suck about as much as if you're trying to ask another human to do it for you, even if that assistant is capable of displaying 1-5 color swatches in their replies.

Instead of just seeing the entire palette and choosing, you need to say "I want a gold color", "lighter than that" and "darker" and "less like urine" etc.

> People fundamentally don’t know how to prompt. There are no better examples than Stable Diffusion prompts.

You know, this reminds me of the Good Old Days of internet search engines, where a little expertise in choosing terms/operators was very powerful, before the advanced-case was cannibalized to help the average-case.

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