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samrusyesterday at 10:50 PM2 repliesview on HN

It works for hard problems when the person already solves it and just needs the grunt work done

It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before, which impresses people and makes them think it is actually solving those problems


Replies

daxfohlyesterday at 11:32 PM

Which matches what they are. They're first and foremost pattern recognition engines extraordinaire. If they can identify some pattern that's out of whack in your code compared to something in the training data, or a bug that is similar to others that have been fixed in their training set, they can usually thwack those patterns over to your latent space and clean up the residuals. If comparing pattern matching alone, they are superhuman, significantly.

"Reasoning", however, is a feature that has been bolted on with a hacksaw and duct tape. Their ability to pattern match makes reasoning seem more powerful than it actually is. If your bug is within some reasonable distance of a pattern it has seen in training, reasoning can get it over the final hump. But if your problem is too far removed from what it has seen in its latent space, it's not likely to figure it out by reasoning alone.

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thunkytoday at 2:09 AM

> It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before

So you mean it works on almost all problems?