alt Hacker NewsNo, it was actually engines.
The mechanism behind engines were fully understood, any experiments with engines were reproducible and measurable. You could get an engine and create schematics by reverse engireening it.
LLMs, useful as they may be, are not that.
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saltcured • today at 5:05 PM
See, now that was a good abstraction.
Centuries later, we still learn new tricks for predicting and controlling the chaos of combustion, but those early engines already wrapped it up in a black box that we could more or less ignore.
carlosjobim • today at 2:16 PM
And what might an engine be made of? And a power plant? And a locomotive? And a ship?
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The mechanics of engines was understood at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they were fully reproducible: all of which is true of LLMs today. An LLM is a bunch of floating point numbers and simple operations on them, all of which are fully known.
But the way that steam engines emergently transformed heat into work was not understood at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Figuring this out led to an entire new branch of physics, thermodynamics. Figuring out how big next-token predictors give rise to interesting systems is likely to lead to similarly new ideas.