alt Hacker News> due to fundamental limitations
People keep throwing this phrase around in relation to LLMs, when not a single “fundamental limitation” has been rigorously demonstrated to exist, and many tasks that were claimed to be impossible for LLMs two years ago supposedly due to “fundamental limitations” (e.g. character counting or phonetics) are non-issues for them today even without tools.
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Character counting remains a huge issue without tools.
Are you using only frontier models that are gated behind openai/anthropic/google APIs? Those use tools to help them out behind the scenes. It remains no less impressive, but I think we should be clear.
>People keep throwing this phrase around in relation to LLMs, when not a single “fundamental limitation” has been rigorously demonstrated to exist
Some limitations are not rigorously demonstrated to be fundamental, but continuously present from the first early LLMs yes. Shouldn't the burden of proof be on those who say it can be done?
And some limitations are fundamental, and have been rigorously demonstrated, e.g.:
Is character counting actually not an issue anymore? Do you know somewhere where I can read more about this?
Character counting errors are a side effect of tokenization, which is a performance optimization. If we scaled the hardware big enough we could train on raw bytes and avoid it.
Your comment, after removing the particulars, has a shape of:
People have an <opinion> which hasn't been rigorously proven, while <not rigorously proven counteropinion>.
As such, I am not sure what you're trying to achieve here.
Drawing five fingered humans was a fundamental limitation... until it's not.
This is kind of my point, we need to get better at describing the limitations and study them. It seems extremely clear that there are limitations, and not just temporary ones, but structural limitations that existed at the beginning and continue to persist.
If you remove the auxiliary tools and just leave the core LLM then strawberry still has an undefined number of `r`s in it.
of course, if you choose to ignore all the limitations they indeed have no limitations.
The literal best public models still fail to count characters consistently in practice so I’m not sure what you mean. It’s literally a problem we’re still trying to solve at work