alt Hacker News> It's like the infinite monkeys on typewrighters that will type whatever you are looking for, given infinite time.
In the monkey example the infinite time is doing a lot of work there. The fact that LLMs can search through semantic space and find reasonably correct paths in a reasonable time is directly tied to the reason why they are valuable.
Saying "these two things are similar except one can be useful and one can't" is not a great comparison.
For me the real lesson learned isn't how "smart" LLMs are, but rather how much human work is basically reducible to repeating past work with minor variation. Human's believe they are "reasoning" but so much code writen is just the human brain doing the same autocomplete style work that LLMs can do now.
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> but so much code writen is just the human brain doing the same autocomplete style work that LLMs can do now.
That's the part they are really good at. But they are really bad at taking complex decisions. Most of them are just guesses from a finite amount of solutions they were trained on, or from options they have in context.
>Saying "these two things are similar except one can be useful and one can't" is not a great comparison.
Launching a nuclear war is an interesting definition of "useful", not one I'd agree with and that exact scenario is what is being discussed.
So yes this is a perfectly valid and useful comparison in examining this particular, civilisation ending limitation.
I mean to a point?
You do have to successfully write something the first time
We already acknowledge this to a degree, what is experience other than having done something similar before?
That first time though, you've got to figure something out that time
The point is that it's the same process with—much—better priors.
This seems like a reasonable view to me. It's surprising just how much better priors matter and how we can develop those priors by training on a bunch of text. But it also explains, or at least hints at an explanation, for why LLM capabilities are so jagged, and in such inhuman ways.