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dijityesterday at 10:57 PM2 repliesview on HN

Yes.

But just so we're both entirely clear on what an LLM is... it's a token prediction system.

it genuinely can't do things except recall things that have already existed.

People are having great success composing things together in new ways, but just like the english language has a finite number of sentences, and music has a finite number of chords: LLMs too are just combining things that have existed.

I don't want to sound condescending, it is remarkable how useful this technology is, but please don't evangelise them on capabilities that they genuinely can never have.

Laptop computers have incredible processing capabilities but nobody expects them to be able to walk your dog, no matter how useful they actually are at doing other things.


Replies

dullcrispyesterday at 11:37 PM

Yes and you suggested Anthropic have their coding agent refuse to attempt to solve anything it can’t find a preexisting solution to in case it turns out to be hard, if I understand you correctly.

Knowing how hard something will be to do before attempting it is precisely the sort of impossible thing that it couldn’t do.

xyzsparetimexyzyesterday at 11:47 PM

God I'm not an ai booster by any means but I'm so sick of this argument. If the maths proofs that have been put out recently are just 'just combining things that have existed' then that goes for everything and the term is meaningless. If LLMs are stochastic parrots then so are we.