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logicchainsyesterday at 7:18 PM2 repliesview on HN

There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do. They cannot take financial or legal responsibility for mistakes, and they cannot learn new things without forgetting things (except to a limited degree by adding it to their context). This is clear to anyone who has used even the smartest models for tasks requiring domain knowledge outside of math and coding, for which it's not possible to generate an infinite amount of synthetic training data: they still make stupid mistakes, and have limited ability to learn from those mistakes.

Humans also have a limit on the amount of domain knowledge they can acquire, albeit a much larger one. Executives hence cannot just replace all knowledge workers with LLMs, because executives have neither the domain knowledge to prompt and check the LLMs' work nor the bandwidth to keep on top of such a large volume of ongoing work.


Replies

Calazonyesterday at 8:35 PM

For the moment that may be true. They are getting better and better at acquiring, retaining, and processing domain knowledge. I wonder what this will look like in a few more years.

The responsibility side is a different matter of course.

IAmGraydonyesterday at 10:25 PM

>There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do.

I would say there’s a third thing. They seem to be very bad at being creative. Maybe they will eventually fix that, but if you ask it to come up with a list of business names or business ideas, for example, what you’ll get is the most generic, boring answer you could think of. They seem to be terrible at extrapolating outside of their training data. To me, this is the most significant difference.