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Re:Looming Liability Machines (LLMs) by cookie_monsta on Sunday August 25, 2024 @07:07AM (#41346381)
> It has been shown that they are good at doing a lot of things that might not have been immediately obvious

Could you point me to some of the places/articles where this is being shown? I'm definitely amongst those who have bought in to the common cop out you are rebutting here

Re:Looming Liability Machines (LLMs) by geoduck14 on Sunday August 25, 2024 @09:37AM (#41347218)
Not OP, but I have been poking around with LLMs for a year and I'd like to add to the conversation.

In my experience, LLMs are word predictors, and the impacts of that fact are not immediately obvious.

LLMs are capable of "explaining" what code does. What it is doing under the hood is pattern matching: I've seen code that looks like X, with an explanation that looks like Y

LLMs are capable of formatting text. It has seen English written like X, that is reformatted to look like Y

One resounding fact my team has found over and over is that "the things we think are hard for LLMs aren't necessarily hard; the things we think are easy aren't necessarily easy"

Re:Looming Liability Machines (LLMs) by dTal on Sunday August 25, 2024 @11:01AM (#41347786)
Worth noting that pattern matching and term rewriting are a sufficiently general combination that it forms the basis for Mathematica.
Re:Looming Liability Machines (LLMs) by psb217 on Sunday August 25, 2024 @12:35PM (#41348655)
Trouble sneaks in when the pattern matching is only correct most of the time. Eg, if some code for regex-based search missed anywhere from 0.1% to 10% of matches, with the miss rate depending on the regex and no obvious way to know which regexes have worse miss rates, the utility of your regex-based search would be limited. LLMs are like this, but their generality makes them useful in spite of this limitation.
Re:Looming Liability Machines (LLMs) by 60654 on Sunday August 25, 2024 @12:52PM (#41348853)
I would just add that Mathematica-style term rewriting (e.g. analytical integration, or equation solving) is done with _semantics-preserving_ symbolic solvers, which are hand-made and human-reviewed to guarantee correctness.

LLM style pattern matching and rewriting does not preserve semantics, except accidentally due to an overwhelming amount of examples.